Buru

The Buru, who call themselves Gebfuka, meaning people of the land, are the principal people of Buru, the third largest Maluku island, speaking a Central Malayo-Polynesian language. The island first appears in the 1365 Majapahit eulogy Nagarakretagama as Hutan Kadali.

Makassar traders built forts and forced the islanders to grow cloves until the Dutch drove them out in 1648 and burned the trees. In 1658 the Dutch East India Company fortified Kayeli Bay and moved some two thousand villagers, including much of the tribal nobility, into thirteen settlements to work clove plantations; these clans became the Kayeli, the island's loyal elite.

After the Company fell the Dutch crown reorganized Buru into fourteen regencies in 1824. The Buru kept the cult of the supreme deity Opo Hebe Snulat even as Islam spread in the north and Protestantism in the south, farming rice, sago and spices and hunting the Buru babirusa.