Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (3 page)

Commerce shaped the archipelago’s religion, as well as its language. From the seventh century, scholars travelling with Indian merchants began to spread the Hindu and Buddhist religions to the southern Sumatran kingdom of Sriwijaya, which went on to become the region’s first indigenous empire. The rulers of Sriwijaya grew rich enough on trade to build up armies and conquer neighbouring islands, spreading their religions across the water to Java (and recruiting vassal states as far away as southern Thailand and Cambodia). The plains and hills of central Java began to sprout glorious temples. Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world, was built in the ninth century. A rival dynasty answered with the breathtaking Prambanan complex, at which Hindus worshipped.

The next wave of traders were Muslims from South Asia, southern China and the Middle East. Because a shared religion greased the wheels of commerce – men could eat and pray together – the traders of the islands were among the first to adopt Islam. Over time, Javanese princes abandoned their Sanskrit names and began to take the title of Sultan. By the start of the sixteenth century, virtually all of Java’s rulers had converted; only Bali, directly to the east of Java, kept its Hindu courts and its caste system.

The people of the archipelago’s various fiefdoms did not think of themselves as part of any larger whole. The constant to-ing and fro-ing of merchants did, however, create an easy openness and acceptance of difference among ordinary people that persists to this day. It translates into an almost voluptuous hospitality, and makes these islands a deeply seductive place to explore.

But the openness had a downside. It left Indonesia vulnerable to a European onslaught that changed the way that business was done.

When Constantinople fell to the Turks in the mid-fifteenth century, Christian businessmen could no longer easily buy from Muslim traders. By that time, spices were an essential ingredient in the larders of rich Europeans – spices preserved meat in an age before refrigeration, and they masked the taste when the flesh rotted. If Europeans wanted to maintain the supply of pepper, cloves and nutmeg, they would have to go directly to the islands where the spices were grown. That became possible in 1497, when the Portuguese adventurer Vasco da Gama sailed around the bottom of Africa and ‘discovered’ the sea route to the East. The Portuguese quickly found their way to Maluku, home to the most precious spices. They made first for Ternate, a volcano island cloaked in cloves. On its frilled skirt, a buzzing town now boasts relics of that time: two Portuguese forts and the Sultan’s palace. These days, the bigger of the forts is part barracks, part government offices. Army wives drape laundry to dry over old cannons, while SUVs with the red number plates of officialdom ferry uniformed civil servants through a triumphal arch to their dilapidated offices. The Sultan’s palace now sits not terribly palatially on a hump of land above the town football pitch, a jumped-up country cottage.

The palace used to be grander. The British sea captain Francis Drake described the Sultan of Ternate’s court when he visited in 1579. Drake blew in to Ternate as one of his last stops on a voyage around the globe. Though this licensed pirate was no stranger to riches, he was duly impressed by the Sultan (the ‘king’) who, Drake said, was draped in gold cloth from the waist down. He wore red slippers, a huge gold chain, and rings on six fingers: two of diamond, two of turquoise, a ruby and an emerald.

As thus he sate in his chaire of state, at his right side there stood a page with a very costly fanne (richly embroidered and beset with Sapphires) breathing and gathering the aire to refresh the king, the place being very hot.
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Even in Drake’s day, the Sultan’s chaire of state was no longer the comfortable place it had once been. Portuguese cannons had blown holes in the principle of free trade. They didn’t want
some
of the spices, they wanted
all
of the spices. For them, trade was a zero sum game, though not, it turned out, one they were very good at.

According to Drake, ‘The Portugals . . . seeking to settle a tyrannous government over this people . . . cruelly murthered the king himselfe.’ Their plans backfired; the people of Ternate revolted and kicked the Portuguese out. Then other Europeans – Spaniards, British and Dutch – sailed in. As they competed to buy spices in Maluku and sell them in Europe, prices in Maluku rose and profits in Europe fell. The backers of these expensive expeditions were displeased. In 1602 the merchants of the Dutch republic decided to do something about it. They banded together to form the Dutch East India Company, the VOC.

The VOC was the world’s first joint stock company, with 1,800 initial investors. The hype around the company’s formation also gave rise to the world’s first stock exchange; early investors were selling off their stake in the company at a premium before the first ship had even sailed. The company’s directors, the ‘Gentlemen 17’, were under huge pressure to deliver value to their shareholders. The first step towards greater profits was to corner the market for spices, eliminating competition from other Europeans. Their strategies were bribery, co-option and brute force.

In the seventeenth century as now, many families in northern Maluku would spend harvest season knocking clusters of pink buds off their clove trees. Children spread the buds on flat, round trays woven out of palm leaves, and adults hiked them up onto the nipa-palm roof of the cottage to dry. After a few days being toasted by the sun and caressed by the breeze, the buds shrivel and blacken into the round-topped nails that we toss into mulled wine. If you are sailing downwind from one of the smaller islands of Maluku in the July clove-drying season, you can sometimes smell Christmas before you can even see land.

The VOC wanted to buy up every single clove, but they couldn’t – almost every family in the northern Maluku islands owned trees, and they would rather sell them to Muslim traders than to these hairy white infidels. Then the Gentlemen 17 hit upon the idea of destroying the clove trees in all but one island, Ambon. They paid the local sultans handsomely to achieve this, beginning a tradition of bribing and co-opting local leaders that was to last for over three centuries.

