Best Story; The Book That Killed ColonialismBy Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Published: April 18, 1999 [NYT magazine]
About 50 years ago, at a diplomatic reception in London, one man stood out: he was short by European standards, and thin, and he wore a black fezlike hat over his white hair. From his mouth came an unending cloud of aromatic smoke that permeated the reception hall. This man was Agus Salim, the Republic of Indonesia's first Ambassador to Great Britain. Referred to in his country as the Grand Old Man, Salim was among the first generation of Indonesians to have received a Western education. In this regard, he was a rare species, for at the end of Dutch hegemony over Indonesia in 1943, no more than 3.5 percent of the country's population could read or write.
Not surprisingly, Salim's appearance and demeanor -- not to mention
the strange smell of his cigarettes -- quickly turned him into the
center of attention. One gentleman put into words the question that
was on everyone's lips: ''What is that thing you're smoking, sir?''
''That, your excellency,'' Agus Salim is reported to have said, ''is
the reason for which the West conquered the world!'' In fact he was
smoking a kretek, an Indonesian cigarette spiced with clove, which for
centuries was one of the world's most sought-after spices.
Is my tale about an Indonesian at the court of King James the greatest
story of the millennium? Certainly not, though I must smile at the
irreverence shown by my countryman. I include it here because it
touches on what I would argue are the two most important
''processes''of this millennium: the search for spices by Western
countries, which brought alien nations and cultures into contact with
one another for the first time; and the expansion of educational
opportunities, which returned to the colonized peoples of the world a
right they had been forced to forfeit under Western colonization --
the right to determine their own futures.
The latter process is exemplified by what is now an almost unknown
literary work: ''Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch
Trading Company,'' a novel by Eduard Douwes Dekker, a Dutchman, which
he published in 1859 under the pseudonym Multatuli (Latin for ''I have
suffered greatly''). The book recounts the experiences of one Max
Havelaar, an idealistic Dutch colonial official in Java. In the story,
Havelaar encounters -- and then rebels against -- the system of forced
cultivation imposed on Indonesia's peasants by the Dutch Government.
D. H. Lawrence, in his introduction to the 1927 English translation of
the novel, called it a most ''irritating'' work. ''On the surface,
'Max Havelaar' is a tract or a pamphlet very much in the same line as
'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' ''Lawrence wrote. ''Instead of 'pity the poor
Negro slave' we have 'pity the poor oppressed Javanese'; with the same
urgent appeal for legislation, for the Government to do something
about it. Well, the [American] Government did do something about Negro
slaves, and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' fell out of date. The Netherlands
Government is also said to have done something in Java for the poor,
on the strength of Multatuli's book. So that 'Max Havelaar' became a
back number.''
Before telling you more about ''Max Havelaar'' and its author, I would
like to go back in time, even before the start of the present
millennium, to tell you about the search for spices. The key word to
remember here is ''religion.''
For hundreds of years, spices -- clove, nutmeg and pepper -- were the
primary cause of religious conflict. Their value was inestimable: as
food preservative (essential in the age before refrigeration), as
medicine and, at a time when the variety of food was almost
unfathomably limited, for taste.
In A.D. 711, Moorish forces conquered Cordoba in southern Spain. By
756, the Muslim ruler Abdar Rahman proclaimed that he had achieved his
goal of spreading Islamic culture and trade throughout Spain. That
country became the world's center for the study of science and the
guardian of Greek and Roman learning that had been banned by the Roman
Catholic Church. By controlling the land on both sides of the entrance
to the Mediterranean, the Moors were also able to maintain control
over trade with the East, source of spices and other important goods.
Christian ships were not allowed to pass.
For several centuries, the development of the Christian countries of
Europe came to a virtual standstill; all available human and economic
resources were being poured into the Crusades. The Holy Wars were
waged not just to reclaim Jerusalem but also to expel the Moors from
Spain and, in so doing, gain control over the spice trade.
In 1236, the Catholic forces of Europe finally succeeded. Islam was
pushed from Europe. To their credit, the victors refrained from
vandalizing symbols of Moorish heritage. Nonetheless, revenge toward
Islam continued to burn -- as did the passion to drive Muslim forces
from any country they reached.
