Buru was of no economic interest to the Portuguese or the Dutch when they arrived in Central Maluku, as there were no native clove or nutmeg trees on the island. The VOC aimed to gain a world monopoly on the trade of cloves, but it offered such low prices that people often sought out other traders (Chinese, Javanese, Makassarese) offering better prices. Cloves were a profitable enterprise for growers and traders and, by the middle of the 1600s, production was in excess of world consumption (Meilink-Roelofsz 1962: 218, 224; Chauvel 1990: 19). To make a profit, the VOC decided to curtail clove production by designating Ambon and the Lease Islands (Saparua, Haruku, Nusa Laut) as the only clove-producing areas. Each household on these islands was ordered to plant 10 new clove trees a year. To ensure that no clove trees were grown in prohibited places, each year the VOC carried out inspections throughout Central Maluku using conscripted labour for rowing services in what came to be referred to as hongi fleets.
Nevertheless, there was considerable resistance to this control. The growing of cloves and trade with other traders continued and Buru became involved. Due to its geographical position and the local terrain, which provided many excellent shelters in river mouths, Buru became an excellent place to hide boats coming from Makassar. Buru thus became a ‘problem’ to the VOC. Several warnings were given until, in 1648, a Dutch lieutenant and a small force were sent to south Buru where they destroyed 3,000 productive clove trees and pulled up countless smaller ones. They also managed to capture and burn down a Makassarese fort up a river and to burn several Makassarese boats (Rumphius 1910, II:50).
The VOC eventually concluded that it needed not only to expel the Makassarese from Buru and destroy the ‘illegal’ cloves trees there, it needed to do something about the people whom it saw as unruly and untrustworthy rebels. After capturing leaders of coastal Buru, on October 2, 1658, the VOC Governor made a treaty with them, promising pardon if the remained legal allies of the VOC and made no trading contracts with any other people. They were to move all their villages from around the entire island to a fort to be built at Kayeli in order to live under the supervision of the VOC. In addition, all clove trees on Buru were to be destroyed and these leaders were to assist the VOC in locating them. And finally, as they were Muslim, the VOC assured them that they would not be harassed because of their religious beliefs.
The same month the contract was signed, the Governor went to Kayeli Bay where a temporary fort was built, manned by 24 soldiers with four cannons. Thirteen separate villages were made around the fort, one for each of the villages from around the island which came to the fort: on the east side of the fort were the villages of Lumaite, Hukumina, Palamata, Tomahu and Masarete; Waisama lay to the south; and on the west side of the fort were Marulat, Leliali, Tagalisa, Ilat, Kayeli, Bara and Lisela (Rumphius 1983: 205). Each village had its own leader (Rumphius 1910, II: 118-21; Valentijn 1856, II: 197, 618). The coastal people of Buru were thus forced into a mixed community with the Dutch as their ever-present overlords, cut off from their former overseas allies and deprived of their local source of revenue from cloves.
Once the fort was established to keep an eye on the rebels, the next 150 years were ones of little change on Buru while the focus of VOC activity in Maluku was on the controlled clove-producing areas of Ambon and Lease. By the middle of the 19th century, approximately 2,000 people were living around the fort at Kayeli. Most of these people were Muslim villagers, still organised in their original villages from 200 years earlier.
During this time, Kayeli was the only place of significance on Buru for the Dutch, who often equated Kayeli with all Buru. The Dutch consistently used the term orang Boeroe or ‘Buru people’ to refer to the Muslim villagers living around the fort, in contrast with the Alfuru, the natives living in the interior of the island.
A law passed as Staatsblad 19a of 1824 sought to reorganise local political systems with the goal of incorporating them into the colonial system. To do this on Buru, where there were only clans and no overarching political system, the Dutch had to appoint rajas and create regencies (Dutch regentschap). Because of the history of VOC involvement on Buru, they were able to find 14 raja in one convenient location—Kayeli.
With the passing of Staatsblad 19a in 1824, Buru was incorporated into the colonial administrative system by dividing the island into territories (regentschap) named after the former villages that had been removed to the fort at Kayeli in 1658. The current leader from each village in Kayeli was designated as regent for the regentschap of his ancestral village. With all the regents (who soon came to be referred to as raja) living there, Kayeli was the colonial capital of Buru just as it had been for the VOC.
In this way, the Alfuru or indigenous people of Buru were officially mapped into the colonial system as subjects of the Muslim rajas at Kayeli. In the second part of the 19th century, however, some colonial officials began to express concern about this arrangement, claiming that the Buru rajas acted like despots in their treatment of the Alfuru, demanding large amounts of ‘tribute’ (enati) from each Buru clan in their regentschap. The tribute included baskets of rice, millet, coconuts, sago, sweet potatoes and tobacco, in addition to services requiring each clan to supply a given number of men on a periodic basis to work exclusively for the raja. Wilken (1875: 6, 7) noted that the tribute system was not an indigenous Alfuru idea, but had been introduced by the Muslim rajas who legitimated their authority over the Alfuru as coming from the supremacy of Ternate and Islam. For the Alfuru, the arrangement was unpleasant (the burden of tribute is still remembered today), but it was legitimated by their own notions that allowed rulers to be outsiders, illustrated by the following Alfuru explanation of why the Hentihu clan was raja of Lisela.
