The people of Sikka Natar, the village of Sikka, occupy an inhospitable sliver of sandy reef which faces the tempestuous waters of the Savu Sea and backs onto the degraded hills of the southern escarpment of the island of Flores. Despite the poverty of the site of the village or, as some Ata Sikka (People of Sikka) argue, because of it, the people of the village have traditionally made their living neither by agriculture nor by fishing, as have other villages to the west and east; rather, the village was, until 1954, the seat of Kerajaan Sikka, the Rajadom of Sikka, a petty state, a confederation of villages and domains, which at one time encompassed much of east central Flores and, the Sikkanese claim, regions beyond. The people of this unprepossessing little village secured their livelihood, first, as rulers and, later, as educators, government officials, traders and proprietors of land in other parts of the island. Today, the Ata Sikka still live to some extent off economic, political and social capital amassed during more than three centuries of rule and their identity as former rulers informs their contemporary relations with other peoples of Flores. Even though the Rajadom of Sikka was wholly dissolved by the end of the 1950s, other peoples of Flores still regard Sikka Natar as one of the important centres of high culture on the island of Flores. For the Ata Sikka themselves, the unique past of their village as the centre of a negeri, a “nation”, is the most potent of many features of their history and culture which define them as distinctive from — and, indeed, superior to — their neighbours.^[1]

As in Tana Wai Brama, the history of Sikka is the history of the coming together of different peoples to create a single society which nevertheless remains a confederation of groups, each of which has its own unique history. In Sikka, the histories of these origin groups are recounted both in oral narratives and in a body of written works. One of the written histories is a history of the Rajadom of Sikka written by Mo’ang D.D.P. Kondi, a minister in the government of the last Raja of Sikka, Raja Don Thomas Ximenes da Silva, some time after the Second World War and in the closing years of the Rajadom.^[2]

Just as the ngeng ngerang of Tana Wai Brama is primarily the history of the founding clan of the domain, so too is Kondi’s account of the history of Sikka that of the founders of Sikka, the descendants of a protogenitor line whose members brought into a confederation people of diverse origins. The history thus reveals, in textual form, the origin structure of the Sikkanese royal house and provides a detailed foundation for the legitimacy of the power and authority of the Rajas of Sikka over their domain. Furthermore, the historical narrative provides information sufficient to legitimate the social and political positions of all those persons and groups other than the royal lineage who claim authority in the contemporary community. Thus, there are many detailed accounts of the conclusion of alliances between the Rajas of Sikka and the heads and tana pu’ang (“sources of the earth”) of various villages and minor domains on Flores (see Figure 5).

Among the Ata Sikka, claims to title, power, authority and precedence are not made alone by reference to the events by which the ancestors of the rajas established the community, but also by reference to a dynastic genealogy of the rajas. This dynastic genealogy establishes at once the origins and succession of power in the rajadom and, insofar as a person or group can demonstrate relatedness to the royal lineage, the legitimacy of power and precedence which devolved from the royal house of Sikka to the mo’ang pulu, “the ten lords” (the noble houses of Sikka which are closely allied politically and historically to the rajas’ house) and, through them, to all the residents of the domain.

In their oral traditions, the Ata Sikka trace the origin of Sikka Natar to the man Ria Raga and his wife, Soru Dédong, who were “penduduk asli” (Malay: “native inhabitants”) of Sikka. Their daughter, Du’a Sikka, married Sugi Sao, the son of the man Rae Raja and his wife, Rubang Sina, who were “pendatang dari Sailan” (Malay: “immigrants from Ceylon”). Du’a Sikka gave birth to Lai Sao, whose male descendants are traced through eleven generations of men to Don Alésu, the first ratu of the Rajadom of Sikka. The names of the ancestors who appear in the genealogy of the Sikkanese royal house are significant. Among the wives of the descendants of Lai Sao are Du’a Krowé, Du’a Bola and Du’a Sogé. Krowé is the region of the central hills of Sikka, from which the rulers of Sikka originated, and Bola is a village on the south coast of Flores to the east of Sikka Natar. Both Krowé and Bola are areas later incorporated into the Rajadom of Sikka. Sogé is the Sikkanese word for Ende, from where a large number of immigrants to Sikka fled after a war between Endenese Catholics and Muslims, which the Catholics lost.

Du’a Sikka’s husband, a foreigner, was named “Raja”, which means “ruler”. Du’a Sikka herself bears the name of the future Rajadom and it is significant that she, who was of autochthonous origin, was female. She was, by implication, tana pu’ang, the “source of the earth”. In terms of precedence, Du’a Sikka was thus prior to her husband, just as the Sources of the Earth of Sikka were of greater precedence than the rajas who, while they were rulers, were descendants of a male outsider. As elsewhere in eastern Indonesia, these representations take on special significance because Sikka had a diarchic division of authority between the lord or source of the earth who held ritual authority over the land and who was classified as feminine and the ratu, the secular ruler who was classified as masculine in terms of an encompassing system of dual symbolic classification. The genealogy of the rajas of Sikka is thus traced through an unbroken line of males to a male immigrant who married an indigenous woman. In ritual language it is said, “ina Sikka ama jawa”, “the mother (from) Sikka, the father from far away” and “ina ratu ama raja”, “the mother (was) the ruler, the father (was) the raja”, a reference to the government of the rajadom and to the encompassing polity of Sikka in which one is reminded that the rajas gained their powers from the tana pu’ang.

