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Chapter 5

RETURN TO INDONESIA

[19] The weather had cooled, rain drizzled down, and the wind blew gently. It was November 1919.¹ With a roar, the big ship weighed anchor and engaged its propeller, churning water more impressively than a whale as it begins to swim. Slowly we left the city of Amsterdam behind until all we could see were indistinct little groups of houses in the mist.

Amsterdam is a large city of about a million inhabitants, but at heart it is only a small town.² Scattered here and there are small factories that make jam, sweets, chocolate, bread, and biscuits. The city is full of winkels—little stores that are very neat and well stocked, but small for a metropolitan port. The Dutch admire the Beurs building as a symbol of modernism in architecture.³ But it is not a skyscraper—strong, firm, soaring into space, a symbol of the spirit and activity of a young country with a will of steel. The Beurs is a nest of brokers—termites and bedbugs busy bargaining away stocks, shares, and such deeds to the soil of other nations. Just as the Taj Mahal is a synthesis of architecture, wealth, and pure perfect love, so the Beurs is a synthesis, or, more correctly, an architectural jumble, filled with the spirit of colonials and kruideniers, whom we know well enough.⁴

Slowly the ship sailed from the port of Amsterdam to the fishing city of Ijmuiden on the shore of the North Sea. We passed through the Ijmuiden Canal, fearful that the ship’s wake might overflow the dikes.⁵ Slowly, carefully, cautiously we proceeded . . . voorzichtig . . . dan breekt het lijntje niet.⁶

[20] It was appropriate enough to the Dutch character: Holland op zijn smaalst.⁷ Not only is the country here at its narrowest, but the farming enterprises are tiny businesses owned by individuals: potato farms, strawberry farms, and of course the bulb farms. They are not worked on a large scale with machines of a thousand and one horsepower, but with human hands and animals. Everything is small, moderate, gradual: “je kunt het nooit weten” [you never know what might happen]. To work on a large scale for a distant objective with great risk is definitely not in the character of the Dutch.

It is true that at the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch and their sailing ships left their shores, navigated the North Sea, went past South Africa, turned north, sailed along the coast of Africa, Arabia, India, Burma, and came to Indonesia. However, it was not the Dutch who pioneered this route to Indonesia, but the Portuguese. Although what is now New York used to be named New Amsterdam, it wasn’t Jan or Piet who risked his life to obtain America, but Columbus. Dash, adventure, the search for the new on the basis of calculations that still contain the “x” factor, the unclear, the unseen, and the risky—these qualities have never been Dutch characteristics, and in all probability never will be.

It is not impossible that the Netherlands may gradually acquire heavy or medium-scale industry with factories to make machines for ships, trains, or airplanes. And of course with changes in the economic base the psychology of the people would also change. But the Dutch don’t have what they need to pose a commercial challenge to the large nations such as England, America, and Russia: raw materials such as iron, bauxite, alumina, tin, nickel, and other elements needed for today’s alloys. They have to get these things by wielding the iron fist. But this will be impossible if the Indonesian people continue to resist the Dutch and to oppose them with a heart of steel even when armed with only bamboo sticks and hand grenades.

We had left the Netherlands behind, and our ship was heading for Indonesia through the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Gibraltar Straits, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and finally the Indian Ocean. It was six years since I had traveled through these same places in the opposite direction. How many changes had I experienced within myself, mainly due to the unhampered influence of events in the world around me: the outbreak and conclusion of the First World War, the social revolution in Russia, and the establishment and reverberations of the Third International. I had traveled this way at the end of 1913, but how different were the impressions I gained at the end of 1919!⁸

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the night’s stillness was broken only by the sound of the bow cleaving the water. Memories of the past six years ran like a film through my mind’s eye as the Netherlands receded ever further.

[21] The story was more bitter than sweet. The huge, unresolved conflict within myself had been enlarged and exacerbated by the conflict within the European society that I was leaving and the sharp contradictions of the society towards which I was headed.

I had not been long in the Netherlands before I felt the contradictions in my physical situation. My payment of 30 rupiah (Rp) a month to the Rijkskweekschool [Government Teachers Training School] hostel meant that I couldn’t get food suitable for an Indonesian even if I was prepared to sleep in the attic.⁹ At that time there were no other Indonesian students who paid less than Rp 50 a month to the hostel, and most of them paid more. However, Rp 30 a month was as much as I could pay from my monthly allowance of Rp 50. Apart from room and board, I also had to pay Rp 11.50 insurance, leaving me Rp 8.50 for my daily needs.¹⁰

I had been close to my teacher, Tuan Horensma,¹¹ the deputy director of the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi,¹² both in the classroom and outside, in the Kweekschool orchestra and in the orchestra for Europeans in Bukit Tinggi, of which Tuan Horensma was the conductor and I the first cellist. It was this relationship and the high level that I attained in my final exams at the Kweekschool that prompted Horensma to go with me to meet the controller in Suliki, where I was born.¹³ An Engkufonds was established, with my family’s possessions being pledged as security and with contributions from the Engku of Suliki.¹⁴ The fund was to collect Rp 50 a month to assist me for two or three years in the Netherlands. I was to repay this debt when I returned to Indonesia.

After I had been in the Netherlands for a while, it turned out that for Rp 30 a month I could secure slightly better accommodation in a house.¹⁵ This was arranged through a friend of mine after I had spent a year in the hostel. I was reprimanded by the director of the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem for taking the initiative in leaving the hostel. However, I made the move because my health had deteriorated to such a degree that I preferred to avoid even looking at hostel meals. That sort of food only roused my stomach to reject it; the ingredients were good enough and contained nourishment, but they were cooked in the worst institutional manner.

[22] My health had already deteriorated greatly. Before leaving Indonesia I had to get a doctor’s certificate for insurance purposes. I got it easily enough and, after examining me, the doctor said with a smile: “You are as strong as teak.” But even teak can be eaten up by time and the climate. And as my desire to eat waned, my desire to play sports continued to rage. As a member of a soccer club in Haarlem, I dutifully played in the matches every week both in the city and in neighboring villages.¹⁶ But I didn’t know how to look after myself in winter, and what I did know I didn’t pay attention to.