Once there was a Patti Buton, a leader of the Butonese immigrants to Buru whose family name was Hentihu, and a Patti Bessy, who was a local leader of the native Buru Nalbessy noro. The Patti Buton said to the Patti Bessy: ‘Let’s decide who will be the raja. We will each get a bucket of sand and whoever has the heaviest bucket will be the raja.’ The Patti Bessy agreed and then the Patti Buton added: ‘Because you are from the land, you walk landward to get sand, and because I am from the sea, I will walk seaward to get sand.’ So that’s what they did and of course the wet sand of the Patti Buton was heavier. This is why the raja of Lisela is an outsider, and why the Hentihu family from Buton has been raja for many generations. [6]
Some Kayeli rajas were well supplied with tribute from the Alfuru in their regentschap, but the Alfuru were not distributed equally in every regentschap. In fact, in some regentschap there appear to have been no or very few Alfuru. This might have been due partially to migration of the native people in the interior of the island as discussed above, but for whatever reason, the varying capacities of rajas to draw tribute from Alfuru created significant differences among them. As time passed, the rajas without Alfuru subjects faded away and their regentschap dropped off the maps of Buru as the boundaries were redefined to include only regentschap with Alfuru subjects (and wealthy rajas). In 1847, the regentschap of Maro, Hukumina, Palamata and Tomahu had no Alfuru (Willer 1858); by 1875, this included Bara and Ilat as well (Wilken 1875: 10).
Kayeli gradually began to decline. In the 1880s, the rajas of Leliali, Wae Sama and Fogi, along with most of their people, returned to their ancestral homes on coastal Buru after more than 200 years at the fort. About the turn of the century, the rajas of Leliali and Tagalisa did the same. By that time, the villages of Maroelat and Bara were extinct, and the ruling families of Hukumina, Tomahu and Lumaiti had died out. In their concern about the Muslim rajas’ treatment of Alfurusubjects, in regentschap Masarete the Dutch appointed a new raja from an Alfuru clan who lived at Tifu on the coast of south Buru. By 1907 there were only 231 Muslims at Kayeli, compared with 1,400 50 years earlier (van der Miesen 1908: 836, 837). Today Kayeli is largely abandoned, and the old Dutch fort is half-sunk in a malarial swamp. Across the bay, the town of Namlea has replaced Kayeli as the major population centre, and is the new centre for the District of Buru Island (Kabupaten Pulau Buru).
In 1906, colonial laws were passed that changed the administrative system of governance in Java and Madura and then, in 1938, similar laws were passed for other areas. After independence, early Indonesian laws regarding administrative structure were based on the Dutch laws. While the regentschap system was no longer the official system of governance, rajas continued to be acknowledged, and several rajas were influential individuals serving in the Provincial Legislature in Ambon in the 1950s and 1960s.
To Buru people, rajas were seen as ‘guarding the doors to Buru’, meaning their role was to interact with the outside, not the inside of society. To the Government, on the other hand, rajas (and regentschap) came to be seen as vestiges of Buru ‘tradition’ (adat). In the Government discourse of modernisation, however, tradition is antithetical to progress, so rajas and regentschap came to be seen as not relevant (and in some instances, hindrances) to the modern administrative system of camat (subdistrict head) and kecamatan. In the past few years, regional autonomy and traditional rights have been coming to the forefront of legislation and social debate in Indonesia. In Buru, as in Ambon and other places in Central Maluku, the beginning of a return to the authority of tradition has evoked a return to the authority of rajas, through a strong social forgetting that rajas were in fact colonial creations.
It still remains to be seen whether the recognition of Buru rajas will continue long term, partially because there are problems in regard to succession. Among the Muslim rajas, heredity is an established criterion for succession and the title passes from father to son or uncle to nephew. In regentschap such as Masarete, however, where the Dutch eventually appointed a native Christian rajas, heredity is not assumed, just as it is not assumed in the traditional Buru political system where noro members appoint noro leaders through consensus. In the past, the Dutch took an active role in appointing a new raja each time an old one died, but since the raja of Masarete died in 1986, the Indonesian Government has taken no such initiative, claiming it must come from the ‘people’. The district head (bupati) was reported to have been willing to write a letter supporting whomever he was convinced had local support as raja. But from the perspective of Buru people in Masarete, rajas have always been entitled by outsiders, not by people inside Buru society. So with neither the government nor the local people seeing it as their responsibility to come up with a new raja, the system attenuates. A few individuals have had clear ambitions to be raja (including the former raja’s eldest son), but no one can appoint himself, and so far no one has been successful in getting himself appointed by others.
Another reason for questioning the longer term survival of rajas on Buru is because egalitarianism between clans is very strong and there is no traditional space for political leadership higher than the clan. This egalitarianism is predicated largely on symmetrical marriage alliances. As is common in Austronesian societies, marriage creates an inherently asymmetric relationship with wife-givers superior to wife takers. On Buru this is expressed as the kori (the bride’s parents and clan elders) holding the machete handle over the sanat (the groom’s parents and clan elders). Sister exchange, however, referred to as the ‘exchange of maidens’ (emhuka eptukar), is arranged in a single set of marriage negotiations where the asymmetrical relationship is cancelled, as both parties are kori. The two bridegrooms in this case are said to be wali-tal-dawet (reciprocally both BW and ZH to each other) and their relationship reflects the ideals of friendship based on equality. Even without simultaneous sister exchange, the reciprocal exchange of women over time allows not just specific men but entire noro to see their overall relation as one of symmetry and equality. From this foundation of equality, Buru people stress that each clan should govern only its own clan, leaving no role for a raja inside society.
