Sama Bajo and Bajau: Southeast Asia’s Sea Nomads Facing Modern Displacement

Sama Bajo (Indonesia)—also known as Bajau (Malaysia)—refers to several Sama-speaking people residing in Island Southeast Asia. The Samalan ethnolinguistic group belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The Sama-speaking people further subdivide into a land-based branch and those residing in boats or along the strand. This latter group is called the Sama Bajo, whose members live primarily along the islands of Indonesia, Malaysia (Borneo), and the Philippines. They form part of a more significant “Sea People” group, which includes the Orang Laut (lit. Sea People) and the Moken, with the Urak Lawoi as one of their subgroups. The Sama Bajo are migratory people living in houseboats (leppa or lepa-lepa) or temporary houses on stilts. Traditionally, they were seafaring people who subsisted through fishing and trade with land-based societies in the region. Estimates of the number of people identifying as Sama Bajo vary significantly from 500,000 to a million.

Southeast Asia’s prime location between India and China made it a preferred stop-over for mariners along the maritime Silk Route of the Indian Ocean. The seasonal Monsoon winds of this body of water provided precipitation and propelled boats with traveling traders, merchants, and missionaries. In this context, sea-roaming populations, such as the Sama Bajo, sought to exploit the sea’s resources. Such items included fish, pearls, trepang, and turtles, which forced the ethnic groups hunting them to adopt migratory patterns to adapt to the seasonality of the maritime resources. Over the centuries, the Sama Bajo developed skills that included expert boat-building, diving, fishing, rowing, and sailing and attracted the attention of the land-based polities around them. Through alliances, sometimes cemented through marriage, the Sama Bajo supported local kingdoms through their access to the sea’s resources and as mercenaries or bodyguards. Most importantly, their close relationships with land-based polities gave seafaring people a prominent position between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The Sama Bajo adopted religions that arrived via the Indian Ocean trade. The majority are Sunni Muslims who, under the influence of Sufi mystics, have incorporated preexisting folk religious traditions closely tied to the sea. A small minority of this migrant group residing in the Philippines also adheres to Christianity, a religion that the Spaniards first introduced in the sixteenth century.

Although the Sama Bajo consider themselves peaceful people, their involvement in the slave trade, piracy, and sea raids revealed a potentially damaging reputation. Europeans, who arrived in more significant numbers in the sixteenth century, used labels such as “Sea Gypsies” or “Sea Nomads” for peoples they did not comprehend or fit into the narrow confines of European classification. Similarly, the technological changes brought about by nineteenth- century Imperialism undermined the Sama Bajo’s strength: their close relationship with the sea. Steamboats replaced their skills as sailors, and the new imperial powers regarded them as backward or “uncivilized,” thus further marginalizing this ethnic group. The Sama Bajo association with the Sulu Sultanate also proved fatal when European and US expansion forced this land-based kingdom to its knees. As the 1800s moved on, the Sama Bajo increasingly lost their roles as cultural intermediaries in Southeast Asia. Over time, imperial powers pressured the Sama Bajo into a more sedentary lifestyle, a policy that found continuation among the emerging national states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the majority of the Sama Bajo have, under pressure, adopted a far more sedentary lifestyle. Only a tiny minority continue their traditional migratory habitation on houseboats. Settlement in new nations brought about additional problems. The land assigned to them is often ill-suited for agriculture and has limited access to the sea that has traditionally nurtured the Sama Bajo. When settlement occurred in a more favorable location, the former migrants often conflict with the land- based population. Such landed societies project stereotypes associated with infrequent cases of dynamite fishing into the past. They supposedly expose the Sama Bajo as lawless societies that have historically drained the wealth of local kingdoms. Thus, further marginalized and cut off from the ocean that sustained them and enriched their culture, the Sama Bajo are frequently poor, with little to no access to education. More recently, in the twenty- first century, grassroots organizations have been concerned with preserving Sama Bajo traditions and oral history to provide cultural grounding and hope for future generations.

FURTHER READING: Gaynor, Jennifer. 2016. Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia: Submerged Genealogy and the Legacy of Coastal Capture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Hoogervoost, Tom Gunner. 2012. “Ethnicity and Aquatic Lifestyles: Exploring Southeast Asia’s Past and Present Seascapes.” Water History 4 (3): 245-65.

Nolde, Lance. 2014. “Changing Tides: A History of Power, Trade, and Transformation among the Sama Bajo Sea Peoples of Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period.” PhD Diss. University of Hawai‘i.