7. Dayak ethnogenesis and conservative politics in Indonesia’s outer islands (Slightly updated from the printed version) Gerry van Klinken1
The Dayaks who played the most important part in [provincial politics in the 1950s] belong to an educated elite, most of whose members reside in Banjarmasin and Sampit…. Most of the Dayak minoritiy in the towns once attended the Mission and Pakat schools around Kuala Kapuas.... The life style of these people is typical of the elite in metropolitian society throughout Indonesia, and in striking contrast with that of Dayaks in hill communities such as Tumbang Gagu. Ngadju Dayaks in Banjarmasin own cars and pianos and patronise local movie-theatres. The fact that the Banjarmasin tennis team consisted entirely of Ngadju Dayaks in 1962 reflected the economic status of this ethnic minority in the town (footnote: because of the exorbitant cost of tennis balls, which are foreign imports, few Indonesians can afford to play tennis). (Miles 1976: 125-6).
This chapter locates the origins of Dayak ethnic awareness in Central Kalimantan within the small Dayak urban middle class that Miles described. This social class segment emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. We gain an impression of it by focussing on the career of the father of Dayak ethnicity in this period, Hausmann Baboe. According to all accounts of democratic transitions, the urban middle class is also the guarantee of civil society. But why were so many urbanites, especially in the regions outside Java, so fascinated with ethnicity during the political crisis that followed the end
1
Gerry van Klinken (
[email protected]) is researching a book on post-New Order ethnic conflict at the
KITLV, Leiden, Netherlands. Special thanks to Rev. Marko Mahin for interviews in Banjarmasin and Palangkaraya, and for introducing me to Hausmann Baboe’s Jakarta-based family association at a meeting in Banjarmasin on 26 January 2004 .
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1030241
of the New Order in 1998? The uncivil society of recent town life in the provinces provides a good reason to look again at our own basic conceptual toolkit, including the idea of civil society. The book of which this chapter is a part aims to do precisely that. This chapter therefore adopts a twofold strategy. First and most important, historical: to examine the emergence of an urban middle class segment in one outer island region that regarded itself as an ethnic minority and often employed ethnicity in its self-description. Second, analytical: a (too) brief discussion of how this might lead us to rethink civil society and democracy in the towns beyond Java today. Questions about the existence of an ethnic group are by now mainstream social science (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Roosens 1989; Anderson 1991; Govers and Vermeulen 1997), but they have not yet been widely applied in Indonesia. If we adopt a narrow definition of ethnicity that excludes religion, Dayaks are probably the most well-developed ethnic group in Indonesia. The question of Dayak ethnogenesis has been addressed for West Kalimantan (Davidson 2002), for Malaysian Borneo (Tan 1997), and in a preliminary way for Central Kalimantan (Miles 1976).2 The quote from Doug Miles’ book is unusual for its interest in urban dwellers. The tone for all earlier anthropological literature on Dayaks in this part of Borneo was set by the late colonial accounts of isolated tribals written by the colonial official Mallinckrodt (1928). The classics of this tradition retain great standing in Indonesia today (Ukur 1971; Koentjaraningrat 1975; Patianom, Ulaen et al. 1992). The fundamental categories of this anthropology lay in Europe and European colonialism, as has been extensively discussed in the literature (Ellen 1976; Kahn 1993; Gouda 1995; Harwell 2000, with a rebuttal in Bremen and Shimizu 1999).3 The literature on Dayaks takes a political turn in the 1980s. They were now portrayed as indigenous peoples squeezed out of their environment by capitalists and state intrusion. This literature is peppered with warnings of a backlash of the kind that actually did occur in both West and Central Kalimantan after the end of the New Order in 1998 (Dove 1982; Sevin 1985; Ludwig 1986; Lowenhaupt Tsing 1993; Padoch and Peluso 1996; Alcorn and Roy 2000; Peluso and Harwell 2001). Understandable as a rural 2
Others are Schiller (1997) and Davidson (2002).
3
The most general ethnography of Borneo is King (1993).