The first place to fall was Ceuta in Morocco, on Africa's north coast,
which, together with Gibraltar, has always served as the gateway to
the Mediterranean. With this, the Europeans had established an
important toehold in wresting control of the spice trade. The problem
was, they had little idea where spices actually came from.
Spain and Portugal, Europe's two great seafaring nations of the time,
set out to find the answer. To preserve order among Catholic
countries, a line of demarcation was drawn (later made official by
Pope Alexander VI in 1493), giving Spain the right to conquer all
non-Christian lands to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, and
Portugal the authority to take pagan countries to the east of the
islands and as far as the 125th meridian (which falls near the
Philippines). It was for this reason that Columbus, helmsman for the
Spanish fleet, sailed west and found a continent instead of the source
of spices. Portugal, on the other hand, sent its ships eastward to
Africa, from which they returned laden with gold, ostrich eggs and
slaves -- but no spices.
In early 1498, Vasco da Gama reached the island of Madagascar, off the
coast of east Africa. There he found a guide to lead him across the
Indian Ocean to the port of Calicut in southwestern India. Arriving on
May 20, da Gama ''discovered'' India. Unfortunately for the weary
sailor, he also found that of the spices he sought, only cinnamon was
in abundance. To reach the true source of spices, he would have to
sail thousands of miles southeast to what is now known as Indonesia
and then on to the Moluccas (located, incidentally, in Spain's half of
the world). Over the next century, the Portuguese forged their way
southeast, consolidating Muslim-held trade routes and converting souls
along the way. By the time da Gama's ships made it to the Moluccas in
the middle of the 16th century, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and
Malaya had all been subjugated in the name of both trade and Christ.
Other travelers had visited the region before -- including Marco Polo
-- but it was the Portuguese who established the first permanent
foreign presence. With the help of handheld firearms, Portugal quickly
spread its power across the archipelago. In no time, the country
controlled the spice route from beginning to end.
There was a problem, though. Portugal lacked the population required
to support a maritime force capable of controlling half the
non-Catholic world. As a result, it was forced to hire sailors from
Germany, France and especially the Netherlands. This weakness would
eventually spell the downfall of its monopoly in the spice trade.
One Dutch sailor in the Portuguese fleet, Jan Huygen van Linschoten,
made extensive notes during his six years of travel throughout the
archipelago. He paid particular attention to the weaknesses of his
employers. Portugal, not surprisingly, had done its best to mask its
vulnerabilities, but all these were exposed in 1596, when van
Linschoten returned home and published a book, ''A Journey, or Sailing
to Portugal India or East India.'' The book -- a virtual travel guide
to the region -- was quickly translated into French, English, German
and Latin.
Two years after van Linschoten's work was published, the Netherlands,
through a consortium of Dutch companies, sent its own fleet to
Indonesia. The Dutch fleet's first attempt failed, but gradually, wave
after wave of Dutch ships reached the islands, driving out the
Portuguese and bringing untold wealth to the Netherlands. Lacking not
only manpower but also the diplomatic stature to protect its
interests, the Portuguese were unable even to put up a fight.
In part, the success of the Dutch can be attributed to their good
working relationship with Java's powerful feudal lords and to their
professionalism. Initially at least, they had come to trade, not to
conquer / and on that basis created what was then the largest maritime
emporium in the world at its seat in Batavia (now Jakarta).
Over time, however, the Dutch shippers needed military force to
safeguard their monopoly. To keep international market prices high,
they also limited spice production. For this reason, almost the entire
populace of the Banda Islands, source of nutmeg, was exterminated in
the early 17th century. The island was then stocked with European
employees of the company. For field workers they brought in slaves and
prisoners of war.
Also for the purpose of controlling spice production, people from the
Moluccas were forcibly conscripted, placed in an armada of traditional
Moluccan boats and sent off to destroy competitors' nutmeg and clove
estates. Buru Island, where I was a political prisoner from 1969 to
1979, was turned from an island of agricultural estates into a vast
savanna.
Let us now fast forward to the mid-19th century. As a result of the
Napoleonic and Java wars, the Netherlands and the East Indies had
entered an economic downturn. Sugar, coffee, tea and indigo had
replaced spices as the archipelago's cash crops, but with increased
domestic production and limited purchasing power abroad, they were
becoming increasingly unprofitable for the Dutch consortium. To
replenish profits, the Governor General, J. van den Bosch, decided
that the Government must be able to guarantee long-term property
rights for investors and that a fixed supply of crops should be
exported every year.