[23] Several years before, when I was still young and undeveloped in strength and stamina, my sporting friends dared me to swim across the Ombilin River.¹⁷ Tossed around by the swift current, I lost my breath; and, as my arms and legs went limp, I lost consciousness. Fortunately, a strong friend was close by and quickly gave me help. When I came to, I was in front of my mother, whose cane was poised to teach me a lesson. My father, who apparently knew well that my mother’s beatings really smarted, urged that I be given a lesson that he deemed more appropriate. With a horse’s bit in my mouth, I was tied to the fence by the side of the road, a spectacle for the Engku children, who weren’t allowed to play with the village children like me. But my mother thought that this was only a stratagem of my father’s to take me away from her. When she saw me with the bit in my mouth, even though my father was standing by on guard and children were swarming around, my mother was not satisfied. She believed in a higher authority, the guru gadang (head teacher).¹⁸ On my mother’s urging, the head teacher gave me the punishment we children knew by the name of pilin pusat (navel twisting). I still wonder why I was the only one to be the target for this punishment. I copped it another time too, again after almost being washed away while diving under the boat carrying the Engku children across the Ombilin River. And there was another time, when we were playing, splashing each other in the face until one gave in. Although I saw most of the other children run away, I continued splashing my opponent. Finally when even my opponent ran away I thought that the struggle was over, victory was mine, and I had the full right to savor my success. Only I was a bit surprised that there was nobody left but me. When I got to the river bank to put on my clothes, awaiting me were the five fingers of the head teacher, ready to twist my navel. Apparently the other children had seen him waiting on the bank, but I was too involved in the game and had my back to him. After that, if anyone said that I had taken the Engku children to see a tiger captured in the mountains, for instance, I was the only one who would be punished. And if an orange war—where one line of children threw oranges at the other line—ended up in a stone war between the local children and those from the school in Tanjung Ampalu, it was I, of course, who had to endure punishment as a war criminal. This time, I was first put into a chicken coop. However, this didn’t seem to satisfy my mother’s sense of justice and so, at her instigation, the head teacher quickly imposed his usual punishment, smoothly and deftly twisting my navel.

Around the playing fields of Velsen or Ijmuiden in winter there was lots of snow, but there were no fingers ready to pounce on my navel. I paid no heed when my friends advised me to wear a thick sweater during half time. It was only bitter experience that could teach me. I do not know whether it stemmed from insufficient food, unregulated sports, or a combination of both, but three months before my teacher’s exams I fell ill with pleurisy. Only when I could no longer walk did I tell my landlady, and only then was the doctor called.¹⁹

Payment for the doctor was a major problem. Outside of my allowance of Rp 8.50 a month I had no money at all. The only doctor we could call was one who helped poor people without asking for pay, known in Haarlem as the busdokter.²⁰ His name was Doctor Jansen. Naturally enough, his examinations weren’t as thorough as those done in hospitals by first-class doctors, and his medicines were only cheap powders. My tiny attic with its close and stifling atmosphere did not hasten my recovery from pleurisy. My temperature remained high, but since I wanted to return to Indonesia I was very anxious to take my teacher’s examinations; my agreement with the Engkufonds was for only two years. But while my temperature remained high, the doctor would certainly not allow me to take the exams. So I began to bring down my temperature. Fortunately it was I who had to take the readings, three times a day.

Believing that I was seriously ill, the director of the Rijkskweekschool came to see me, several days before the examinations. He commented on my not having taken the tests during the three months that I had been absent from school. However, in spite of my absence, he still had faith in my ability and would let me take the exams as long as I had a certificate from the doctor. With great difficulty I got the doctor’s certificate, on the condition that I went to and returned from the exam by horse carriage. My temperature was normal . . . on the chart that I myself had filled in.

[24] And so at the appointed times I took the official written and oral examinations, and I passed them both. But when I returned home I suffered the effects of having so expended my energy when I was still seriously ill.

In point of fact it had not been really necessary for me to go through some two years at the Rijkskweekschool to get my hulp-acte.²¹ In my opinion two or three months of supplementary courses would have been sufficient. However, under Dutch imperialist policy at that time, the process of obtaining a teacher’s Europeescheacte was so complicated that it would take too long for me to go into it here.²² However, one incident illustrates the whole situation quite clearly. After the Silungkang insurrection of 1927,²³ the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi, which in my time was the sole teaching academy for the whole of Sumatra, was closed altogether.²⁴ Even the Kweekschool was too advanced for the ten million Sumatran people, and for the Minangkabau people in particular.

Here I have not the time, space, or inclination to relate the whole story of my education, useful as it might be for our youth today. But in order to explain more clearly how the climate and food of the Netherlands disagreed with me, particularly in my early years there, it will help if I explain in some detail the conflict between the knowledge I had at the time and my desire to study on the one hand, and between this desire and the possibilities for me to realize it on the other.

The Dutch government paid the cost of education for the pupils at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem, just as it did at the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi. But other similarities between the two schools were hard to find. The Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem taught its students to become teachers of Dutch children in the Dutch language and in the interests of the Dutch nation. The Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi trained its students to teach Indonesian children, primarily in the Indonesian language and in the interests of the Dutch East Indies.

Competition to receive government support was so great that many of the students admitted to the Rijkskweekschool were at least graduates of the MULO level.²⁵ The large number of candidates meant that the entrance examinations were hard enough, though not as harsh as those for the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi, particularly for students of Minangkabau-darat or Padang-darat descent.²⁶ (In my time, of the two or three hundred candidates only three of us were accepted.)

[25] When I started at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem, I was bitterly disappointed to find that my education from the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi had no connection with what I would now pursue. It is true that both schools taught botany, for example. However, the plants we had to study in the Netherlands were of course different from those in Indonesia: similarly with geography, pedagogy, art, and geometry. Furthermore, there were subjects that I had to study from the very beginning, such as Dutch history, world history, algebra, stereometry, trigonometry, and mechanics. On the other hand, some of the subjects that I had studied in Bukit Tinggi, such as chemistry and agriculture, were not taught at all or were taught only minimally. But the first and foremost subject for a Dutch teacher was the Dutch language, and, however clever one might be in studying foreign languages, Dutch youths of fourteen to twenty years of age naturally understood their mother tongue better than an Indonesian who had only studied Dutch several hours a day in school for six years. But that did not mean that I could not beat the students in even the highest class in grammar.

I do not know what strategy the teachers at the Rijkskweekschool had decided to use on me, but over those two years I had no class of my own and was shifted around among the four classes. For geography, for instance, in the morning I might be in class one and in the afternoon in class four. In itself, without any other problems, this would have been enough to break the heart of anyone who was studying subjects from the very beginning. Certainly I had to force myself to study all my subjects. Those like pedagogy and botany required self-discipline, and I had to be forced to study the exact sciences such as algebra and trigonometry.

Aside from arithmetic, one didn’t really need to study the exact sciences, either to be an ordinary teacher or for the examination to qualify as head teacher. But after the mathematics teacher shifted me around between classes one, two, and three in a single day, he pulled me aside during the break, saying he wanted to finish the mathematics lesson with me. He added in a whisper that he wanted to continue to teach me, though previously he had considered Indonesians incapable of learning mathematics. “It was really hard for me to teach Sutan,” he said, “but now, after seeing you, my outlook is changing.”

