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 exceptions 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 lands, 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,
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