Matriarchs of Sumatra

The woman of the Minangkabau

Red peppers, green peppers, starfruit, and guavas; woven purses of sugarcane and reed; ketek vendors with their clove-tinged cigarettes, chickens squawking under baskets, fatjiggling women selling sweet cakes dripping with delights… it is market day in Bukittingii and, for Yusaini Zabor, a chance to combine duty with pleasure. Her grandniece has chosen a husband, and the head of the clan, Yusaini's mother, has sent her representatives to begin the wedding preparations.

Yusaini is Moslem and Minangkabau. That combination my not seem unlikely to her, but in the male-dominated world of Islam, the Minangkabau represent the far end of the sex-role spectrum. Almost alone among the world's cultures (the only other exception are found in India), these dwellers of the central highlands of the island of Sumatra have retained a truly matriarchal society. Women here were once queens, and still today it is the grandmother who is the final force in the family affairs. Property belongs collectively to the matrilineage, to be inherited and worked by the daughters. Children are members of the mother's family and look to her brother, rather than to their own father, for care and education.

When the muezzin makes the call to prayer, the mosques fill rapidly, for the Minangkabau are fervent in their faith. But once outside the mosque, it is a woman's world. Unlike their cloistered sisters in other hands, Minang ladies shout hearty salaams to one another in the street. They laugh--loudly and frequently--and bear themselves with the erect pride of long authority.

An anomaly of mere historical interest? Perhaps. But this is no dying tribe of hunters and gatherers. In fact, the Minangkabau are the only merchants in Indonesia able to challenge the Chinese--Butkittinggi market offers evidence of that. At the foot of the city's hills, a honking welter of buses deposits goods and shoppers. Horse carts trot their ribboned pom-poms past elderly matriarchs marching sedately under umbrellas. Veiled schoolgirls dart part, laughing. On the central hilltop, the sexes mingle among the street stalls, spread in all directions and thick with hagglers and barter baskets and shouted enticements to buy. Small ladies bang large tin pails. Ice-juice stands offer colors never seen in nature.

Yusaini Zabor ignores them all. In company with her cousin and a niece, she walks past the rows of reeking fish, down a lane of barbers, and up into the covered arcade of the central market. At the entrance to a cloth stall the three pause, greet the owner, and seat themselves in the alcove.

A call goes out for coffee, and with obvious pleasure the women settle to their task. The process of bargaining will take hours. The stall owner--actually an in-law--is from the village of Sulungkang, known for its hand-loomed sarongs laced with gold thread and detailed naturalistic designs. The opening salvos of bid and recoil are danced through with the sureness of a shared inheritance. Its strength is evident, but from what does it sprint?

The historical inheritance

The homeland of the Minangkabau is the group of valleys surrounding Mt. Merapi, high in the interior of Sumatra. That little is known of their origins should not be surprising. Sumatra is over a thousand miles long, and, despite government attempts to lure settlers, sixty percent of it remain uncleared jungle.

What is known is that a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom flourished at the site of Pagarutung sometime prior to the region's Islamization, which occurred about 1500A.D. When the Dutch appeared along the west coast in the 1660s, a brisk trade in gold and pepper ensued, with the highlands as procedures and the Dutch at Padang controlling the commerce. The royal family continued to function as nominal rulers, although then, as now, it was the matrilineal clans who held the real power.

This fact, coupled with the society's commitment to Islam, led directly to the Padri War and Dutch intervention. The Padris were religious teachers who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and, while there, encountered the puritanical Wahhabi movement. On their return, they determined to purge the homeland of non-Islamic elements, such as the use of alcohol, finery in dress--and matrilineal inheritance.

The adat (traditional) chiefs opposed them. The royal family was assassinated. The Dutch sided with the adat chiefs, but it was only in 1838, after nearly two decades of war, that the Padris were defeated. And then it became the Dutch who made the rules. Trade was restricted, while the growing of certain crops was forbidden and others made mandatory. It was not until 1910, when the Dutch removed internal restrictions, that Minang commercial genius had a chance to come to the fore. An astonishing surge in case crops (coffee, rubber, coconuts) took place. Fist-pond farming became successful. And with the introduction of schooling, a new intellectual group arose.

With educational opportunities backed by the clan, and a male population free to go abroad to extend trade contacts, Minangkabau culture was poised for revitalization. That such a process has occurred, while elsewhere traditional cultures decline and disappear, may have as much to do with the subtle balancing of sex roles in the society as it does with any supposed innate mercantile flair.