[26] I know that Sutan Casajangan, to whom he was referring, was certainly not stupid, even though he had failed five times in the examination for the head teacher’s certificate.²⁷ My respect for the mathematical ability of the Bataks at the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi was very high, and Sutan Casajangan, a former pupil at that school who had been accepted through examinations from among the many candidates from Tapanuli, certainly was no exception.²⁸ But probably a weakness in his knowledge of the Dutch language made it difficult for him to understand the mathematics he was taught. And as for his having failed the head teacher’s exam five times, it was quite possible that the Dutch imperialist school policy had something to do with it.

Mathematics had never been a problem for me, even when I was constantly moved around from one lesson to another. Several years before I arrived in the Netherlands I had already worked out a strategy for understanding mathematics, and I was able to apply it successfully without working very hard. But as for studying plants—the number of leaves and stamens and seeds—or the number of teeth of a Dutch frog or the way to teach the alphabet to children, there was no alternative to rote learning, and I was not cut out for that. I really hated to learn by rote, except when I had a real interest in something.

My hatred for memorization was even greater than my hatred of facing bread and cheese and bread and cheese without variation, day after day in the hostel. My hatred of these foods was aroused simply by the sight of them, but my hatred of forced learning by rote was unceasing, as was my hatred of the unjust differences between Indonesian and Dutch societies.

It was under such conditions that I had the opportunity of meeting the late Professor Snouck Hurgronje, who said to me, “I wouldn’t even think of becoming a teacher of German children though I have lived a long time in Germany and really know the German language well.” I was surprised to hear this. Then he asked at what age I had started to learn Dutch. I answered that I had studied it since I was about thirteen. He then said, “So before you were thirteen you didn’t have any contact with Dutch children. Do you think, then, that you can understand the spirit of Dutch children under the age of thirteen in the primary school, and use the words they use?”

[27] It was with my thoughts in tumult that I left the professor, who was known as an ethisch,²⁹ an admirer of the inlanders [natives]³⁰ and an expert on Islam. His question still thundered in my ears, and it was from that time that I began to doubt the direction of my education. I was ashamed of wanting to attain the right to become a teacher of Dutch children with whom I shared neither language nor nation, and whose spirits I would be unable to reach in their mother tongue.

At first, I thought of changing my field of study but here I collided with the advice that my teacher, Horensma, had given me before we parted. Several times he said to me that he could only advise me to become a teacher. I knew it was because he was a teacher himself and because he wanted to see an Indonesian receive the education of a Dutch teacher. Only after I had returned to Bukit Tinggi six years later, and he himself had become disillusioned with the bureaucracy in Batavia, did he express his regret over that advice. “I really should have advised you to become an engineer.”³¹ If from the start my education had been directed toward chemical or agricultural engineering, and if my health had been guarded, my desire to study would not have been disturbed and might even have been encouraged. But, anyway, as the proverb goes, the rice had already turned to porridge, and in those six years I underwent many changes.³²

When one’s body suffers through want and one’s spirit is shackled, when all roads to change and improvement are blocked, then one’s heart is open, torn between the emotions of the common fate of humanity and the realization of social contradiction, between negative and positive forces. The turbulence of thesis and antithesis within me was a reflection of the external struggle taking place about me: in the typical poor household in which I lived and as an echo of the broader struggle throughout Europe, which together with the whole world was caught in the crucible of the First World War. It was almost a year before the war began when I arrived in the Netherlands and nearly a year after it ended when I left.

[28] I lived in a small, dark attic room in the rented house of a working class family, a small house on a small street which, by coincidence, was named Jacobin Street. In the room next to mine lived a Belgian refugee, Herman, a youth who worked in a jam factory in Haarlem.³³ This young man had left Belgium after it was attacked by the Germans. The landlady was a working woman—honest, simple, and in everything filled with a humanitarian spirit at a time when the world showed no humanity toward her. Her husband had been sick with a lung disease for a long time and was being nursed in a hospital. He was really only waiting to meet his death. Formerly, Van der Mey (the name of this poor sick man) had been an ironworker in a workshop in Haarlem. Since falling sick, he had received no pay, pension, or any other kind of assistance. Like a sick mule he was just abandoned. Nyonya van der Mey lived by renting rooms to us and by the little bit of help she received from her grown child, who worked as a lowly clerk in an office in Amsterdam. What she got from Herman and me didn’t really amount to much at all because the food she provided for us used up almost all of our rent. From this small income and the help she got from her child Nyonya van der Mey had to pay her husband’s hospital expenses every month. I need not describe her poverty any further. I should only add that the patience of this simple working woman was far from insignificant.³⁴

The young Van der Mey was sympathetic to the Allies (England, France, and Belgium) and was a faithful reader of De Telegraaf, a fiercely anti-German newspaper that spoke of the Germans as “dirty Krauts.”³⁵ At that time I could see no difference between German, English, or Dutch imperialism, and because of this we often had disagreements. During one of these debates, which had gone on for some time and was rather spirited, Herman suddenly chimed in, saying, “You’re right, Ipie (that was my nickname).³⁶ I agree. As far as I’m concerned they’re all a bunch of filthy, thieving swine.” Hot-blooded as all Belgians, Herman already had a knife in his hand. I tried to calm him. Fortunately, Van der Mey was sensible and gave in.

It seems that Herman, a reader of Het Volk, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Workers Party in the Netherlands, had waited a long time to get Van der Mey, reader of De Telegraaf.³⁷ When Herman came home from work with a shining face and put his hand into his pocket, I knew what he would pull out. It would be a magazine, brochure, or essay, burning with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiments. Herman enjoyed reading fiery things, and when necessary could act strongly.

Step by step, pushed by circumstances within and around me—influenced and illuminated by the books I was reading, in accordance with the laws of quantity being transformed into quality—suddenly in spirit and in understanding I was in a state normally termed revolutionary.

[29] When I started to read meaningful books, my admiration for the unity of spirit and organization of the Germans attracted me to Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who had strongly influenced the young German fighters of that time.

