Guru Edwardo St Panduko Guci was born in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra in June 1973.  He began his martial arts journey at the local Kung-Fu school after Bruce Lee mania swept into Indonesia.  It wasn’t until his father sent him to his home village on the shores of Lake Maninjau to receive some injury treatment from his uncle who also happened to be a Shaman, that Ed discovered his native Silek.  This was in 1989.  His uncle asked Ed about what he had learned from his Kung-Fu and Ed feeling confident decided to demonstrate on his elder relative.  Suffice to say each time he tried to apply a technique his uncle would counter softly and put Ed to the floor.  Being somewhat shocked and a little embarrassed the young Edwardo gave up the Kung-Fu altogether and began his quest to discover all he could about his native Minangkabau Martial Arts, beginning with learning his uncle’s Style of Silek Balam.

This journey led Ed to travel all over the region of West Sumatra to research, discover and train with many masters of Minangkabau Silek.  In order to fund his sojourns, he would take a guitar and play and sing on buses.  Little money was made this way but it was enough for him to survive during this period of deep investigation.  He discovered a very definite line of similarity within all of the styles he encountered, often with only minor differences in movement or training methodology.

In 2002 he met Johnny Silmon in Bukittinggi, and they immediately connected.  The two kept in touch up till around 2005 but then lost contact.  It was via the ‘miracle’ of social media that Ed reconnected with Johnny in late 2009.  Since that time, with Johnny’s assistance, Ed has co-hosted both the 2013 & 2014 Minangkabau Silek Camps and later the 2017 Minangkabau Silek Retreat all of which opened up previously unknown styles to the West and proved to be a great success.

Guru Ed is sought after as an authentic and no-nonsense teacher of Silek Minang.  He has taught in Malaysia and Thailand and there are plans (as of Dec 2018) that he will be making his European & U.S teaching debuts over the next 12 months.  He is The W.A.I ‘on the ground’ researcher, often travelling to far corners of the archipelago to connect with ‘off the radar’ teachers and document many rare forms of Warrior Arts of Indonesia.