Living on the Edge: Being Malay (and Bugis) in the Riau Islands

Summary

INTRODUCTION: “LIKE BLACK AND WHITE PARTS OF THE EYE”

In April 2008, and only six years following the legal formation and secession of Indonesia's Riau Islands Province (Provinsi Kepulauan Riau or KEPRI) from adjacent Riau Province, then Governor of Riau H.M. Rusli Zainal (2003–13) attended a meeting of the Kerukunan Keluarga Sulawesi Selatan (KKSS) or the “South Sulawesi Family Association” in Riau's provincial capital of Pekanbaru. The South Sulawesi Family Association is one of Indonesia's largest and most active ethno-regional associations, with members hailing from or tracing their roots to South Sulawesi, an east Indonesian province widely known as the ancestral homeland of Indonesia's Bugis people. Outnumbering that province's indigenous Makassarese, Mandar and Torajan peoples, South Sulawesi's Bugis people are historically renowned as much for their seafaring prowess as they are for the wanderlust that fuels their travels throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond in “search of good fortune” (Bugis: massappa’ dallé).

The Riau Governor, a “Malay of Bugis ancestry” (Malay: Melayu keturunan Bugis), had been previously honoured by the ethno-regional association with the honorary “title” or gelar of Daeng Magguna. Roughly translatable to “he who is useful”, the title bestowed upon the Riau Governor by the association featured the Bugis-Makassar honorific “Daeng”, commonly given to Bugis-Makassar people of noble birth. Daeng is also a title whose meaning reverberates in the historical imaginary of Riau and Riau Islands Provinces, two places whose contemporary borders closely align with those of the once-sprawling Malay Sultanate that stretched from what we today call Indonesia, through Singapore, to Malaysia. Among Riau Islanders and their neighbours in Riau Province, the noble honorific Daeng is iconically associated with five legendary Bugis brothers — Daeng Parani, Daeng Marewah, Daeng Menambun, Daeng Celak, and Daeng Kemasi — whose involvement in the region changed the course of history across the Malay world in the early eighteenth century.

Riau Governor H.M. Rusli Zainal (alias Daeng Magguna) used his April meeting with the South Sulawesi Family Association to thank them for their continuing support and involvement in Riau's everyday life, but also to ruminate on the ethno-historical linkages between the Bugis people and the region's indigenous, ethnically Malay community. “Both of these people since the beginning cannot be separated”, the Governor said.