On the corner of Jacobin Street was a bookstore, which I would pass on my way to and from school. My interest in this bookstore rose together with the tumult of the war in the battlefields of Europe and the whole Sturm und Drang atmosphere that affected my generation. No significant book escaped my eye and my lightning reading. But my ability to buy was very limited and could be exercised only by closing my eyes to everything but books, and pulling my belt a little tighter. The series De groote denkers der eeuwen³⁸ was displayed behind the window as were books like Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zoo spraak Zarathustra and another of his essays that was no less popular among German youth at that time, De Wil tot Macht.³⁹

If ever I was attracted to language, it was to Nietzsche’s terms, such as Die Umwertung aller Werten (the transvaluation of all values). Yet it was apparent to me that Nietzsche’s philosophy was centered on one nation, Germany, and one class of Germans in particular, the Junkers, the aristocracy allied with the wealthy. The iron will, the desire that was reflected in the Übermensch at the time of the First World War, manifested itself in the Wilhelm-Hindenburg-Stinnes alliance. In the Second World War, this iron will appeared as an alliance among Hitler, Goering, and Krupp. I quickly came to understand the German nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy when I tried to enter the German army to receive German training. I was told that the German army did not accept any foreigners and did not have a volunteer foreign force.⁴⁰

After that I was attracted to the deeper Umwertung aller Werten (revaluation of all values) inherent in the movement for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Thomas Carlyle’s book De Fransche Revolutie (or De Groote Fransche Omwenteling) long lain buried among a few others in my trunk.⁴¹ had When we were parting, my teacher Horensma lent me several of his former textbooks. The above-mentioned book had already gone back and forth several times between his trunk and my own. Finally he put it into my trunk, saying, “Now go to it!”

Politics was a terra incognita for me then.⁴² I neither hated nor liked it, for I knew absolutely nothing of its existence. But in that time of Sturm und Drang, when ideas were leaping about, hiding, turning left and right, and breaking through like dammed-up water, the book De Fransche Revolutie suddenly appeared as a resting place for my weary, questing thoughts.⁴³

[30] One proof of the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” of the French nation was their hospitality toward the colored peoples who were in their country at that time. Was it not a fact that the Arabs, Senegalese, and Annamese were faithfully and firmly defending “France” in the European battlefield? Just like the Gurkhas, whose courage and fidelity alongside the English were admired by the whole world, the soldiers from French Algeria were faithful to France.

At that time, my thoughts had not yet developed to the stage of dialectical materialism and to an analysis of the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité in the context of capitalism and imperialism. My outlook did not yet include an image of bourgeois and proletarian classes alongside colonized and colonizing nations. Such a development came only as a byproduct of my search for a satisfactory understanding of the Russian communist revolution, which shook the world like a bomb in October 1917. It was only then that the old books on Marx and Engels’ philosophy came alive for me: Het Kapitaal in a translation by Van der Goes, Marxtische [sic] Ekonomie, by Kautsky, and others, as well as the many pamphlets being published on the Russian social revolution of October 1917.⁴⁴

The circle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis had reached its first stage. “Affirmation, Negation, Negation of the Negation” secured a garden of happiness in which to reign. It was an age of passion and tumult. Material conditions stimulated ideas, which moved like a mountain stream—leaping, lying still, flowing and surging through to the ocean.⁴⁵

Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—in the field of philosophy, this process took the following form: Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, and finally Marx and Engels as synthesis. In the field of politics, it took the form of Wilhelm-Hindenburg-Stinnes as affirmation, Danton-Robespierre-Marat as negation, and the Bolsheviks as the negation of the negation.

In the turbulent life I led during those six years in the Netherlands, I experienced for myself the first stage of the immutable process, “reality as the source of all ideas.” The second stage of the process, “ideas being able to transform reality,” was what I felt to be my life’s responsibility, which I had to carry out regardless of the difficulties I might face.

[31] It is true that will, skills, and the emotions develop under good physical conditions: Mens sana in corpore sano.⁴⁶ But it does not work the other way: that one’s spirit is destroyed by a deterioration in health. Frequently illness is not even felt if the will to struggle provides a clear and firm understanding, with a great hope of victory. The new society, though still an unrealized desire, has a spirit which seems not to recognize the obstacles of bodily or societal sickness. It is as if the struggle becomes the soul of life and the life of the soul.

Doctor Jansen, who was treating my pleurisy, was already fairly old. He was friendly and used to mixing with the common people. But pleurisy is extremely difficult to cure. Because of insufficient medical examinations, inadequate equipment, and cheap medicine, the water around my lungs would not dry up. After my teacher’s examinations, my temperature remained high.

I do not know what Horensma managed to do, but while I was still sick, sometime in 1916 or 1917, I was unexpectedly approached by a representative of a Netherlands scholarship fund under the patronage of former governor general Van Heutsz.⁴⁷ This fund gave loans to Indonesian students at an interest rate of 5 percent. The manager of this fund, Tuan Fabius, got in touch with me directly; he was a prominent person in Holland, a former major general in the artillery section of the Amsterdam Defense Force and a writer of books well known for their outspokenness.⁴⁸ His political views were strong too, like those of his friend, former governor general Van Heutsz, who was well enough known for the destructive attacks on the people of Aceh.

I moved to a new place in Bussum, a small town with many large villas. The house I lived in was average in size for a middle-class teacher’s family.⁴⁹ The air was always fresh, the sunshine freely entered the veranda, the food was full of vitamins and well cooked, with no lack of vegetables and fruit. With such a climate and food, I recovered half of my strength. And electrical treatments by a well-known doctor, Clinge Doorenbos, dried up the water around my lungs in one or two months and brought my health back to more or less what it had been when I was in Indonesia.⁵⁰

[32] Such fine food, drink, and accommodation as I had in Bussum could have lulled me to sleep and tied me body and soul to the bourgeois world. Fortunately, my thoughts were already in a process of change that was close to becoming revolutionary. My experience in Haarlem in the home of an unfortunate proletarian family was enough to remind me of the huge distance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat even in a leading imperialist and capitalist country such as the Netherlands. I was still in the bourgeois town of Bussum in 1917 when the Bolshevik revolution broke out. It gave certainty to my spirit, which was still caught up in the struggle between thesis and antithesis, that society was moving toward the era of socialism. For a while, socialism may perhaps be beaten back here or there, but in the world as a whole, society must go beyond capitalism and move toward socialism. With recovered health and with a clear political understanding and world view, I faced up to bourgeois life.

One day I heard that Van der Mey had gone to visit Tuan Fabius to ask that I move back to Haarlem, to his mother’s house. Money was not the only reason, for she already had a temporary lodger; Nyonya van der Mey, that simple, honest woman—of whom there are so many in the Netherlands—was lonely after the death of the elder Van der Mey, and she thought of “Ipie” as her own child. The younger Van der Mey reminded Tuan Fabius of the promise made before I went to Bussum, that I would be brought back to Haarlem as soon as I was well again. I don’t know Tuan Fabius’ precise answer, but the request was rejected. There was no point in trying to guess the reason for this rejection, since I was bound by my debt to this new fund to comply with his decisions.