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1030241
focus is, however, we cannot grasp the ethnic militancy after the New Order without focussing on the urban Dayak middle class. For them the state was no intruder but the source of their livelihood, albeit one to be won through competition. All over Borneo a sense of homogeneous, bounded, and politicized Dayak ethnicity arose in step with the modern colonial state and the Christian mission. Urban Dayaks were the products of this process. Far from dissolving a pre-existing ethnic identity into a larger and more cosmopolitan community, colonial pacification and postcolonial modernization actually created a new ethnic identity where none existed. The tennis club ethnicity for which urban Dayaks organized so vigorously in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s lay in another universe from the identities lived out by their rural cousins. They knew nothing by experience, for example, of the rural nyuli movement that periodically lit the flame of protest whenever the government expanded its footprint in the interior. Lt. H. Christoffel, freshly notorious from his pacification of Jambi, displayed equal ruthlessness in suppressing Dayak resistance in the Upper Dusun and Upper Kapuas areas in 1904-‘05. One final burst of resistance in Pasir in 1915-‘17 was put down with a force brought from Java. About 1000 soldiers were still in the residency in the early 1930s, patrolling constantly (Van Suchtelen 1933: 243). The end of armed resistance then admitted an intensive government presence into the Dayak interior. Restrictions placed on the freedom of movement were arbitrary and far-reaching. Traditionally dispersed Dayaks were forcibly resettled in villages. Surveyors arrived in 1920 to measure land for taxation purposes, forced labor was recruited in 1922 to build a road to Buntok, and in 1924 the slaughter tax was applied to Dayaks for the first time. Each time the government imposed a fresh burden, it seemed, Dayaks reacted with a mystically tinted protest movement called nyuli. Wearing white ribbons on their wrists they attended secret meetings at night to hear legends of great men who had resisted outside domination, to buy invulnerability oils, and to await the coming resurrection. The military was put to work to suppress the movement. Although there were apparently no bloody incidents, the leading figures were arrested and convicted (Mallinckrodt 1925; Feuilletau de Bruyn 1934; Lindblad 1988:123). Dayaks in the interior of Borneo had before this been effectively stateless. There were many such stateless or micro-state societies around Southeast Asia (Reid and
Castles 1975). They only knew an organized state at a distance, whenever they paid tribute to the Sultan of Banjarmasin, who gave them various titles in return (Irwin 1955; Black 1985; Brown 1988; Rousseau 1989). Elsewhere in Indonesia, the sultan then signed a contract with the Dutch allowing him to remain in his palace but giving up most of his sovereignty. This patchwork of contracts covered most of the archipelago and is the reason why the Netherlands Indies was quoted with admiration around the world for its remarkable system of indirect rule (Furnivall 1956; Resink 1968; Emerson 1979; Trocki 1992; Cribb 2000: 134). However, the Banjarmasin sultanate was abolished when it was crushed in the wars of 1859-‘63. When the Dutch finally did make contact with the Dayaks in 1894 it was to establish their rule directly. Nevertheless, both the missionary and the administrator tried to do their civilizing and governing work using elements of what they understood to be indigenous Dayak traditions (adat). The seeds of the politicized ethnicity that turned out to be so persistent were planted by this bureaucratization of adat. Today the Dayaks’ standard version of their own ethnic history traces the birth of Dayak awareness not to the mists of ancestral time but to a key moment of colonial state creation, namely the meeting of Dayak elders called by colonial officials at Tumbang Anoi in 1894 (Usop 1996). For two months, 800-1000 delegates representing upriver Dayak communities from much of the barely explored interior gathered, at Dutch expense. They discussed and resolved hundreds of intra-Dayak vendettas. At the closing ‘reconciliation feast’ they vowed to put an end to war-making among themselves and to accept the Dutch imperial umbrella. Numerous down-river traders came to take advantage of the captive market, and the missionary from Kuala Kurung found himself giving well-attended lessons in the Christian fundamentals. The satisfied colonial reporter summed it all up with a sentence that Dayaks were to affirm a century later: ‘The meeting may also have planted a seed for the birth of a civilisation’ (Koloniaal Verslag 1895: 21-2). De Kat Angelino was the most visionary ideologue of late Duch imperialism. He employed almost mythical language to describe the role the colonial state played in creating social realities. Unlike in Europe, he wrote, where society created the state, in the colonial world there was no society ‘in the modern sense, but only tens of thousands of genealogically, territorially or functionally isolated little communities’. It was
therefore the task of the colonial state ‘to bring to life its own unborn mother’. The state was engaged in a ‘cementing process… of gigantic proportions’. Its ultimate objective was the emergence of a strong indigenous middle class (De Kat Angelino 1929-'30 II: 296-7, 311). But unlike the democratic things a middle class was expected to do in postwar modernization theory, for De Kat Angelino such things should be avoided as ‘anarchic’ and ‘individualistic’. He believed the state ought instead to promote ‘loyalty and obedience’. In short, he wanted not Western but ‘corporative Eastern democracy’ (De Kat Angelino and Renier 1931 I: 328, 438).4 Colonial officials in Southeast Borneo were surprisingly clear-sighted in their account of how the state set about creating a hierarchical society out of a stateless egalitarian one (Van Suchtelen 1933: 72-6).5 Dayaks formerly knew neither a tribe nor an inherited leadership. Elders ruled collegially over long houses (betang). One house joined another only as need arose, for example to ward off headhunters. The sultan of Banjarmasin awarded aristocratic honorifics like demang and tumenggung to those Dayaks who brought him tribute from the hinterland and thus served as his links with tribal society. But the titles were not hereditary. After the Dutch abolished the Banjarmasin sultanate, they continued the aristocratic phraseology but bureaucratized it into a permanent native civil service covering the entire population. Its purpose was to collect tax and political intelligence for the European masters, who also maintained their own European civil service. The two bureaucracies met at the geographical level of the river basin, known as the onderafdeeling. The Dutch controleur was in charge. He was assisted by a native district chief (districtshoofd, also called kiai and later wedana as in Java). Underneath the district chief were several subdistrict chiefs (onderdistrictshoofden). Underneath them, from 1920, a series of customary communities (adatsgemeenschap), each led by a ‘popular’ chief (volkshoofd) given the title demang. The Kuala Kapuas onderafdeeling, for example, had thirteen such communities in the
4
De Kat Angelino and other colonial writers frequently quoted Biemond’s proto-fascist booklet (Biemond
1922). See Bourchier’s discussion of the lineages of organicist thought into the Golkar era (Bourchier 1996). 5
In fact there are signs of a pre-colonial aristocracy in some Dayak societies, but not in the area of concern
here (King 1985).
