Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [368]
Vietnam’s ethnic minorities | Minorities in the central highlands |
Sedang (Xo–dang)
According to their oral histories, Sedang people once lived further north but are now concentrated in the area between Kon Tum and Quang Ngai and comprise a community of nearly 130,000. The Sedang were traditionally a warlike people whose villages were surrounded with defensive hedges, barbed with spears and stakes, and with only one entrance. Inter-village wars were frequent, and the Sedang also carried out raids on the peaceable Bahnar, mainly to seize prisoners rather than territory. In the past, Sedang religious ritual involved human sacrifices to propitiate the spirits – a practice that was later modified into a profitable business, selling slaves to traders from Laos and Thailand.
In the 1880s, an eccentric French military adventurer called Marie-David de Mayréna, established a kingdom in Sedang territory by making treaties with the local chiefs (See "Vietnam’s real-life Kurtz"). A few decades later, the French authorities conscripted Sedang labour to build Highway 14 from Kon Tum to Da Nang; conditions were so harsh that many died, provoking a rebellion in the 1930s. Soon after, the Viet Minh won many recruits among the Sedang in their war against the French. In the American War some Sedang groups fought for the Viet Cong while others were formed into militia units by the American Special Services. But when fighting intensified after 1965, Sedang villagers were forced to flee, and many now live in almost destitute conditions, having lost their ancestral lands.
Each Sedang extended family occupies a longhouse, built on stilts and usually facing east; central to village life is the communal house where young men and boys sleep, and where all the major ceremonies take place. Because villages historically had relatively little contact with each other, there are marked variations between the social customs of the subgroups, and so far seventeen Sedang dialects have been identified. Agricultural techniques are more consistent, mainly swidden farming supplemented by horticulture and hunting. Some Sedang farmers employ a “water harp”, a combined bird-scarer, musical instrument and appeaser of the spirits. The harp consists of bamboo tubes linked together and placed in a flowing stream to produce an irregular, haunting sound.
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Vietnam’s ethnic minorities | Minorities in the central highlands | Sedang (Xo–dang) |
Vietnam’s real-life Kurtz
The Sedang played their part in one of colonial Vietnam’s oddest interludes and one which finds echoes in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, in which a mysterious voyager named Kurtz proclaims himself king, deep in the Belgian Congo – a story later borrowed by Francis Ford Coppola for his film Apocalypse Now(See "Coming to terms with the war").
The career of French rogue Marie-David de Mayréna was a chequered one to say the least. After a stint with the French army in Cochinchina in the mid-1860s, he made his way back to Paris, only to return to the East after having failed as a banker. Back in Vietnam by the 1880s, he established himself as a planter around Ba Ria, until 1888 when the governor sent him to explore the highlands. Of the hundred or so porters and soldiers who accompanied him, only one, a Frenchman named Alphonse Mercurol, remained by the time he reached Kon Tum. Through the contacts of the French missionaries based there, Mayréna was able to arrange meetings with local tribal chiefs; soon the leaders fell under the spell of his “blue eyes” and “bold, confident stare”, and he conspired to proclaim himself King Marie I of Sedang, while Mercurol adopted the title “Marquis of Hanoi”. For three months, Mayréna ruled from a straw hut flying the national flag (a white cross on a blue background, with a red star in the centre), legislating,