Three days in April every year, the sleepy fishing town of Semporna, East Coast Borneo (Malaysia) turns into a bustling little hive of activity, dance, and music: the Regatta Lepa takes over.
The Southeast Asian island world is home to several maritime communities whose people often are referred to as "sea nomads" or "sea gypsies," names that appeal to the exoticist imagination especially of Ang Mos (“redheads"), as white travelers and residents are called winkingly in Malaysia and Singapore. The Sama Dilaut, one of these sea-going peoples, live all over the Philippine Sulu Archipelago, southwestern Mindanao, Sabah/Borneo, east Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and many of the eastern Indonesian islands. In East Coast Borneo, the Bajau Laut, as the Sama Dilaut around Semporna, Sabah/Borneo call themselves, have strong ties with their related communities in the Philippines.
Locations in both countries as well as other, often sacred, sites in the archipelago play important roles for them. Some of these Bajau Laut have maintained their nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, living in houseboats and only temporarily setting up makeshift huts on small islets in the Celebes and South China Seas, the eery borderlands between the Philippines and Malaysia. Not quite in keeping with romantic Ang Mo dreams about unlimited freedom and vagabond life, clear turquoise waters and simple living, however, others have become sedentary, living in the stilt houses of the so-called "floating villages" that started to grow considerably in Semporna during the 1960s. And yet, they remain “Bajau Laut”: “Sea Bajau.” .................
The Bake (pronounce Bahkuh) Society , was founded in 1984 as a counterpart to the Ethnomusicological Centre “Jaap Kunst”. The society, named after the illustrious musicologist and singer Arnold Bake, organizes conferences, seminars and workshops.
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