early 1930s. Dayaks called this government creation of customary communities ‘customisation’ (diadatkan). The Dutch called it ‘development of custom’ (adatsontwikkeling), that is, ‘a government-initiated stimulation of ordered community according to principles known in custom (such as consultation, hierarchical representation)’ (Van Suchtelen 1933: 74-5). These arrangements, they hoped, would become ‘a habit over the years’, for ‘they fit wonderfully well in the program of internal ordering of the Netherlands Indies commonwealth’. Indeed, the demang are today regarded in Central Kalimantan as an authentic Dayak aristocracy (Patianom, Ulaen et al. 1992: 13-4). Hausmann Baboe was a district chief in Kuala Kapuas, half a day’s ferry ride northwest of Banjarmasin. Today a street carries his name in Palangkaraya, but little is known about him. He was probably born in about 1885, in the Kampong Kristen of Hampatung, Kuala Kapuas.6 His was the first generation of town-dwelling Ngaju Dayaks. Hausmann Baboe attended the mission school in Kuala Kapuas. Its location at the confluence of two rivers made this a significant trade center, even though it flooded badly in the monsoon. After completing the mission primary school he first became a journalist, then joined the native civil service.7 Educational standards among Dayaks in Southeast Borneo were still too low for entry to one of the new schools for native civil servants (Osvia). By the time Hausmann Baboe rose to district chief, in about 1918, residents’ routine reports had left behind the martial -- suppressing revolts and headhunters, placating the remaining mini-sultans -- and begun to breathe the orderly air of a growing bureaucracy. One of that bureaucracy’s many tasks was -- wonder of wonders -- to track a dynamic, modern religious and political life among urban locals. 6
The estimate comes from members of the Jakarta-based family association Keluarga Besar Housman
Baboe, based partly on the ages of his children, and partly on a photograph taken in the mid- to late 1930s. He looks about 50. The photo was taken just before he travelled to Batavia where his eldest son Gunther Baboe had a new job. Baboe’s parents settled in Kuala Kapuas after fleeing intra-Dayak fighting in their home area near the Mangkalit River 40km northeast of Kuala Kapuas. They may have named their son after the missionary Krusman (Marko Mahin 2003). 7
T.T. Suan (pers. com. 26-01-2004) believes Hausmann Baboe wrote for Sinar Borneo in 1905, Brita
Balahap in 1912, and Sinar Pengharapan in 1914. I have not yet had the opportunity to verify this.
