The Stranger-Kings of Sikka

The stranger-kings of Sikka is the first monographic study of an origin myth and history of an indigenous eastern Indonesian state and the contemporary ethnography of the Ata Sikka of Flores.

During the 1920's, in the regency of Sikka on the island of Flores, D.D. Pareira Kondi and A. Boer Pareira two notable men among the first literate Sikkanese, began writing about the history and culture of their people. Writing in Malay and the Sikkanese language, their literary careers encompassed the last half century of the rajadom of Sikka, a semi-autonomous state under the Dutch colonial regime. Among their many surviving manuscripts are two long work on the origin of the rajas who ruled Sikka until the end of the rajadom in the 1950's

The author of this book uncovered the manuscripts in 1994 and found among them versions of the myth of origin of the Sikkanese rajas, an epic tale of immigrant-kings that was lost to living memory and as oral tradition by the 1970's. Drawing on Boer's and Kondi's texts and his own field research in the regency of Sikka, Lewis presents an abridged English translation of the origin myth and constructs a history of the Sikkanese rajas and the organization of the society they ruled.

Born in Texas in 1947 and educated at Rice and Brown Universities, E. Douglas Lewis (PhD Australian National University) began his research on Sikka in 1977 and has been a university lecturer in Australia for many years.