Akar Nusa
Before dawn off Semporna, a small wooden boat slides between the stilt houses. A mother steers, a child watches the water. The family has fished these reefs for as long as anyone can say.
The story
The Bajau Laut are the sea-going people of the Sama-Bajau family. In Malaysia, sea-going Sama-Bajau use the name "Bajau Laut". Some other Bajau groups use an unkind name for them, "Pala'au". We use the name the people use for themselves.
Traditionally the Bajau Laut lived almost entirely on boats and moved between mooring points called sambuangan. Their groups of boats stayed within about 40 kilometres of a home mooring. The houseboat is called a lepa. Another Bajau group, the Kubang, builds lepa and sells them to the Bajau Laut, who live in them.
Around Semporna, thousands of Bajau Laut live on or beside the sea, making their living from the coral reefs. Semporna had about 35,000 residents in 2010. Many Bajau families live in large villages built on stilts over the water. Over time, many have moved from boat life to stilt houses. Where they have settled, health centres and schools have followed.
The modern story is hard in places. Malaysia counts Sama-Bajau under the "Bajau" label as Bumiputera. Some people who came later from the southern Philippines, from the 1970s, are treated as outsiders in law, and some have since obtained Malaysian identity cards. We leave the politics to others. The point for this page is that a person's place in this story is a matter of family, community and law.
Where you can still see it today
- Regatta Lepa, the annual boat festival in Semporna, held from 24 to 26 April. Boats are decorated with colourful flags.
- The stilt villages and waterfront of Semporna.
- Tun Sakaran Marine Park (Semporna Islands Park), gazetted by Sabah Parks in 2004.
- Semporna as a gateway to Sipadan and Mabul for divers. The town also has a pearl-culturing industry.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
A well-known 2018 study in the journal Cell found that Bajau divers have larger spleens, about 50 percent larger than neighbours, linked to a gene called PDE10A. This is a good example of how DNA can show how people adapted to a way of life. But the study was made with Bajau in a village in Indonesia, not in Malaysia, and it did not test the Bajau Laut of Semporna. We cannot say the same applies to them.
We found no mother-line or father-line study of the Bajau Laut of Semporna alone. The wider Austronesian mother line B4 is common among Borneo peoples, and a Malaysian we have tested with a B4 line may share that deep regional history.
DNA does not decide which people you belong to, your religion or any legal status. Those come from family, community and law.
