Rejang

The Rejang are an Austronesian people of the Barisan highlands of southwestern Sumatra, chiefly in the upper Musi and Ketahun basins of Bengkulu. Linguistic evidence suggests their ancestors crossed from Borneo and travelled up the Musi to settle the interior in several waves. Their language forms its own branch of Malayo-Polynesian.

In 1337 they lived in small upland hamlets, divided among five dialect groups each led by a chief, with noble kutei families ruling through customary law and reckoning descent through the male line. Their old religion venerated the rice goddess Nyang Serai and treated the tiger as an ancestral spirit not to be harmed.

Islam reached them in the sixteenth century through Banten, Minangkabau and Acehnese traders and missionaries, and spread gradually. Highlanders blended it with customary law and ancestor rites, such as lighting coconut-husk torches for returning spirits at Eid.