The market for nutmeg should have been easier to corner, because at the time, it only grew in one place on earth: the tiny, isolated Banda islands which rise out of one of the deepest seas on the planet, barely visible on most maps. There, the Hollanders’ co-option strategy failed. The islands have a strong tradition of village-level democracy and the Dutch found no sultan, no king, no central power to bribe or threaten. The people of Banda signed treaties with the Dutch, then sold nutmeg to the British. When VOC troops arrived to build a fort on the islands in 1609, the people of Banda ambushed them, murdering a Dutch admiral and thirty-three of his men. Twelve years later, the Dutch responded with brute force on an unprecedented scale.

Wandering around Banda on New Year’s Day, 2012, I found the ghost of the VOC floating all around. The aisle of the church is paved with the gravestones of governors installed by the company. In a sandy side road of town, I came across an abandoned orchard behind a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates fashioned into the company logo. The insignia is carved into paving stones and walls, it is stamped on cannons, it graces the archways of several of the forts that dot these islands. The most imposing of these, Fort Belgica, glowers over the harbour as a warning to incoming ships: Don’t mess with the Dutch. Walking around Banda Neira, one could be forgiven for thinking that the VOC was more a military than a commercial enterprise. It is a feeling reinforced by a painting which hangs in the museum in Banda Neira. In the centre is a fleshy Samurai mercenary, naked but for a loincloth, his legs a Jackson Pollock splatter of blood. He stands in a minefield of body parts; under one foot, an eyeball pops out of a severed head. Gut-snakes writhe their way out of chest cavities, disembodied hands reach from crimson pools. In the background, a naked baby climbs into the lap of his wailing mother. Dressed in historically unlikely Islamic clothing, she begs for mercy as the stone-faced Samurai prepares to bring his sword down on another Bandanese hero. A Dutchman waves his rifle, encouraging the mercenary. Another Dutch soldier kicks a prisoner. In the middle distance, the heads of five elders of Banda look down sightless from the lances on which they are impaled. Far beyond, in the bay, the warships of the VOC fly the Dutch flag.

The painting is almost exultant in its brutality. But the events it summarizes were brutal, too. The massacre of 1621 was led by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the ambitious new Governor-General of the VOC, who had, as a young trader, witnessed the ambush and murder of his boss by the rulers of Banda twelve years earlier. He responded with genocide. His men killed anyone that they didn’t think would make a good slave, then exported the rest, reducing the islands’ population of 15,000 to a few hundred souls. The Gentlemen 17 told Coen off for his excessive use of force. They also paid him a bonus of 3,000 guilders.

The monopolies on cloves and nutmeg contributed disproportionately to the income of the VOC for many decades, but the cost of enforcing the monopolies was also high. The company got sucked into a series of expensive wars between squabbling Javanese princes, and was distracted, too, from its profitable trade with China. The VOC began to lose money; in 1798 it toppled into bankruptcy. By then, just four years short of its 200th anniversary, it employed 50,000 people and had a fleet of close to 150 trading ships and dozens of warships. The VOC was deemed Too Big To Fail; the Dutch crown took over the company’s ‘possessions’ and its debts. It was to rule the colony of the Netherlands East Indies until the Japanese invaded 150 years later.

It was unclear, though, what exactly constituted the Netherlands East Indies. When the VOC crumbled, it had more or less stamped its authority on Java and the spice-producing islands of Maluku, it controlled the buzzing port of Makassar in Sulawesi and it had an outpost or two in Sumatra. Over the following century and a half, the Dutch crown spread its tentacles across a much wider area, but only gradually. Like the VOC before them, the Dutch colonists were more interested in profit than people; they were driven always by the wealth of the land. They cut down jungles in Sumatra to plant rubber and cocoa, they cleared scrub in Java, Sulawesi and other islands for coffee, tea, sugar and tobacco. They opened the earth to dig out tin and gold, they sank wells for oil. If an island or a region could produce nothing of interest to Dutch businessmen, the colonizers allowed local princelings to carry on setting the rules until well into the 1880s.

Travelling in Indonesia, whether you are local or foreign, you’ll hear one question before any other: ‘
Dari mana?
’ ‘Where are you from?’ It’s perhaps natural in this nation of traders, a way of calibrating what this stranger has to offer, what they might buy from you, how they are likely to behave. But it also provides an interesting insight into what Indonesians think of other countries. Including their former colonizers.

I used to struggle with the ‘
Dari mana?
’ question. My mother is a Scot who grew up in England, but I didn’t live in the UK until I was fourteen, and was only properly resident for five of the subsequent thirty-five years. My father is the grandson of Italian immigrants to New York. My parents met in an immigration queue when my father was hitchhiking around the world and my mother was hitchhiking around Europe. I was born in a city in the American Midwest whose name I consistently misspell, and grew up in Germany, France and Spain. I’ve actually lived in Indonesia for longer than any other single country in my life. But dozens of times a day, all of this gets boiled down to ‘
Dari Inggris
’ – ‘I’m from England.’

When I first lived in Indonesia and confessed to being ‘
dari Inggris
’, the invariable response was: ‘Wah! Inggris! Lady Di!’ In this age of near-universal access to televised football, it has become: ‘Wah! Inggris! Manchester United!’
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But then, with remarkable frequency, the initial reaction is followed with something else: ‘I wish we’d been colonized by the English, not the Dutch.’