When Hausmann Baboe first appeared in the colonial archives in 1921, he was described as a ‘Dayak Christian district chief’ (Van Kempen 1924: 18-9). The German and then Swiss Protestant mission was until World War II a surrogate state in interior areas of the residency of Southeast Borneo. It initially used the commercial network of the German trader Robert Henneman, one of the pioneering capitalists based in Banjarmasin since 1882 (Lindblad 1988: 48, 52). Kuala Kapuas was the center of the Protestant mission, and it produced all the urban Dayak leaders in the pre-war movement. Hausmann Baboe lived there much of his life, between periods in Banjarmasin and Sampit. The mission gave many stateless societies around the world a centralized ethnic identity, larger than the clan but smaller than the colony (Bigalke 1981). Although missionaries only ever converted a little over 5% of the Dayak population, the prominence of Christians in the Dayak ethnic movement shows that this also happened here. The Rheinische Mission led the world in thinking about how mission should be done (Van Klinken 2003: 12-3). Friedrich Fabri and Gustav Warneck wrote a missiology that quoted the mission’s work in Batakland with satisfaction. It was inspired by romantic nineteenth century German notions of the ‘Volk’. Volks-Christianisierung meant baptizing not individuals but an entire culture, and not merely by reforming social institutions like marriage and labor, but by creating a sense of ethnic identity, greater than the clan but smaller than the Netherlands-Indies, that previously had not existed at all. The mission virtually wrote the resident’s Dayak policy for him. It believed that retaining the internal passport system was key to preventing an influx of Malays into the Dayak interior, as they would bring their religion with them as well as displace the Dayaks economically. Agreeing, Resident Hens wrote in 1921 that among the most primitive tribes such as Dayaks and Papuans travel restrictions aim ‘to resist displacement, exploitation and to prevent the extinction of the Dayak population’ (Hens 1921:76-7). Batavia did not always see it the same way. The liberal view there was that freedom of movement -- an end to the internal passport system -- would promote learning and trade as intercourse grew across the archipelago. Isolating them did not mean Dayaks should be left alone. Both the government and the mission thought nomads should settle down in permanent villages and learn
‘discipline, order and regulation’, by force if necessary (Hens 1921:10, 78). Education was almost entirely a missionary monopoly. Its level was elementary and aimed largely at making them better Christians. The government in 1921 secretly gave the Rheinische Mission a large grant of fl. 70,000 to help it through its post-War World I exchange rate crisis just as it was handing over the Baseler Mission (Hens 1921:geheime bijlage). Resident Van Kempen in 1924 wrote that the mission schools were not only ‘civilising’ the Dayaks of Kuala Kapuas and the Dusun lands, but were in reality doing ‘political pacification work [that] deserves the support of the government in every respect’. The sheer size of Borneo was apt to make administrators ‘nervous’, he added (Van Kempen 1924: 82, 143). Government and mission thus both agreed it was best to protect Dayaks by nurturing them in isolation. They must have been surprised when Hausmann Baboe, one of their star proteges and already an experienced administrator, refused to play along. In September 1921 Resident Van Kempen reported that Baboe had secretly supported an anti-government protest in Sampit led by Mohamad Taib, the Pangkalanbun branch chairperson of Sarekat Islam. We do not know their grievances, but even the resident acknowledged that some of them were justified. The following February Van Kempen relieved Hausmann Baboe of his position (Van Kempen 1924: 18-9). The mission felt as disturbed about a Christian doing politics with a Muslim as the state did about a district chief with anti-government sympathies. The mission placed him under a temporary ban from the communion table (siasat gereja) in that same year 1922. The reason was bigamy – he had married a Banjar Malay woman, a Muslim. He liked women. A photograph from the 1930s shows him wearing a dandyish white suit. But the mission history also added that he was ‘susceptible to communist ideas’ (Witschi 1942: 58). Since he had been married to her for three years already by this time, one suspects the church ban was inspired more by politics than moral theology.8 Thus in one blow the colonial state deprived him of all the prestige it had heaped upon him. (Under the 8
Interview with Ibu Rawintan E. Binti, granddaughter of Hausmann Baboe, in Banjarmasin, 26-01-2004.
The family does not remember her name. The pair divorced again in 1924. They had one child, Ruslan Baboe (b. 18-10-1919), who became Ibu Rawintan's father. Hausmann Baboe's first wife was Regina (b. 1891). They had eight children between 1905 and 1926.
influence of the progressive missionary Hendrik Kraemer, the mission later came to see him in a more generous light as the first of a new and more mature generation of Dayaks). Emboldened rather than disheartened by his dismissal, Hausmann Baboe reached out to the ‘hitherto quiet’ Dayak Union (Dajakbond). This ethnic organization had grown out of the mission school. Similar organizations sprouted all over the Netherlands Indies at this time among educated, often aristocratic young people. The Dayak Union had been set up in Kuala Kapuas in July 1919 to raise Dayak educational levels and provide mutual assistance (Van Kempen 1924: 22). Hausmann Baboe himself had played a stimulating role in founding it.9 ‘Mutual assistance’ meant that in 1920 they set up a Dayak trading cooperative to counter ‘Chinese capital’ (Eisenberger 1936: 101). Feelings against Chinese capital was common in all indigenous circles in Borneo. Fired by indignation over the way Hausmann Baboe had been treated, the group began to assert itself against the mission. They were no longer satisfied with the simple and pious mission schools. They wanted ‘progress’ and (as the mission history later wrote) ‘equality with Europeans’. If they were not allowed to be ‘advanced’ (madjoe), they said, they might explode, like Krakatao (Soeara Borneo (SB) 30-10-1926). They felt the mission was deliberately holding them back. Without a high school they would never be able to enter the Osvia school in Makassar.10 When the government refused to give them a high school, they set one up themselves. Their impressive energy compensated for a complete lack of money. The secular, private Hollandsche Dajak School (HDS) in Kuala Kapuas was run by the Vereeniging Pakat Dajak. Hausmann Baboe’s nephew Mahir Mahar, himself only a junior high school (Mulo) student, became principal. The school began with a dozen students on 1 July 1924. To the quiet satisfaction of ‘mission and government’ (the two 9
Hausmann Baboe, already district chief, addressed the founding meeting, saying Dayaks needed a
representative in the newly established Volksraad. The assistant resident and the missionary were appointed protector and advisor respectively ('Pakat Dajak', Brita Bahalap, 16 September 1919, p.72, including a list of office holders). The list said to be from 1919 in Usop (1996:75) is probably from 1925. It includes Hausmann Baboe as well as Mohamad Horman (there spelled Norman). 10
Resident De Haan in 1929 feared a shortage of indigenous administrators because none had entered
Osvia the previous two years (De Haan 1929:32).