Tuan Been, a publisher of children’s magazines, acted as a go-between to convey my wishes to Tuan Fabius.⁵¹ I did not try to conceal what I wanted to do: “I want to go home. I will work anywhere to repay my remaining debts. Afterwards I will return to Europe to study at my own expense what fits in with my own desires.”

Tuan Fabius’ answer gave my request short shrift. “You can’t. Because of the war there are no places on board ship.”

[33] I was forced to wait until the end of the war, whenever that would be. But I no longer had the will to continue my studies to become a head teacher in the Netherlands.⁵² If in Dutch eyes I had Europeanized myself enough, I could have attained the same level as the Dutch head teachers. (Although I would naturally remain a European inlander.) Then I would have had the right to teach Dutch children. Further, as a European inlander, I could have Europeanized all the inlanders’ children. But I was not prepared to do this.

Of course, I continued to see the work of educating the children of Indonesia as a noble and important task, as I still do today. As to the direction of this education—the principles to be used and the means to be employed—I was clear enough in my mind about this even then. The only difficulty was that in terms of directions, principles, and method my ideas were in direct conflict with those followed by the colonial Dutch. For me, it was clear that Dutch should not be the medium of instruction and that Dutch culture should not be the direction of our education.

My conflict with this new circle of people in Bussum was really too involved for me to go into here in any detail. I didn’t feel much sympathy with the landlady, Nyonya K, who in my eyes was using the mask of religion solely to gain status in the church and parish. Nyonya K was a fanatical Mennonite. If her fanaticism had been limited to carrying out the tenets of her faith it would not have interfered much with other people’s feelings, but Nyonya K was also convinced that other Christian sects, let alone Islam, were beyond the pale. On her return from church each Sunday, and even during lunch, Nyonya K would discuss the sermon she had heard, in spite of the fact that her listeners were not Mennonites. Even this would not have been too much if it had been discussed in a matter-of-fact way, but Nyonya K saw red when she came home from church. What really upset her were discussions concerning the parish in general and specifically the elections for the parish leadership. Nyonya K had been defeated by another member of the parish in the elections that year. According to Nyonya K, the election was run dishonestly, because she herself really should have won. The conflicts within the Mennonite community in Bussum were very funny. They probably did not have any more than thirty members and “honesty” was Nyonya K’s own slogan.

[34] Fortunately, the landlord agreed with whatever his wife said, and was usually silent and patient. But there was one thing that could arouse Tuan K from his placidity, and that was the topic of socialism in general and the question of authority in schools specifically. Tuan K was a socialist and a schoolteacher. He was fiercely anti-leadership and opposed to having head teachers. For Tuan K and his like-minded friends, head teachers were dispensable creatures. He felt that the teachers could organize the school together in the manner of gotong-royong without being watched over by a pedantic head teacher who did not take any classes and just wandered around twiddling his thumbs.⁵³ What I really did not understand was that whenever he began to sound off about the system of head teachers, there was always some pretext for his wife to go to the kitchen or upstairs. It was as if there was an agreement between the two: if she complained about the parish leadership he would just say yes, while if he ranted about head teachers, she would leave the room.

But they did not use this tactic with me. The clash occurred when the Sarekat Islam and Budi Utomo came to the Netherlands in connection with the question of the Indië Weerbaar.⁵⁴ This matter penetrated as far as Bussum and the circles of the household. In a conversation after I had come back from an Indië Weerbaar meeting in Den Haag, the landlady brought up the subject, taking the position of a real Dutch colonialist. The conflict exploded.

I moved out and stayed with Tuan D, an exporter who owned a small villa.⁵⁵ He was a German trader, and he was most hospitable, while his wife was a young, patient, and gentle Dutch woman. These people had already taken into their house two Indo students, one Chinese, and another Indonesian, who had run away from the place where I had been previously.⁵⁶ The Indo students were two rather wild brothers who had been moved from Den Haag to Bussum to be in a better, more civilized atmosphere under the supervision of Tuan Fabius. They had not gone very far in school. Even though they were eighteen and nineteen years old and came from a family with a fair amount of money, they had been able to get only their primary school certificate. In Bussum they took night courses in bookkeeping. They progressed with great difficulty, for their intelligence was low and their disobedience rose to great heights. They were moved from Den Haag because they had thrown their landlady down from the attic.

When things were hopping—if there was a young man, or, even more so, a young woman about—the older brother (O. S.) became even more mischievous than usual. On the second night I was there, O. S. suddenly grabbed me by the neck from behind. “This is the crab silat, Iep,” he said.⁵⁷ He was not just playing, either. I felt my neck pulled back and it was difficult for me to breathe. Luckily I knew a little about this crab attack, and it was not I who got caught in it! Fortunately there was a glass of water on the table nearby for me to give first aid to the unfortunate fellow, and O. S. came to quickly. After that he was very nice to me. People like him seem to respect only brute strength. Despite his respect for me, his cruelty to others, especially those he considered weak, became even worse.

[35] I also tangled with his brother (H. S.), not because he was aggressive, cruel, or gave me an ultimatum, but because he insulted the landlady. While I was reading I could hear him imposing his ideas on her and insulting her. “You are stupid. You are an idiot.” I warned him twice, and the third time the words he used were different, but even less appropriate in front of a woman who had never used coarse or arrogant language. I am not sure how it happened, but I sprang up and he fell with a thud against the wall. After that, behind my back he called me “the tiger.”

The Chinese student was diligent, quiet, and clever. In the beginning we were quite close, then later on fell out. However, because he had a nervous sickness and for a long time could not sleep or study, I felt very sorry for him, and we became good friends again. The Indonesian was always in the hospital, which of course made us very sad, until finally his illness forced him to return to Indonesia.

That was the situation in my immediate environment. The Russian revolution had been going on for nearly a year. My convictions became even more certain. But I had to wait until the end of the war to return to Indonesia. Desires thwarted in one direction will break out in another: a burgeoning awareness, particularly in the breast of a youth, cannot easily be kept behind a fence of teeth. It soon shows, even in day-to-day conversations. When Nyonya R, the wife of a friend of mine, met me in Den Haag, she greeted me with the words, “Hello, Mr. Bolshevik.” It was then that I became conscious of the change that had taken place within me.