The histories of Sikka credit Bata Jawa, a descendant of the eighth generation after Lai Sao, and his son, Igor, with establishing the major customs governing religious practice, marriage and the settlement of disputes in Sikka. His son, Baga Nang, a descendant in the tenth generation after Lai Sao, was the first Sikkanese to settle at the site of Sikka Natar. The history recounts how Baga Nang acquired the site from its aboriginal inhabitants, the people of Hokor, by an act of subterfuge and usurpation, a theme common in the origin myths of eastern Indonesia, by which he caused the Hokor people to flee the site. Only one of the aboriginal Hokor people remained behind, and that was the tana pu’ang, the “source of the earth” who held authority in matters pertaining to the rituals of the land and agriculture.

In the narratives of the Sikkanese history, Bata Jawa’s and Igor’s creation of hadat and Baga Nang’s acquisition of the site of Sikka Natar are prelude to the main story, which is that of the foundation of the rajadom by Don Alésu in the eleventh generation after Lai Sao.

Alésu was the third raja of Sikka according to the royal genealogies, the first raja having been Mo’ang Igor, the son of Mo’ang Bata Jawa, and the second Mo’ang Baga Nang, the son of Mo’ang Igor. In the Kondi text and in the mythic histories which I recorded from informants in the late 1970s, Alésu is a culture hero of considerable stature. The Ata Sikka take considerable pride in their Catholicism and in the time they have been Catholics, which by their account has been almost four and a half centuries. More than any other element of Sikkanese life and dominion over their rajadom, Catholicism is at the root of Sikka’s claim to legitimate rule in eastern Flores. Alésu is the figure who brought Catholicism to Sikka, who converted the people, and who thereby secured Sikkanese hegemony over the whole of east central Flores. Thus, the origin and foundation of the rajadom is linked inseparably to the coming of Catholicism to the Sikkanese.

In the narrative, the heads of the clans and domains of Sikka chose Alésu to replace Baga Nang after his death. After becoming raja, Alésu travelled to Malacca, where, under the patronage of Raja Worilla, he converted to Christianity and was educated in theology and law. After three years, Alésu asked Raja Worilla to allow him to return to Flores and to provide a teacher of religion for his people. The Raja sent his son, Augustinu da Gama, to Flores as a teacher. Alésu then returned to Flores with the great wealth which Worilla had given to him when he departed from Malacca. Upon reaching Flores, he resumed his position as ruler of the Sikkanese with the assistance of Augustinu da Gama. The wealth with which he returned he distributed among the mo’ang pulu, the “ten nobles” of Sikka, the clan headmen, tana pu’ang and minor rulers of Sikka, thereby cementing the alliances upon which the rajadom was founded.

In the era of the rajadom, Sikka Natar was a stratified society consisting of four classes: the ratu and his kin, noblemen, commoners and slaves. The royal house of Sikka is Lepo Geté, the “Great House”, and the people who made up the Great House bore the Portuguese name da Silva. Their name in hadat is Lésupung. Lésu is an elision of Alésu, who is recognized as the founder of the house,^[3] and pung, a polysemous word meaning: (1) to possess, possession (Bahasa Indonesia: punya) and (2) grandchildren, descendants. It is a reflex of the word pu, which means, among other things, “ancestors” or “forebears”. Pung is semantically linked to the word pu’ang, which means “source”, “origin”, “trunk (of a tree)”. People who are “Lésupung” are thus “the descendants of Alésu” and the people whose protogenitor was Alésu.

Next to the ratu in rank were people of the nobility, who made up the kuat wungung, “houses”, into which Sikka Natar was divided. Each noble house occupied a wisung, “territory” or “ward”, in the village. All of the people of the kuat wungung have both hadat names and Portuguese names. In addition to da Silva, the name carried by members of Lepo Geté, the nobility of Sikka carried such names as Fernandez, Pareira, da Cunha, da Gomez, da Lopez, and so on. It was from the nobility that the mo’ang pulu, the “Ten Lords” came. In the reign of the last raja, the mo’ang pulu made up an advisory council to the raja and each mo’ang ruled his ward in Sikka Natar and lands and villages attached to it outside of the village of Sikka. In the 1930s, the Dutch reorganized the government of the rajadom and appointed kapitan to serve as resident administrators in the various administrative divisions of the rajadom. These administrators were largely drawn from the mo’ang pulu, the nobility of Sikka Natar, and were known as the kapitan lima, the “five captains”, although in later years there came to be seven.

Each of the kuat wungung of Sikka Natar is said to have originated outside of Sikka and to be made up of the descendants of immigrants who joined the ratu at different times. Kondi (n.d.:11) identifies thirty-six places of origin, including east Flores, Lio to the west, Solor, Adonara, the Kei islands, Bima, Bali, Savu, Ambon, Kisar, Wetar and Sumba.

In the compilation of origins, the rajadom, which defined Sikka as a society, consisted of no indigenous people since the aboriginal inhabitants who occupied the site of the village, the people of Hokor, were forced to flee. Thus, the ruling village of Sikka is represented both in oral and textual sources as consisting of peoples of diverse origins. Among these various groups, the house of the raja is temporally prior to all of the others and thus claims social and political precedence in the community.