often mentioned each other in one breath at the time), the school’s financial struggles eventually forced it into the hands of others. Mahir Mahar went on to become apprentice book-keeper in Bulungan far to the east. Hausmann Baboe also ran a private primary school in Mentangai (De Haan 1929:18; SB 30-10-1926).11 More remarkable than their assertiveness against the mission was their reaching out to the Serikat Islam. Not only was this an embrace of difference -- Banjar and Dayak, Muslim and Christian. It was a celebration of freedom that broke all bounds of ethnicity or religion. This was still the abundant phase of Serikat Islam that Takashi Shiraishi characterized as ‘An Age in Motion’ (Shiraishi 1990). Though only just -- the doctrinal crystallization into communists and orthodox Muslims had already begun in Java. In complete contrast with the image of the tribal savage that remained universal in the literature about Dayaks (even to the present day), the Dayaks helping organize Sarekat Islam events showed themselves to be urban moderns. The Banjarmasin branch of SI was led at this time by a Batak recently arrived from Java, Maradja Sayuthy Loebis. The Serikat Islam had established branches in several places in Southeast Borneo in 1914, but this early momentum had been lost. However, the Banjarmasin branch experienced a burst of new life in 1922 when Tjokroaminoto, the SI chairman in Java just released after nearly a year in detention without trial, established contact by mail. Preparations were made for Tjokro to visit Borneo. Hausmann Baboe helped organize an aggressive publicity campaign for the planned open air meetings. By early 1923 he had recruited the Dajak Bond to spread pamphlets up the rivers to the Dayak Dusun lands. He translated the name Dajak Bond with the SI-sounding Serikat Dajak. Predictably, Resident Van Kempen banned Tjokro from visiting Borneo. He had earlier considered using the travel restriction powers to stop the pamphlets spreading. But the activists did not give up. They established a National Borneo Council that held a National Borneo Congress in Banjarmasin in April 1923. Hausmann Baboe was SI’s
11
The ‘Pakat Guru Kristen Dayak’ officeholders for December 1926 include H. Sima and H.Nyangkal
(Usop 1996:75). If correct this would be a later incarnation, as the school had been opened two and a half years earlier.
‘advisor for government affairs’. He wrote a ‘grievance motion’ to the Governor General on its behalf. Nevertheless, it was a disappointingly low-key affair. Hausmann Baboe was by now the best-known Dayak in Southeast Borneo. For six years beginning in 1924, outgoing residents devoted a section of their report to the Dajak Bond he led. Only barely concealing their apprehension about the revolutionary potential of the natives, they routinely assured their superiors in Batavia that Hausmann Baboe’s influence was in decline. The movement from Java was to Hausmann Baboe a wind of liberty to blow away the stifling paternalism of government and mission. In October 1925 he addressed a meeting of ‘Christian Dayaks’ in Kuala Kapuas expansively on the emancipatory issues of the day. He spoke about the status of women, land rights, labor unions (native Bornean ones should join outside Islamic ones). People should grow fruits and vegetables rather than rubber. The slaughter tax should be abolished. He wanted cooperation with the PKIrelated Sarekat Ra’jat in Java. The local SI representative was among the 200 in attendance, as was Hausmann Baboe’s former boss the government controleur of Kuala Kapuas. The conservative Banjarmasin paper Bintang Borneo headlined its report on the event: ‘Communists at work in Kuala Kapuas’ (Bintang Borneo 30-10-1925). In 1925 the Serikat Islam and Serikat Dajak activists tried again to invite Tjokroaminoto, this time adding H. A. Salim for good effect. The three main organizers were Hausmann Baboe now chairing the Dayak Union, and Mohamad Arip and Mohamad Horman from SI. The resident, now De Haan, again banned the visitors from Java, but the congress was held anyway without them. The speeches were largely economic -- protests against the land tax and forced labor (Politiek verslag 1925; Eisenberger 1936:104). The resident had some anxious moments about banning the notable opposition figures from Java, and he still lacked a specialist detective service to track dissent. But he was relieved to conclude the high rubber prices had dissuaded the Banjarese from rising up in protest. The abundant phase was about to draw to a close. At the end of the following year they held another National Borneo Conference, again led by Hausmann Baboe and Mohd Horman (SB 11-12-1926). Serikat Islam was now merely a shadow of its former self, and this one was advertised as a ‘joint meeting’ of the two organizations. But a new element