One day, Suwardi Surjaningrat, whom we now know as Ki Hadjar Dewantara, suggested out of the blue that I represent his party [the Indische Partij] in the Netherlands because he was going to leave for Indonesia. It was already clear enough to me where the different parties—nationalist, socialist, and Bolshevik—stood, but to act in and represent a party that had once been very revolutionary was a different matter. The Indische Vereeniging, with its R. M. Noto Soeroto, had not prepared me theoretically, let alone provided real experience.⁵⁸ I looked into the face of Dewantara, without knowing how I should answer. He smiled. Then I looked into the face of the late Doctor Gunawan Mangunkusumo. He also smiled and said, “It’s fitting, just accept it.” Not long afterwards, I represented the Indische Vereeniging at the congress of Indonesian youth and students of Indology at Deventer. I was chosen to give the report on the nationalist movement in Indonesia.⁵⁹

[36] It was as though a stone had been thrown into a chicken coop. “We can’t allow this now, can we?” When I came back to Bussum several Dutch colonialists, and particularly Tuan Fabius, engaged me in debate.

I must have been called to Tuan Fabius’ house five or six nights in a row. The discussion, or more precisely the debate, ranged over the problems of every branch of Dutch society, which was in turmoil at that time. Even though it was not actually in the war, the Netherlands did not escape the force of the hurricane in Western Europe. We covered political and social questions, but it was the educational one that we were constantly discussing. This concern touched me both directly and indirectly.

Naturally enough, I agreed with the view that education from primary school to high school should not only be under the guidance and control of the state but also that for capable students it should be paid for by the state. It wasn’t hard to understand Tuan Fabius’ objections, which were, in fact, tied to his bourgeois class interest in general and specifically to the interests of his nation against the Indonesian nation. According to him, such policies would only increase intellectual quantity while reducing quality. Even now, he said, there is considerable unemployment among intellectuals even while university education is limited to children of the well-to-do.

I maintained that in a society where production and education were carried out according to a plan, there would not be unemployment, and if there were, it could not possibly be for long, because education would be synchronized with the production needs of society. It would not be as now, tossed about by supply and demand in the capitalist market, where production is carried out anarchically. Intellect would certainly not decline if continuing an education to the university level no longer depended on the contents of one’s father’s pocket but, instead, solely on one’s ability, as determined by the state education board. Today, many intelligent and worthwhile people are hindered and even overcome by their lack of money. On the other hand, many of those with degrees actually have no right to hold them.

This conversation naturally touched on my expressed desire to study in the officers’ school in Breda.⁶⁰ Tuan Fabius said that I could not go there because I knew no French, German, and English. I replied that I was willing to go to Kampen, where even primary school graduates were accepted.⁶¹ But this too was forbidden.

[37] On the road home at night, I once again began to ponder my situation. The first time I had done this, I had rebelled furiously against everything, including myself; but with increasing knowledge and experience, I was able to wait patiently and view my situation philosophically: I was a student from a colonized country, a member of a family that had known only religion and adat kuno and that, although fairly wealthy, lived in a primitive economy and could not trade its possessions; I had received the rudiments of my native education, but this was not followed up in my homeland; I was not fortunate enough to be in America in the prosperous era when poor students could work their way through night school; and, finally, I was not able to return to Indonesia because the war was still going on.⁶² All this I saw clearly in my mind. But even more distinctly I saw my debt of Rp 1,500 to the Engkufonds in Indonesia and Rp 4,000 to the fund in the Netherlands supervised by Tuan Fabius.⁶³

Apparently Tuan Fabius felt his responsibility to the Netherlands fund for my debt even more sharply than I did. The next morning he came to my place to continue the discussion. I was in the attic, at the bedside of Nyonya D, who was unwell. A member of the household told me that Tuan Fabius wanted to speak to me. Nyonya D, who apparently understood the situation quite well, advised me to act cautiously. As usual the two brothers, H. S. and O. S., scurried away on hearing Tuan Fabius’ voice, which indeed thundered terrifyingly.

The discussion bored me somewhat, because it only repeated what had been said before. But after we touched on the question of “debts” and “gratitude” and Tuan Fabius suggested that I go back to Indonesia, I objected. “How is it that at the beginning of the war after my exams, when I wanted to go home, I was held back because you said there was no room on the boats, and now, when the submarines are wreaking even more havoc, you can get me a berth?”

[38] I said that I objected to continuing to borrow from the fund that he supervised, since this was not the first time that the question of “gratitude” had been raised, even though indirectly, by Tuan Fabius himself and by other Dutch people. The discussion stopped short. Apparently neither he nor the landlord had imagined that I would answer in such a way.

That night Tuan and Nyonya D called me to their room in the attic. Tuan D said to me, “In the discussion today you were a bit harsh, but we understand. We have decided to let you stay on with us as our own child until you can go back. But we cannot give you pocket money because my business is going very badly.”

I could get more than just pocket money by teaching Indonesian to Dutch people who wanted to go to Indonesia. Tuan and Nyonya D at that time got along well, and the peaceful household was a good and healthy atmosphere for me for the short time before I left for Indonesia. But the world changed a lot in the two years after I left them. The harmony between many husbands and wives turned into estrangement during the economic crisis after the First World War. When I came back to the Netherlands on May 1, 1922, after being exiled from Indonesia, I found that Tuan and Nyonya D had parted and were now divorced.⁶⁴ There was no chance of their being reunited. Nyonya D, whose ideals regarding the marital relationship were very high, was shattered by the goings-on of her husband, which she considered a betrayal of the relationship that should exist solely between husband and wife. She had no security, not even financial. I was happy for the opportunity to repay her good will, but after I left again I heard from my friends in the Netherlands that she was in pitiful circumstances. However, I later heard that the former Nyonya D was working on a ship that sailed to America. This news made me a little happier. “She did not want to sit around waiting for assistance from men . . . simply accepting all these goings-on of her husband [but she rolled up her sleeves and took on all kinds of jobs] in order to reject what she felt to be a violation of ideals and disrespect for women.”⁶⁵

I think I know myself well enough to say that I am not a person who easily violates the rules of respect and behavior towards older people, particularly one as polite as Tuan Fabius, who was willing to give assistance according to the terms of his own morality. On the other hand, I felt that Tuan Fabius’ pressures had shown a lack of respect for me, especially considering that my connection with the scholarship fund had been implemented with no prior knowledge, let alone consent, on my part.⁶⁶

[39] Apparently, Tuan Fabius was unable to let the matter drop and to wait until I was in a situation where I could repay the debts as I had promised. He wrote to my teacher, Horensma, in Indonesia, telling the story. I do not know what he said, but one night I was visited by one of Horensma’s brothers-in-law who came to tell me that Horensma had answered Tuan Fabius’ letter with great anger. In his letter he said that he had known his former pupil long enough to believe firmly in his honesty, but together with this letter he was sending 4,000 guilders to repay with interest the money owed the scholarship fund represented by Tuan Fabius.⁶⁷

Now I felt even more bound by these material and moral debts. I owed money to the Engku of my own kampung and to my former teacher—an amount totalling some 6,000 guilders. Furthermore, I got a letter from my mother and father reminding me of my promise before I left that I would come home quickly and would be away for only two or three years.

