Sahu Erotic

The Sahu are a farming people of western Halmahera, the large K-shaped island at the center of Indonesia's North Maluku province. Their villages sit in the valleys and low hills inland from Jailolo, the old royal seat that once gave its name to one of the four Moluccan sultanates. No single chiefdom holds the Sahu together. What they share is a language, a yearly cycle of planting and harvest, and a building: the sasadu, the communal hall at the center of village life.

The Sahu language belongs to the North Halmahera family, a small group of non-Austronesian languages surrounded by Austronesian speech across the rest of eastern Indonesia. It is related to Tobelo, Galela and Ternate, the prestige language of the old sultanates, but its closest relatives are languages of its western neighbors, such as Gamkonora and Wayoli. Most Sahu also speak Indonesian and North Moluccan Malay, which are used at school, at the market and in dealings with the regency government.

Faith here comes in layers. Most Sahu are Protestant Christians, a result of the Dutch missions that worked across North Halmahera from the nineteenth century onward, and the congregation is one of the ways a village organizes itself. Older duties to ancestors, to the land and to customary law, or adat, were never swept away. They were folded in, and harvest is where that shows most clearly.

The sasadu is built low on purpose. Its thatched roof comes down so far that anyone walking in has to stoop, a posture read as humility before the gathering, and it has no walls, a sign that the hall belongs to everyone. After the harvest, communities hold Orom Sasadu, which means eating in the sasadu: a thanksgiving feast of shared food, music and dance that can last well into the night. It works as a celebration and also as a public statement that the community is still whole and still keeping its obligations. The ceremony has also been staged at the Jailolo Bay Festival, which brought it to audiences far beyond Halmahera.

For most of their history, the Sahu lived on the edges of bigger powers. When Ternate absorbed Jailolo's sultanate, the Sahu heartland came under Ternate's control, and later under Dutch colonial rule. The communal violence that tore through North Maluku in 1999 and 2000 reached the Jailolo area too. Today Jailolo is the capital of West Halmahera Regency, and two of its districts, Sahu and East Sahu, still carry the name of the people who farm them.