of ethnic competition had crept into the proceedings. It was triggered by the recent government reforms in which the residency of Southeast Borneo would get one government-appointed representative in the colonial pseudo-parliament, the Volksraad. The conference recommended there should be two -- a Dayak and a Malay. The two had very different ‘cultures and means of subsistence’. Two candidates were put forward who, it was felt, would appeal to the colonial mentor. Both were the sons of wellregarded district chiefs, both had royal blood, and both were students in Java. Goesti Mohamad Noer was the Malay, Raden Cyrillus the Dayak. Actually Hausmann Baboe had another Dayak in reserve as well, Dorus Sylvanus, like Cyrillus a student in the medical college in Surabaya (Nias) (SB 30-10-1926). Two months before this December 1926 conference, Hausmann Baboe had started his own newspaper named Soeara Borneo. Like the school, it ran on little but idealism, and it only lasted till February 1927. Lack of money was its worst enemy, but it was also dealt a serious blow when the controleur of Banjarmasin expelled the editor for communist leanings. Achmad (nicknamed Maharadja Lela in one edition) had been a teacher at Krian, Sidoarjo, when he was exiled to Borneo by the colonial government in 1925 for his PKI and Sarekat Rajat activities. There he soon befriended Hausmann Baboe, who, we remember, had begun to speak highly of the Sarekat Ra’jat at this time. But when in November 1926 the police got wind of an imminent colony-wide PKI revolt, Achmad was detained. When a revolt did break out in Banten, West Java, he was sent back to Java, presumably to face trial. Soeara Borneo declared it was proud of Achmad’s work and the detention proved he had been doing the right thing (SB 27-11-1926). From a list of overdue subscribers we can guess that Soeara Borneo readers were mostly Malays in Banjarmasin, with a smattering of European and Dayak names in Kuala Kapuas, Muara Teweh, Martapura, Balikpapan, and as far afield as Makassar (SB 11-121926). Its short life was spent ranging across fundamental issues of class, ethnicity and nation. The basic challenge, Hausmann Baboe declared in the first edition, was ‘progress’ (SB 09-10-1926). Economically, Borneo native sons (boemipoetra Borneo) had been left far behind those of other Indonesian islands. He urged readers to subscribe and send news, provided it was not about religion and not slanderous. His solution to the problem of the many ethnic identities was to see them all as parts of a whole. There were lots of
peoples (bangsa) – ‘bangsa Djawa, bangsa Sumatra, bangsa Borneo’ and so on -- and they all dreamed of a Greater Java, Greater Sumatra, Greater Borneo. But they were united in the same fate, ‘so it is only right that we call ourselves Indonesians, Indonesian people (rajat Indonesia)’, whose aim was freedom from a foreign power (SB 16-101926). But elsewhere the paper moved away from Hausmann’s interest in land rights and taxes towards issues of identity. It shone an indignant light on the stereotype of Dayaks as ignorant savages and casual killers (the Madurese were also on the short list of those of whom this was said) (SB 09-10-1926, 04-02-1927). It engaged in polemics with the leading ideologue of Banjar ethnicity in Banjarmasin, Amir Hasan. Both Hausmann Baboe’s Dayak Volksraad candidates lost out to the far more numerous and urbanised Banjarese. Politically active Dayaks were far and few between around pre-war Banjarmasin. Dayak organisation paled next to the Banjarese, whose Sarekat Kalimantan led by Amir Hassan was well covered in a lively Banjarmasin press (Bingkisan, Tjanang). The Dayak Union fell into listlessness. Hausmann Baboe still addressed public meetings about taxes and corvee service, but Resident Koppenol in 1931 judged him no longer a threat (Koppenol 1931:11). The generally progressive Bingkisan at the end of 1932 also thought Hausmann Baboe was too polite in his criticism of the government, which (they said) he described as ‘modern, humanist, gentleman and the like’ (Bingkisan 14-12-1932). Indeed the government was content to note a general aversion to revolutionary action in the Southeast Borneo, attributing this to high rubber prices and especially conservative religion, perenially stuck in debates about the Kaum Muda versus the Kaum Tua. Hausmann Baboe’s moderation in the 1930s was partly due to his own mellowing. He must have been in his fifties by this time -- older than the nationalist leaders in Batavia. Moreover he had grown wealthy. His family today remember he was the first Dayak in Banjarmasin to own a motorcar, in which he drove to the movie theatre with his family. He brought crocodile skins and antiques from the interior on his own steam riverboat and sold them to the Dutch. There was a warehouse in Surabaya, as well as a house that became a base for the children's higher education in Java.