Men's roles

Men are not entirely without significance in Minang society. Mamak (mother's brother) gives advice on business deals and marriage. He is also expected to provide educational opportunities, long a key concern among the Minangkabau.

The tradition of merantau, which means "to go abroad" and is practically a rite of passage for young males, also serves to counterbalance female influence. Since men as a group have far more experience with the outside world, their advice on external affairs carries heavy weight.

Even within the village, men have access to power. While the clan is the core unit of Minang communal life, a village is composed of a federation of such lineages. Each kinship group has its own headman (the pengkulu), who is appointed by his cousins and, in tandem with the headmen of the other clans, governs the village. This arrangement insures that in dealing with the male-oriented Indonesian government the Minangkabau are represented in kind.

Tell this to Yusaini and her in-law Saniah and they laugh, quickly and with obvious humor. Saniah rises, retreats to the rear of her shop and reappears wearing a headdress sparkling with bits of gold. Yusaini's grandniece will wear one like this at her wedding. But expressions of awe at its beauty are cut short. That is not the point.

"This is tanduk," says Yusaini. "Kabau tanduk." She gestures in quick, aggressive motions at the conical points of cloth sticking up on either side of the headgear. "Buffalo horn," she says. "Very important for Minangkabau people."

Yuasaini shifts herself on the alcove floor and, wither cousin's help, related the story of the victorious buffalo. It is not the men, she is saying, who make dealing with the Javanese successful, it is the method.

The buffalo who won

The name Minangkabau derives from "pinang kabhu," meaning "original home." But this meaning has been replaced in legend by a false etymology that translates the tribal name as "victorious buffalo." Despite its inauthentic origin, the latter translation offers an intriguing glimpse of the Minang cultural dynamic at work.

The legend goes that once, when threatened by an attack from a Javanese kingdom, Minangkabau leaders persuaded the invaders to allow the issue to be settled by having buffaloes (not men) fight. The invaders agreed and brought forth a giant of beast to do battle. The Minangkabau, on the other hand, trotted out a spindly buffalo calf with knives attached to its tiny horns. The large buffalo ignored it. The calf, mistaking the buffalo for its mother, went straights under its belly to be sucked. The knives sliced open the soft underflesh and the huge beast died on the spot, losing both battle and war.

The point of the legend is twofold. For one, it validates the Minangkabau reverence for the buffalo horn as tribal totem. The shape of the horn is replicated in both the women's ceremonial head-dresses and on the roofs of the clan houses. But also implicit in the story is function as well as form. The Minangkabau stress intelligence rather than power, a valuable characteristic in dealing with the central government and its population-heavy power base on the rival island of Java.

As Yusaini and the others finish their story, it is evident that this bears the imprint of a feministic approach to confrontation. Their satisfaction is full until three teen-age boys wander past the stall playing a cheap radio at full, ear-piercing volume. The distortion of noise upsets the mode of the covered interior and derails the women onto a new train of thought: the passing of adat ways.

Adat village culture

Bukittinggi may be current cultural and commercial capital of the Minangkabau, but its position as focus of interaction has necessarily brought change in its wake. Each time Yusaini Zabor comes to market, there seem to be more buses, more noise, and more brazen men acting as if they, too, would have the wherewithal to maintain societal order.

"This young generation is living upside down," says Yusaini to Saniah, who clucks her teeth disapprovingly and spreads another sarung for inspection.

"The speaking of the proverb reminds Yusaini of the mother villages, tucked like content chicks under the protective wing of Mt. Merapi. There the old ways continue. There men still know their place and women their duties as heads of house and clan. Yusaini's village is Rao-Rao, one of the most intact of the traditional communities. It is set on the cluster of hilltops, each given over to the houses of a particular clan lineage.

These houses--while striking to even the most casual eye with their curved-horn roof turrets and rambling wooden walls--are more than just architecturally significant. They are both nexus of clan activity and public witness of clan strength and structure. The houses, like the land, are owned collectively and presided over by the oldest living mother of the clan. Each married woman has a room of her own, where she may entertain her husband. Although a husband may sleep with his wife (depending on her favor), most of his time is spent eating and working at his sister's house, where he is a member of the clan. He will never become part of his wife's family but instead adopts the role of semenando, or "welcome guest."

