By Gina Jeong ’25
Sabah is a state in East Malaysia, located on the northern part of Borneo island. From the early historic accounts of this region, Sabah, with its old name as Barune, was once ruled by Java in the 14th century. Towards the end of the 14th century going over to the 15th century, the Sultanate of Brunei, and the Sultanate of Sulu took over the power of the Northern Borneo region. Their territorial extent stretched along the northern coast of Borneo, and into the land of the north. The regime held political and economic power until the 18th century, when Sabah became a British protectorate. Alfred Dent, the leader of the British North Borneo Company made a treaty with the Sultan of Brunei and Sulu. During this period, BNBC was given full authority to the development of territories, domestic and international on political and economic governance. Although BNBC was bestowed powers by the Sultan, the British Crown practically held the power over the territory for her control over BNBC. From 1942 to 1945, Sabah experienced a short period of Japanese occupation. In 1946, Sabah officially became a British Crown Colony and its capital city was moved from Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu. In 1963, with the formation of the federation of Malaysia, Sabah joined the newly formed nation-state and regained its name as Sabah.
There are 32 major ethnic groups identified to be residents of Sabah. Largely, the category could be initially divided into Malay/Bumiputera, Chinese, and Indians. The general Malay group, or the Bumiputeras contains ethnic groups that are considered ‘native’ to the land. Of the many, the most conspicuous ones stand as the following: Melayu-Malay, Bajau, Dusun, Suluk, and Murut. Muslim ethnic groups such as Bajau and Suluks have an immigrant history to Sabah, having migrated from the Philippines. Nonetheless, for the extended period of their residence in Sabah, they are considered to be one of the Sabah natives under government census, and culturally.
The classification of race and ethnicity in Malaysia has been an ambiguous process and influenced by the colonial bureaucracy. Today, the Malaysian government separates the residents into three groups: Malays, Chinese, and India. The classification is evidently a legacy of the British colonial period where the groupings were made based on the economic sectors that each social group largely contributed to (Wang, 299). Followingly, the grouping made on the indigenous Malay people is too broad and generalized. In some government census, there is an effort made to specify the Malay grouping into Melayu-Bumiputera (Melayu is the non-anglican way of pronouncing Malay; Bumiputera means ‘sons of soil’ in Malay, referring to those who are native to the Malay peninsula), referring to Malay speakers who are native to the land and Muslim, and non-Muslim-Bumiputera, referring to the Malay speaking natives who are not Muslim (Tangit, 15). Consequently, the classification of Malay (or Bumiputera) contains references to various ethnic groups. It is important to note that these nomenclatures fail to encapsulate the cultural, historical, and ethnic diversity of Malaysia. A conspicuous problem is the fact that the Muslim-immigrants from the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia are put into the same group as those who are indigenous and traditionally non-Muslim to each region of Malaysia. Moreover, dividing the Bumiputeras into Muslim and non-Muslim doesn’t necessarily correspond to the existence of each ethnic group since an ethnic group does not divide into ones that are Muslim or not; an ethnic group may conform to various religions (Olmedo, 815).
In the midst of the complicated nature of groupings and labeling in Malaysia, Dusun is an ethnic nomenclature used to refer to the people who are indigenous to the coastal and interior mountain areas of Northwest Sabah, and speak the language Dusun. The Dusun community is the largest indigenous group in Sabah, followed by Muruts and the Paitan community. The term Dusun was coined by Melayu-muslims who were trading produce with the group, and the term means ‘orchard people.’ The nomenclature gained a wider usage during the British occupation, for the colonizers needed a way to categorize the non-muslim Malay demographics in the region (Roff, 327). The ethnic group is traditionally agrarian by nature; they mostly lived a lifestyle of farming crops, vegetables, and fruit trees. Therefore, they were mostly residing in land that is also known for its rice cultivation, and rice winery. The group has traditionally practiced animism prior to contact with the Sultanate power and the Britishers. However, today, due to the influx of external religions in the region, nearly all of them have converted to mainstream religions, with Catholicism taking up the biggest proportion of the population.
Although Catholicism was introduced to Sabah by the Portuguese during its Sultanate period, it was properly introduced to Sabah during the British colonization in the late 1800s. One of the pioneering Catholic mission organizations was Catholic Mill Hill Mission. Catholic Mill Hill Mission opened Catholic mission schools in 1882 for the Dusun population on the south of modern Kota Kinabalu. The missionaries were fully aware that a knowledge of the mother tongue – Dusun – was a key factor in the propagation of the religion (Reid, 125). The Dusun language was thus taught at Catholic mission schools and the missionaries also translated holy scriptures into this language. The BNBC also encouraged missionary bodies to train local children to read, count and write, thus enabling them to acquire basic literacy. By 1953 there were 40 Catholic schools in Sabah with almost 6,000 students, the majority “indigenous”. In the whole school system (including government and Chinese schools) there were then 3,385 students classified as “Dusun” (Kib, 56).13 Most of these were KDs of the West Coast studying in one of the 40 Catholic schools, including the famous St. Michael’s secondary school in the Penampang valley behind Kota Kinabalu. While less than four per cent of the KD population was Christian in 1931, a quarter had become so by 1960, and a majority are today.
In a muslim majority country, Dusun’s high rate of adherence to Catholicism is unusual. Several theories account for this phenomenon; firstly, the traditional culture on rice wine and pork consumption does not align very well with Islam’s values. Moreover, the claim on the indigeneity of the land by Dusun people have been historically inferiorized by the Melyau-Malays, who are technically also foreigners to land. Lastly, the Dusun people maintained a stronger political connection to the Crown, hence a stronger affiliation to Christianity in general, and subsequently Catholicism.
Today, the presence of Catholicism in Sabah has grown to the point of the establishment of an archdiocese. The Archdiocese of Kota Kinabalu is an archdiocese of the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church in Sabah, which oversees the ecclesiastical province of the west coast of Sabah as the metropolitan archdiocese. Sandakan is under a separate diocese (Diocese of Sandaka) under a suffragan. There are also over forty Catholic schools in Kota Kinabalu alone, and around ten in Sandakan.