For almost 400 years the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, attracted Europeans in search of escape, quick money, exotic color and easy sex, among other things. These imperial possessions differed from British India or French Indochina in being islands, and besotted and drunken Dutchmen, incapable of returning to a cold, gray Holland, stagger through the pages of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham alike.
The empire had been established in the 16th and 17th centuries on the spice trade, moving on to coffee, and then, with the invention of the internal combustion engine, rubber. To the Dutch it was simply “Yava” (Java), and during the 1860s its governor-general made twice the salary of the president of the US, while its remittances home constituted 34 percent of state revenues. By 1930 the region was producing nearly half the world’s rubber supply, and coffee was worth eight times its equivalent weight of oil.
With the cheapness of servants, the warm climate, the un-Protestant attitude to the erotic and the chance of amassing a substantial fortune in as little as 10 years, it felt like paradise, despite the heavy, languor-inducing humidity. By 1900 more than 200 Westerners were arriving every week. Many foreigners kept a local concubine, popularly depicted in the literature of the day as seducing her European catch by magic, and then poisoning the foreign bride who’d routinely replace her. European males who failed to take advantage of this opportunity (with or without “shrimp poisoning,” or syphilis) tended to hit the bottle, though many ended up embracing both options.
Yet today almost nothing is said in the Netherlands about its colonial past, according to US academic Inez Hollander. On one level it’s become an unexamined cliche that the Dutch were up to no good, and on another the debacle that accompanied their final departure in the 1940s — totally different from the lack of British fatalities in India when engaged in a similar operation during the same period — has been deemed too grisly to reexamine.
Hollander has determined to look at the record more closely. Many of her family had been in Java, and in Silenced Voices she sets out to examine what remains of their testimony, and place it against the background of a wider history.
She focuses on her great grandfather’s brother who ran a remote coffee and rubber plantation where he lived with his wife and three children. When the Japanese invaded in January 1942 many of the Dutch thought they were safer in the East than in German-occupied Holland. How wrong they were to be proved. Of the family studied in this book, only two of the five survived the appalling events that soon began to unfold.
The head of the family was incarcerated first, on suspicion of making preparations for an American invasion. He was interrogated and tortured by the Kempeitai (KPT), Japan’s secret police, one of whose techniques was a form of water-boarding. He died later, and was probably executed. Soon afterwards his wife and children were interned in abysmal conditions. They survived, but two of the children were killed when their transport got caught up in armed violence in Surabaya in 1945.
This final incident marks the most horrifying point in the narrative. Sukarno had declared Indonesian independence days after the Japanese capitulation, but the Dutch government had plans to return, a move agreed to at the Potsdam Conference and supported on the ground by British soldiers (the actor Dirk Bogarde was one of them). Sukarno’s youthful supporters, who he was unable to rein in, took to the streets of Surabaya in October, vowing to rid the city of the British and killing almost at random, though some Indonesians also tried to help their former colonizers. Many Chinese died, together with around 200 occupants of the ambushed trucks containing the author’s relatives.
The British then bombarded the city from the sea, but the Dutch withdrew from the country anyway four years later under American pressure. Conditions were such that few of the planters had returned to their estates.
None of this is taught in modern Dutch schools, says Hollander. Students learn about the Holocaust and Anne Frank, but not about the end of their country’s colonial experience. Situations where events can be presented in black-and-white terms, she says, are easy to teach. Those where blame cannot be so easily attributed, and that might tarnish something essentially worthy (such as Indonesian independence), are by contrast bypassed.
This sane and largely factual book makes no attempt to draw up a moral balance sheet. The privileged lives of the colonizing Dutch, the cruelty of many of the occupying Japanese, the random violence of some young Indonesian freedom fighters — all are displayed, and sources cited. Indeed, the book’s greatest use to future researchers may well be its bibliography and footnotes.
I have some minor quibbles. At one point the author wonders whether dressing young European boys in what look to us like girls’ clothes was normal at the time or the result of her particular family’s paranoia. In fact it was traditional, at least among the middle classes. And, though a Dutch speaker, she never learned Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) and didn’t visit the region when undertaking her research.
Silenced Voices, though modest in its aims, has the virtue of bringing a neglected topic into the limelight, and of allowing private family archives and large-scale public history to throw light on one another. Even more, it succeeds in breaking what is apparently a taboo in the Netherlands itself — a country that, after decades of exceptional enlightenment, has recently exhibited a darker face in matters related to race. You can’t help feeling that the sooner there’s a translation of this illuminating book into Dutch the better.
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