Thus the stable domestic unit is that of a woman and her children. Men tend to shift around its periphery. Land, buildings, and the like all belong to the sisterhood. The headman may decide what to do with the family harvest, but the key to the barn is kept by the matriarch of the clan.

Women do much of the agricultural work, as well as running the shops and stalls in the highland markets. It is the communal--and inalienable--ownership of the land that is the crucial function of the lineage. For all their expertise in the bazaar, it is the combined agricultural labor of the clan (which may number from two to three hundred members) that positions the Minangkabau to make use of the networks of trade.

The Minang abroad

Men find that new vistas of opportunity open up once they go merantau. In turn, the connections they establish abroad offer new commercial possibilities for the businesswoman at home. This mass migration to the "man's world" has resulted in the Minangkabau population of Jakarta being greater than that of Padang.

Even in Singapore, there are nearly a thousand Minangkabau--a fact made more remarkable by the keen commercial competition to be found in a Chinese-dominated trading city. However, this success has extracted its own price. As Mazhar Abdullah, Minang press attaché of the Indonesian Embassy, points out: "Times have changed. The tradition of the woman asking for the man's hand in marriage is not observed here." Mazhar adds too, that in Singapore a man is "no longer bound by the adat Minang of shouldering the responsibilities of bringing up his sister's children."

Zulina Bustami, born in Singapore but of Mianagkabau descent, is concerned because today's younger generation can rarely speak the Minang language at all. She says, "My husband is a Malay. Still, I'm proud of my heritage and would like my children to know the origins, customs, and tradition of the Minang people."

Continuity and change

There is no louder sound in the world today than that of the clash of cultures. But where one disintegrates, another holds firm. Why?

For the Minangkabau, the key leis with the matrilineal clan. Clan strength and social order are reinforced by group dwelling in "mother's house," an arrangement pointedly lacking outside the homeland. That the Minangkabau never developed the finely graduated systems of rank and social distinctions that one finds on the islands of Java or Bali may be taken as a further indication of the inward focus on family and cooperation within it rather than an outward concern with status or competition.

Pressed for examples of gains linked to matriarchy, Yusaini and her cohorts look startled and then confused. They mention "groom price," as form of male dowry, and the proofs a prospective husband must bring attesting to his abilities and moral character. Then they trail off and go back to sifting through sarongs. It is plan that their focus is on the wedding.

To the outsider, such evidence appears in unexpected places. One is in novels. Although they make up only four percent of Indonesia's population, Minang writers dominate its literature. Titles like Sitti Narbaja (a girl's name) and Because of the Mother-in-Law reflect their cultural roots. Indonesia's first major contribution by a woman writer came from the Minangkabau in 1993, when Selasih published her book If Fortune Does not Favor, using letters and dreams to tell the tale of two star-crossed lovers. Unlike other novelists of the period, Selasih blamed the male, rather than fate, for the tragic outcome.

Perhaps the most unexpected source of matriarchal influence is found in the Bukittinggi Museum, where pride of place is given to displays of household goods and women's fineries. Silver chain-link coin purses, filigreed bangles, and hairpins lie opposite an entire cabinet of necklaces with designs of semiprecious stones as daisy chains on a ring and in teeth like arrangements of patterned gold and silver.

Even more impressive are the household items, which have been inlaid and hammered into things of rare beauty. Plates, thread cases, basins--even soap dishes--proclaim a refined aesthetic. Finest of all are the coffee pots. Some bear thick handles in the shape of a person, others depict sacred buffaloes on the body of the pot, still others offer minute geometric designs. Over a foot high and made of dark rich wood, these coffee pots bear witness to a culture that values the woman's functions.

It is this valuing of the ordinary (not just the clan mother's headdress) that offers the final proof of Minangkabau strength. And it is the use of the skills of the whole society--rather than just the male half--that makes the Minangkabau stand out from the Moslem cultures around them.

As the day's last light lies dying in the distance, Yusaini and her sisters descend the hill to the bus depot. The town is quieted now as the long-distance runs to the lowlands have departed. Only a handful of minibuses bound for local villages remain.

The edge of heat is off the day, and as Yusaini shifts the bundle of wedding sarongs on her head, she thinks of home, the clan house, and her mother. Change, she knows, will come. It always has. But why fear it? Motherhood, like the house itself, as the Minang say, "does not crack in the heat or rot in the rain." It endures.