Akar Nusa
At dawn in the waters off Semporna, a family pushes a wooden boat out from a coastal village. The boat has been in the family for years. The children know the reef by heart. They are learning words their great-grandparents also used for fish, tide and wind.
The story
The Sama-Bajau are a group of related peoples of the seas of Maritime Southeast Asia. Many call themselves Sama. Outsiders often say Bajau. They speak about ten related languages, all part of the Austronesian family, the great language family that spread across the islands (see the Austronesian stories on this shelf).
Their homes stretch across a wide sea. You find Sama-Bajau communities in the Sulu Archipelago and southern Philippines, in northern and eastern Borneo including Sabah, in Sulawesi, and in eastern Indonesia. According to a general reference, they were the second-largest ethnic group in Sabah as of 2010. Please treat counts as rough. Surveys differ.
Not all Sama-Bajau live the same way. In Sabah, the West Coast Bajau around Kota Belud are known for horse culture. On the east coast, some Bajau live on land, and the Bajau Laut have traditionally lived on and from the sea. In the Philippines the sea-going groups are called Sama Dilaut. In the past a family often lived on a boat, such as the lepa, and sailed with relatives in small flotillas, meeting at shared mooring places.
How old is this way of life? Linguistic work, reported by UC Berkeley in 2018, suggests more than 1,000 years. A chronicler on Magellan's voyage noted Bajau life at sea in 1521. Today fewer families live only at sea, as many settle ashore and take up other work.
Where you can still see it today
- In Semporna, Sabah. The Regatta Lepa festival fills the water with decorated boats each April.
- In the waters around Semporna, where Bajau families have long fished and sailed. Visit with respect, and ask before you take photographs.
- In Kota Belud, Sabah. West Coast Bajau are known for their horse culture.
- In the languages. Sinama, called Bajau in Malaysia, is still spoken.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
In 2018 a team from Copenhagen and Berkeley studied the Bajau of Jaya Bakti village in Sulawesi. They compared 59 Bajau with 34 Saluan neighbours, who do not dive. Bajau spleens were about 50 percent larger. The spleen stores oxygen-rich blood, which may help in long dives. The team found signs of natural selection on a gene called PDE10A, and also on BDKRB2, a gene that affects the diving reflex. Some Bajau dive deeper than 70 metres.
That is a story about a few genes. It does not tell us the whole ancestry of a person.
Your mother line and father line can show whether your family's threads sit in the Austronesian part of the tree that is common around the Sulu and Celebes seas. A region estimate can show links to island Southeast Asia. None of these can tell you that you are Sama-Bajau. That is a matter of family, language and community.
DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. It shows one thread among thousands.