Although the war had ended, it was still hard to get a berth on a ship. However, because I had secured a job in Senembah Mij., one of the largest estates in Deli, the problem of securing and paying for passage on a ship was no longer mine to solve.⁶⁸ I was to be an assistant supervisor for all the schools for coolie children of Senembah Mij. The task was to devise a system appropriate for these children, and I was to work with a Dutch teacher who had studied Indonesian under me in Amsterdam. I received an initial “equipment allowance” of 1,500 guilders and was promised a wage of 350 guilders a month together with free accommodation, water, electricity, and transport. Also, on the ship I was to teach Indonesian to several people, including the director of Senembah Mij. himself, Dr. Janssen, together with two of his relatives.⁶⁹

This was a satisfying resolution of my difficulties, both physical and emotional. From the point of view of finances, during the journey to Indonesia alone I would earn almost enough money to settle my debt with the Engkufonds. And from the point of view of ideology and my life’s interest, I would have the opportunity to study the part of Indonesia known as “Deli het goudland” (“Deli the land of gold”) and to mix with the very poorest and most oppressed Indonesians, known as “contract coolies.”

[40] While I was reliving my six years in the Netherlands, our ship was leaving that country far behind. I have deliberately selected only a few episodes to illustrate the origin and outline of the philosophy that I developed and with which I faced a future full of difficulties. Even so, what I have written for this section has exceeded what I had planned, so I am forced now to summarize my impressions of the parts of the globe that I was now visiting. We had already entered the gateway to the Mediterranean, Gibraltar (Jabal Tank). We were sailing toward the Suez Canal, Mount Sinai, and the Red Sea.

Many books—boxes and even warehouses of them—have been written about the history of the few nations around the Mediterranean: Egypt, Phoenicia, Judea, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Rome, Arabia, Spain, Italy, and France. It is from around the Mediterranean that we inherit our most important cultural elements. We respect this inheritance and use it in building the endless ladder of progress in technology, science, and ethics. It took nearly ten thousand years for us to advance from the use of human and animal energy harnessed by the Pharaohs for building the pyramids, to electricity and the atom bomb. And most of this progress took place around the Mediterranean.

Although progress in science and technology has gone apace with the years, this has not been the case with morality as disseminated by the three world religions that were born around the Mediterranean: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even if we have not actually suffered a decline in morality, which forbids killing and stealing but commands such things as love for one’s fellow human beings, we can’t say that we have advanced. Witness the unchecked oppression and cruelty of capitalism and imperialism—class against class, nation against nation—and the outbreaks of world wars, which directly or indirectly have caused an incalculable waste of human souls and human possessions through mass looting, raping, and killing.

[41] In any case, it is the Mediterranean Sea that has been the cradle of most of technology, science, and morality. Also around the Mediterranean Sea the less irrational and more comprehensible wars among the nations have occurred: the travels of Alexander the Great to the Ganges in India, the battles of Julius Caesar right up to England and Germany, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the wars of Islam under Arab and Turkish leadership, and the victories of Napoleon at the time of the French Revolution.

But it is through different-colored glasses that I now look at the wars of days gone by. When I began to read with great pleasure histories of the world, they opened new vistas to me, and my attention was held by the strategies and victories of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and Genghis Khan. But my interest in Napoleon’s glorious ideals and the force of his personality was limited by the question, for what purpose and for which class were all these wars and killings carried out?

Such questions are generally not even posed, let alone answered, by most bourgeois historians, who focus their attention on individuals. And when they do advance reasons, they are only superficial ones. The reasons for the reasons, the deeper causes, are never analyzed in the history books that are used in a systematic and consistent fashion in bourgeois schools today.

What I mean by the purpose of the wars is the aims that arise from the needs of production, owned or controlled by a particular class in a state and operated in the interest of that class. In the twentieth century, we know that the Germans became aggressive because of their need for raw materials and markets for the bourgeois-feudal class in Germany. Similarly, wars in the future will arise from the need for markets and the desire to buy and sell raw materials and products or to increase the capital of the capitalist class. Diplomats practice diplomacy, and politicians lead and devise the “isms” for which soldiers fight: all this is done to defend class interests.

For those willing to understand, it is clear, for example, that Egypt or Syria attacked neighboring states with the intent of looting their human power. The inhabitants of the conquered states became slaves. Those considered likely to fight back were killed, together with the women and children.

[42] However, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, or Abderrahman no longer acted in this fashion.⁷⁰ They were considered enlightened despots and ksatria.⁷¹ Certainly there were other, deeper reasons than noble emotions involved. These reasons must be sought in the needs of production, which had changed in character because of changes in technology and the corresponding changes in the class structure of society. For example, increases in the production of a state may require it to have neighbors who are sufficiently prosperous to buy the products; i.e., it needs markets. Conquered neighboring states that are immediately emptied by the sword do not provide the market that such a victor nation seeks. It is enough now if the conquered nation is ruled and supervised and even better if it can be made a relatively prosperous province able to keep buying the products of the oppressor nation.

Such was the situation in Greece at the time of Alexander, and in Spain at the time of Abderrahman. But history written by the bourgeoisie cannot look in the direction of changes in production. It concentrates on wars from the point of view of individuals—in particular, the will, ability, and intelligence of the individual. For the bourgeoisie, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon are the crucial factors. For us what is crucial in the final analysis, besides the state, is which class has control of production in a society. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon are only instruments of a class in society, even though they may be intelligent, brave, able, and exalted by their class.

Among the city-states of Greece, we know Sparta as an example of a state based on autocracy and aristocracy. We shall take Sparta as the thesis and the city-state of Athens, based on democracy, as the antithesis. Even though these city-states were formed from the same nation, they were for many years in a state of conflict, enmity, and war. It was during this period of continual conflict that the Macedonian empire arose under the leadership of King Philip, an aristocrat. But his son, Alexander, was educated by the greatest philosopher of the Greek era, Aristotle of Athens. Alexander united Sparta and Athens, aristocracy and democracy in one kingdom, forming the synthesis. Alexander the Great had the desire to unite East and West, an even more advanced synthesis. However, this attempt at a national and cultural fusion of East and West had only begun when he died at a young age.

Caesar was faced by two conflicts. Internally, conflict and great enmity raged between the patricians (aristocrats) and the plebeians (the poor) of the Roman republic. Externally, there was conflict between the Romans and the foreign barbarians.

