Sica (ethnicity)

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Raja Josephus da Silva of Sikka and his wife in colonial times

The Sica (also Sika , Sikka or Sikkanese ) are an ethnic group with around 180,000 members from the east of the Indonesian island of Flores , where they formerly ruled the Sikka kingdom . They speak a Malayo-Polynesian language , the Sika (also Sara Sikka ). The ethnic group describes itself as " Ata Sikka " ("Ata" means "people").

Name and origin

"Sika" means in Sara Sikka something like expel, so that "Ata Sikka" means something like "the people who were expelled". According to legend, the Sica were expelled from their old homeland and came to Flores by ship, where they ruled the eastern center of the island until the 1950s. According to legend, "Sikka" was the name of the first local woman who married one of the newcomers who were shipwrecked on Flores.

Sica on Timor

Sica women spinning (first half of the 20th century)

A group of mestizos from the Kingdom of Sikka and Europeans moved to Dili in Portuguese Timor as voluntary recruits in 1851 . This year the Portuguese governor José Joaquim Lopes de Lima had signed a treaty with the Netherlands , with which he ceded the west of Timor , the island of Flores and other areas in the Lesser Sunda Islands to them. This agreement was confirmed in the Treaty of Lisbon in 1859 . The Sica, along with the Bidau and the Moradores, formed one of the three parts from which the Portuguese armed forces of the colony were formed. All three ethnic groups lived in their own quarters of the capital. If they originally spoke their Malay language, they later switched to a Creole Portuguese . In the meantime they have become part of the population and no longer form a separate group.

literature

  • E. Douglas Lewis: The Stranger-Kings of Sikka: With an Integrated Edition of Two Manuscripts on the Origin and History of the Rajadom of Sikka , 2010, limited preview in Google Book Search.

Web links

Commons : Sica  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ E. Douglas Lewis 2010, p. 4.
  2. ^ E. Douglas Lewis 2010, p. 1.
  3. ^ E. Douglas Lewis 2010, pp. 1 & 2.
  4. ↑ Luis Filipe Thomas: DE CEUTA A TIMOR ( Memento of February 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Geoffrey C. Gunn: History of Timor , available from the Centro de Estudos sobre África, Ásia e América Latina , CEsA of the TU Lisbon (PDF file; 805 kB).