To that end, van den Bosch put into effect on Java a system of forced
cultivation, known as cultuurstelsel, in which farmers were obliged to
surrender a portion of production from their land to the colonial
Government. Through this plan, the Government was able to reverse the
Netherlands' economic decline in just three years. Java, however, was
turned into an agricultural sweatshop. In addition to surrendering
land for Government-designated production, paying high taxes to the
Dutch and ''tithes'' to local overlords, peasants were forbidden by
law to move away from their hometowns. When famine hit or crops
failed, there was literally no way out. As a result, tens of thousands
of peasants died of hunger. Meanwhile, Dutch authorities and feudal
lords grew richer by the day.
On Oct. 13, 1859, in Brussels, Eduard Douwes Dekker, a former employee
of the Dutch Indies Government, finished ''Max Havelaar.'' Concern for
the impact of the colonial policies on the Indonesian people had
marked the career of Dekker, who originally studied to be a minister.
When he was posted in North Sumatra, he defended a village chief who
had been tortured, and unwittingly found himself on the opposite side
of a courtroom from his superior. As a result, he was transferred to
West Sumatra, where he protested the Government's efforts to incite
ethnic rivalry. Before long, he was called back to Batavia. Only his
writing skills saved him from getting the sack entirely. After a few
more bumpy stops, Dekker wound up in West Java. It was there, when
Dekker was 29, that his disillusionment came to a head and he
resigned. Judging from his autobiographical novel, we can assume he
wrote the Governor General something like this: ''Your Excellency has
sanctioned: The system of abuse of authority, of robbery and murder,
under which the humble Javanese groans, and it is that I complain
about. Your Excellency, there is blood on the pieces of silver you
have saved from salary you have earned thus!'' He returned to Europe
-- not to the Netherlands, but to Belgium, where he poured his
experiences into ''Max Havelaar.''
Dekker's style is far from refined. In depicting the cultuurstelsel he
writes: ''The Government compels the worker to grow on his land what
pleases it; it punishes him when he sells the crop so produced to
anyone else but it; and it fixes the price it pays him. The cost of
transport to Europe, via a privileged trading company, is high. The
money given to the Chiefs to encourage them swells the purchase price
further, and . . . since, after all, the entire business must yield a
profit, this profit can be made in no other way than by paying the
Javanese just enough to keep him from starving. Famine? In rich,
fertile, blessed Java? Yes, reader. Only a few years ago, whole
districts died of starvation. Mothers offered their children for sale
to obtain food. Mothers ate their children.''
The publication of ''Max Havelaar'' in 1859 was nothing less than
earth-shaking. Just as ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' gave ammunition to the
American abolitionist movement, ''Max Havelaar'' became the weapon for
a growing liberal movement in the Netherlands, which fought to bring
about reform in Indonesia. Helped by ''Max Havelaar,'' the energized
liberal movement was able to shame the Dutch Government into creating
a new policy known as the ethical policy, the major goals of which
were to promote irrigation, interisland migration and education in the
Dutch Indies.
The impact of the reforms was modest at first. By the beginning of the
20th century, however, a small number of Indonesians, primarily the
children of traditional rulers, were beginning to feel their effects.
One of them was Agus Salim, the man with the clove cigarette, whose
reading of ''Max Havelaar'' in school proved an awakening. He, along
with other Indonesians educated in Dutch, fostered a movement for
emancipation and freedom, which eventually led, in the 1940's, to
full-scale revolution.
The Indonesian revolution not only gave birth to a new country, it
also sparked the call for revolution in Africa, which in turn awakened
ever more of the world's colonized peoples and signaled the end of
European colonial domination. Perhaps, in a sense, it could be no
other way. After all, wasn't the world colonized by Europe because of
Indonesia's Spice Islands? One could say that it was Indonesia's
destiny to initiate the decolonization process.
To Multatuli -- Eduard Douwes Dekkera whose work sparked this process,
this world owes a great debt.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a novelist. ''The Mute's Soliloquy,'' a
chronicle of his years as a political prisoner in Indonesia, will be
published this month. This article was translated by John H. McGlynn
from the Indonesian.
0 komentar:
Post a Comment