[43] Alexander first settled the conflicts within Greece, and only then went abroad to settle those with foreign nations. Caesar acted in reverse. First he dealt with the foreigners around the Roman republic from the Mediterranean up to England and Germany; only then did he come home with his experienced forces, cross the Rubicon, and proceed to settle the conflict within the republic of Rome itself. He came from the aristocratic class (thesis); he adopted the philosophy of democracy and led the plebeians (antithesis). Finally, he destroyed his enemies, the aristocratic parties of Sulla and Pompey, with the aim of establishing his empire, which took the form of the synthesis.⁷² Caesar was killed by his enemies when he was on the point of becoming emperor, but even though he was physically destroyed, his spirit lived on in the synthesis of the Roman Empire.

Like Caesar, Napoleon first settled the conflicts of France with its neighbors. Only after securing power and popularity by virtue of his victories did he come back to deal with the internal conflicts between the Jacobin-proletariat alliance on the left and the bourgeois-aristocracy on the right. It was by destroying these two opponents that Napoleon, who in his youth had been a Jacobin, was finally able to establish the Napoleonic empire as the synthesis.

But it is not always easy to achieve a synthesis, nor does it, once gained through struggle, have eternal life. Normally the synthesis, once achieved, eventually becomes the thesis that gives rise to another antithesis and so the process continues.

With the destruction of the city-republic of Thebes, Alexander completed the subjugation of his entire nation. The empire he established by the sword naturally gave rise to rebellions and other attempts by nations to free themselves from this enforced synthesis. Caesar and Napoleon waded through oceans of blood to establish their empires, both of which were brought to an end by the rebellions of the oppressed nations within them.

Hannibal was such a statesman as is rarely born in a century, and it can be said that as a commander he has never been bettered and seldom equalled. He was a commander with a will of steel and a brilliant mind; he was always in the vanguard when attacking and in the rear when retreating. He could withstand extreme heat and cold, he lived as a soldier, and he was loved, praised, and idolized by his army as well as being supported by a wealthy state. But despite all this he was defeated by his enemies, the Roman commanders, his inferiors in every way.

[44] Bourgeois historians do not sufficiently analyze the situation in Carthage with regard to production, food, trade, etc., compared with that in the city of Rome which was long besieged by Hannibal. We do know that at the end of the war the Roman ships were stronger than those of Carthage and that Roman society at that time was almost one of equality, while the wealthy state of Carthage had a far less developed society.

All the world, friend or foe, acknowledged the glory of the Islamic empire in Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Granada, Seville, and Cordoba were the center of the Western world’s attention at that time, just as London, Paris, and Berlin are today. The great thinkers—such as Ibn Rasjid, known in Europe by the name Averroes, who was comparable to Aristotle in Greek times—were magnets attracting the attention of philosophers and students of Western Europe. In agriculture, irrigation, and manufacture, this empire had no equal. Historians write of it as an isolated event and do not deal with its entirety, explaining its rise and fall. In describing the wars and the defeat of the Islamic empire by Christianity, historians should compare the two sides with regard to forces of production, society, and politics. They should ask such questions as whether Islamic society was static and frozen (and, if so, why) and whether Islamic society was split in two by a huge gap that gave rise to contradictions and even conflict between two groups, the rich and the poor. These questions are not even asked, let alone answered, by bourgeois historians. They pay too much attention to military policies and to a few individual leaders. Or they treat the culture without an accompanying analysis of its moving force: the system of production and the social and political systems.

What we need is a complete rewriting of the history of Greece, Rome, Arabia, and other great nations. We must have a history of society, of classes and their leaders in politics, military development, and culture, backed up with technological, sociological, and cultural data.

[45] The Sakutra Ocean: even big steam ships are tossed about by its waves!⁷³ Our ancestors, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca to fulfill the obligations of their religion, still remember the dangers of this ocean. Their small sailing boats plunged through waves as high as mountains as they struggled in their need to visit the holy land. Who knows whether it was trade or the desire to travel that attracted our earliest ancestors here in tiny boats thrown about by the waves like grains of rice in boiling water . . . to the south . . . to Madagascar.⁷⁴

India . . . caste . . . conflict between Hinduism and Islam. Just think of the Hindu temples: they are covered with sculpture inside and out, on the walls and around the roof. Symbols of the variety of human emotions, the sculptures represent courage, satisfaction, truth, sadness, and admiration, and there are even sculptures of people stabbing themselves. In general they are pessimistic, hopeless, and confused, representing the dissension and the divisions between and among more than three thousand castes. Listen to the modern Hindu songs: they seem sweet only to the singers themselves; as for me they have always seemed only to shout of arrogance, saying there is no caste higher than the Waisya caste, which is higher even than the Himalayan mountains. The Waisya was a trading caste, which has now become capitalist-bourgeois. The songs of the Hindu sailors and workers are simpler, more in accord with their oppressed spirit. The scourge of caste in India will not be eradicated by laws alone, but will vanish only when those laws are accompanied by changes in the economic, political, and social systems, and only when the hundred million untouchables and members of the Sudra and Pariah castes arise under the leadership of the workers and peasants and revolutionary intellectuals. And if the bourgeois, priestly, and aristocratic castes of India resist openly or covertly, then the Indian revolution will make the French and Russian revolutions look like child’s play.

Finally, Sabang, Indonesia.⁷⁵ On the coast, from a mountain top one can admire the sinking sun, its beautiful colors changing every minute. Go and witness it for yourself! The journey now comes to an end. The Indian Ocean has been crossed, from the African-Arabian coast to the coast of Sumatra. This was the ocean that the ancestors of today’s Indonesian nation sang about in the dim past.

[46] A nation of wanderers: this is only half accurate.⁷⁶ Nature gradually changed the region of the original Indonesian inhabitants into a fallow and desert place, forcing them always to wander. The spirit of endurance became characteristic, displayed from west of the Indian Ocean to Central America on the east of the Pacific Ocean.⁷⁷

This wandering spirit was also encouraged by the structure of society over two thousand years ago. From the remnants of the social system in the Minangkabau matriarchy and in the Batak patriarchy, which also used to exist in Java, we can still see how the youths of each village were organized into fighting forces. They lived in houses specially set aside for youths, where they were educated in things spiritual (adat and religion) and physical (silat and pencak).⁷⁸

Guided by the moon and stars, sailing in their tiny boats, they were protected by their wits, and their spirit of community and gotong-royong in both good times (hati gadjah sama dilapah, hati tungau sama ditjatjah) and bad (telantang sama minum air, terlungkup sama makan tanah).⁷⁹ And even the ocean became only a lake in their eyes.