Colonial political discourse had taken an ethnic turn. Identity politics were implicit in the re-traditionalization program that Batavia had begun to promote after the abortive but nonetheless shocking communist uprisings of late 1926 and early 1927. The conviction grew in establishment circles (e.g. Schrieke 1966) that the revolt had been a consequence of the loss of traditional social cohesion. The answer was therefore to strengthen customary institutions -- if necessary by (re)inventing them where they were absent Southeast Borneo Resident B. J. Haga had earlier written his dissertation on the same concept of ‘organic Eastern democracy’ that had so inspired De Kat Angelino (Haga 1924). He proposed in 1933 that the hitherto directly ruled Dayak interior could be reconstructed to resemble an indirectly ruled entity governed along customary (adat) lines, albeit still led by Europeans. ‘Thus one would have there a kind of self-ruling land with a European administrator at the top, who consults as much as possible with the popular heads, to whom a greater share in government is given as their capacities grow’ (Haga 1933: 420). The concept was to approach reality in the post-war Greater Dayak Council (Van Klinken forthc.). The revival of tradition found defenders both among romantics disillusioned by the failures of Western liberalism in Europe during World War I, and conservatives for whom indirect rule was a cheap alternative to constructing a modern state. Cost was a consideration. Resident De Haan complained in 1929 that Southeast Borneo yielded a huge annual surplus in oil and timber but government expenditure there was actually declining (De Haan 1929:1).12 Linked to the idea of re-emphasizing tradition was a broad program to deconcentrate government administration in the far-flung colonial empire. The basic intention was to move towards a structure of relatively autonomous units each run, as far as the population was concerned, in a ‘customary’ way. The legal basis for this structure were the numerous contracts the Dutch had made indigenous rulers sign around the archipelago in the nineteenth century. Especially under the colonially experienced conservative Dutch Prime Minister Hendrikus Colijn in the 1930s, the idea of separate development by reinvesting indigenous aristocrats with ‘dignity’ to a substantial extent became official policy. He had been drawing since 1917 on the proto-apartheid ideas of 12
The fullest statement of colonial re-traditionalization was De Kat Angelino and Renier 1931.
Ritsema van Eck to propose a series of ‘island governments’ (Ritsema van Eck 1919; Colijn 1928). These were established in Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Great East (eastern Indonesia) just before the Japanese invasion (Benda 1966). The device to make of the Dayak lands an indirectly ruled territory was the ‘neolandschap’, which simply applied the 1938 Self-Rule Regulation to an area previously ruled directly. One of the little discussed implications of this move would have been that Dayaks would get the simplest set of laws available in the Netherlands Indies plurality of legal systems. Not only were they subject to native law, which provided far fewer safeguards than the law for non-natives (Lev 1985), but the more professional administration of native law (the landraad) available in directly ruled areas would be denied them. For kinship issues such as marriage and inheritance, they were subject to customary law, which was being exhaustively codified by Dutch jurists between the wars. All of Dutch-held Borneo was in 1938 declared a Government, meaning it was to be ruled by a governor based in Banjarmasin. Resident Haga oversaw a preliminary yet significant constitutional move to bring greater autonomy to Borneo. He demonstrated vision and energy. The worst effects of the depression had passed and in December 1938 Batavia announced its intention to ‘open up’ Borneo (Van Helsdingen 1946). Resident Haga wrote a report on the region’s economic possibilities that in some respects prefigures the resource boom of the 1990s. Low world rubber prices meant quotas on production remained in place, but the future of timber looked bright. Madurese labor was building a new road up the east coast to Samarinda. Madurese were also being considered for transmigration (then called colonization) on dry land. Failing rubber prices had driven thousands of Banjar Malays to drain the wetlands for rice cultivation. Javanese settlers would be invited to learn the Banjar techniques and help expand the drainage effort -which would require canals and ditches to lower the water level. The Dayaks, meanwhile, stood to lose their land to this agricultural expansion. Haga’s solution was the Dayak reserve. This was to be declared among the Meratus Dayak, in existing forest reserves in Hulu Sungei and Martapura, northeast of Banjarmasin. The objective was to protect them from the Malay expansion, and to protect the environment at the same time. Malays were thought to leave the land an alang-alang waste, whereas Dayaks practiced more sustainable forms of shifting cultivation. Dayak
