I Bajo di Sulawesi: chi sono e come visitarli senza essere invadenti

On the Sombori side of our route there is a village called Mbokita, built on stilts above the water. Almost every operator in this region lists it as a stop. Very few say anything true about the people who live there.

This page is an attempt at the actual history, the actual science, and honest guidance on how to behave when a boat full of visitors arrives in somebody's neighbourhood.

What to call them

You'll see several names. Bajo is the usual spelling in Indonesia. Bajau is more common in Malaysia and the Philippines. Scholars generally use Sama-Bajau for the wider group, since the people themselves often use Sama.

You'll also see "sea gypsies", frequently in tourism copy. It is not a term the community chose for itself, it carries a slur inside it, and we do not use it. "Sea nomads" is the phrase academic work tends to use and it is at least accurate about the history, though most Bajo today are not nomadic.

Where they came from

This is better documented than most travel writing suggests.

Linguistic evidence places the origin of the Sama-Bajau in the southern Philippines around the 9th century. From there they dispersed south through the Sulu Archipelago and along the northeastern coast of Borneo by roughly the 11th century, reaching Sulawesi before the 16th and 17th centuries.

Bajo origin stories in Sulawesi often name Johore in peninsular Malaysia as a homeland instead. Scholars treat those accounts as being about political relationships rather than literal migration, which is a fairly common pattern in origin myth generally.

The written record picks them up early. The earliest evidence of Bajo in Sulawesi is a mention of a people called Bajo Sereng, meaning Moluccan Bajo, in the La Galigo epic cycle of South Sulawesi, a reference that probably dates from the fourteenth century. In 1511 the Portuguese writer Tome Pires documented the likely presence of Bajo in the kingdom of Gowa, around Makassar. By the late 1670s they had reached the Manado area in the northeast.

The often-repeated detail about Bajo collecting turtle shell as tribute to the ruler of Gowa comes from a later Dutch account of the 1660s rather than from the 1511 record. The two get merged constantly in retellings; they're separate sources a century and a half apart.

What they actually did

The romantic version has the Bajo drifting freely across an empty sea. The historical version is more interesting and considerably less passive.

The Bajo were maritime specialists inside a trading economy. They worked for the kingdom of Gowa and later the Bugis kingdom of Bone as explorers, messengers, sailors and harvesters of sea products. The trade in trepang, meaning sea cucumber, and in turtle shell drove their distribution across the region for three centuries.

In other words, this was skilled labour in a long-distance commercial network, not aimless wandering. The Bajo went where the product was and where the polities that wanted it sent them.

Families lived aboard houseboats, coming ashore mainly to trade, to bury their dead and to shelter from storms.

Why they live in houses now

Boat dwelling declined after the nineteenth century, giving way to a shore-based existence. Today most Bajo live in pile-house settlements above shallow coastal water, which is exactly what you see at Mbokita.

It's worth being clear that this was not simply a lifestyle preference. Research on the wider region describes political and economic pressures from the colonial period onward driving sedentarisation, with resettlement used as an instrument of state control. Recent scholarship on Sama Bajo communities documents both the disruption that caused and the adaptive strategies communities have used since.

There are very few genuinely mobile sea nomad communities left anywhere. The Sama-Bajau are described in the scholarly literature as the largest of the region's sea nomad groups, but the houseboat life is largely historical now, and it ended for reasons that were not entirely theirs to choose.

The free diving research

This is the part most worth knowing, because it is real published science rather than folklore.

In 2018 a study in the journal Cell, led by Melissa Ilardo, reported the first evidence of a human genetic adaptation to diving. The researchers compared Bajo individuals with the Saluan, a neighbouring land-based Sulawesi group, and found the Bajo had a median spleen roughly 50 percent larger.

Spleen size matters for free diving. A larger spleen holds more oxygenated red blood cells, which are released during the dive response, extending how long a diver can stay down. The study associated the difference with a variant of the gene PDE10A, thought to influence thyroid hormone levels.

Press coverage of the research notes Bajo divers working at depths of up to around 70 metres using weights and wooden goggles.

Two things follow from this. First, it is a genuinely remarkable piece of human biology and it belongs in any honest account of these communities. Second, it is not a party trick to be requested. Nobody at Mbokita owes a visitor a demonstration.

Visiting Mbokita well

Mbokita is a working village. People live there, fish from there and build boats there. It is not a heritage site, there's no ticket office, and nobody is on shift.

What that means in practice:

• Go at a sensible hour. Not dawn, not during prayers, not at a time that suits a photograph better than it suits the people living there.
• Ask before photographing anyone, and accept no as an answer. This applies especially to children, who are the most photographed and least consulted people in travel photography.
• Don't photograph inside houses or through doorways.
• Buy something if something is for sale. It is the most direct way for a visit to be worth anything to the village.
• Don't hand out sweets or money to children. It creates a begging dynamic that outlasts your visit by years.
• Bring your rubbish back out with you.
• Don't treat the houses as scenery. A stilt house over clear water photographs beautifully and is also somebody's front room.

None of this is complicated and none of it costs anything. More on the wider version of it is on travelling responsibly around Labengki.

What a village visit is not

It is not a cultural performance. There's no dancing laid on, no craft demonstration, no lunch in a traditional house arranged for guests. If that's what you're expecting, you'll be disappointed, and the disappointment is the fault of the expectation rather than of Mbokita.

What it actually is: a walk through a village on wooden walkways above the water, with people going about their day around you, and a chance to see how a settlement functions when it has no roads and no ground.

On our shorter trips Mbokita is a stop between other stops. On the five-day Labengki and Sombori trip there is time to slow down, which is a better experience for everyone including the village.

On the water

The Bajo relationship with these reefs is longer and more complicated than a visitor's. Fishing is a livelihood here, not a hobby, and some fishing practices across this wider region have done real damage to reef.

We are not going to stand outside a village and lecture about it. What we'll say is that conservation work in these waters, including the giant clam no-take zones near Labengki Kecil, functions because local communities accept and enforce it. Community agreement is what makes a protected area real rather than a line on a map.

Common questions

Are the Bajo still nomadic? Almost none are. Boat dwelling declined after the nineteenth century and most Bajo now live in stilt settlements over shallow water. The nomadic period is history, not current life.

Is it true they can hold their breath much longer than other people? There is published research supporting a physiological basis for it. A 2018 study in Cell found Bajo spleens around 50 percent larger than those of a neighbouring land-based group, associated with a variant of the PDE10A gene. Larger spleens support longer breath-hold dives.

Is visiting a Bajo village exploitative? It can be, and how it is done decides. Arriving quietly, asking before photographing, buying locally and not treating people as an attraction is the difference between a visit and an intrusion.

Should I call them sea gypsies? No. It is not their term for themselves and it is not a neutral one. Bajo, Bajau or Sama-Bajau are all fine.

Do the Bajo at Mbokita speak English? Generally not. Your guide interprets. A few words of Indonesian go a long way and are appreciated out of proportion to how well you say them.

Is Mbokita on every itinerary? It is a normal part of the Sombori side of our route, subject to sea conditions on the day like every other stop. Where it sits geographically is covered on Sombori's caves and lagoons, and the stop itself on meeting the Bajo at Mbokita.