village chiefs would be authorized to administer the exclusion of Malays by a system of cultivation permits. The reserve was implemented just before the Japanese invasion (Politiek verslag 1938; Haga 1941). The Meratus Mountains covered only a small portion of the Dayak interior. Further away from Banjarmasin the Malay invasion had hardly begun, though it had become a major source of social change by the early 1960s, when Douglas Miles did his research. In the 1930s the deep interior was administered only by the mission. The momentum towards a decentralized and ethnicized polity in the Netherlands Indies made it advisable for Dayaks to be better organized. Another round of Volksraad appointments were scheduled for November 1938. Their vehicle to raise the Dayak profile was the Committee for Dayak Tribal Awareness (Comite Kesedaran Bangsa Dajak). Its energy came from Pakat Dajak, a group of junior civil servants that grew out of the teachers whom Hausmann Baboe inspired to set up the Dayak school in 1923. Its chairman was Mahir Mahar, Hausmann Baboe’s nephew and the founding principal of the fledgling school in the 1920s.13 The committee’s name betrayed a problem. Dayaks lacked ‘awareness’ that they were Dayaks. They had to be told by a committee of urbanites. There was in fact no Dayak tribe, as Van Suchtelen had already noted. The anthropologist Rousseau even concluded that any notion of Dayak ethnicity ‘has limited heuristic value’ (Rousseau 1990: 302). In the upriver jungles of Borneo, people identified only with small local
13
The best contemporary list of Pakat Dajak officeholders comes from December 1939, when the
organisation was revived and held a conference to elect a new leadership. No doubt the same people ran the Comite Kesedaran Bangsa Dajak. They were (Politiek Verslag 1940): 1) Mahir Mahar, clerk at the office of the controleur in Pleihari, chair; 2) E.S. Handoeran, assistant book-keeper in the Hennemann shop, deputy chair; 3) C.Loeran, copyist at the Inspectorate of Indigenous Education (Inspectie van het Inlandsch Onderwijs), first secretary; 4) C. Rupok, draftsman at the forestry department (Boschwezen), second secretary; 5) Pahoe, clerk at the state treasury (Landschapskassen), third secretary; 6) F.J.Mathias, clerk at the ‘V en W’ (?), first treasurer; 7) H.Sutta (poorly legible), market master (marktmeester), second treasurer; 8) E. Mathias, customs guard (douane oppasser), commissioner; 9) H. Sima, teacher at the Christian Dutch Native School (Christelijke Hollandsche Inlandsche School), ditto; 10) E. Mahar, principal of the small trade school (hoofd van de kleinhandelschool), ditto; 11) Doeradjat, retired district chief (gepensioneerd kiai), ditto.
communities, or at most with a dialect group known as utus. Doug Miles reported that Mahir Mahar explained to him in the early 1960s how the young Dayak activists in Kuala Kapuas responded to this lack of awareness:
He and his political associates acted on the assumption that in an administrative unit where Ngadju [Dayak] were a majority, ethnic loyalties of the hinterland population would keep their leaders in power against Banjarese-Malay rivalry. However, a campaign to bolster awareness of common traditional values and interests among people of various utus [dialect group] identity would be a necessary preliminary to the establishment of an autonomous administrative entity. (Miles 1976:126)
The committee toured upriver communities with the message of Dayak unity. However, once again, the campaign was unsuccessful for no Dayak was appointed to the Volksraad. But it had been a valuable political experience. Had it not been for the Japanese invasion of March 1942, a kind of apartheid may have emerged in Dutch-held Borneo. Everyone that mattered approved of this idea. The mission saw the Dayak reserve as a cradle for the nurture of a Christian Dayak community undisturbed by the problems of a plural modern world. The government saw it, at least in part, in terms of a wider strategy to defuse a growing archipelago-wide movement for non-ethnic nationalism by dispersing native energies into submissive and mutually competitive ethnic identities. Not everyone in government agreed with the strategy to promote adat. Resident De Haan wrote in 1929 that adat had not existed among the Banjar Malays since the Dutch destroyed the sultanate in the war of 1859-‘63 and killed all the traditional chiefs. This had made the population highly individualistic and driven by immediate economic interests (the rubber boom). Precisely this modern individualism made it difficult to mobilize a revolt, De Haan wrote. ‘In this region it is a useless toil to try to revive the adat relations, since the time for that is gone, and the years of political unrest in the Indies have passed this region by practically unnoticed’ (De Haan 1929:16). However, even De Haan made an exception for the Dayaks. As we have already seen, the main government driver in Southeast Borneo of the adat policy was his successor B. J. Haga, an energetic man who said he had learned a lot about the subject in
Ambon. Putting things in order in Southeast Borneo for him meant vastly expanding its exploitation of natural resources, while making sure the native Dayaks were not over-run by the changes, and that they did not make too many demands. The Dayak urban elite at first thought a policy of ethnic segregation a poor alternative to the promise of emancipation offered by the nationalist and leftist movement growing across the archipelago. But the security apparatus had drawn the sting of the leftist resistance by the late 1930s. In any case, the growing opportunities for advancement within the government’s conservative strategy of ethnic divide-and-rule made collaboration too good an option to refuse. Meanwhile the only people about whose views we know almost nothing at this time are the rural Dayak majority. The Japanese occupation produced immense deprivation in Southeast Borneo. Hausmann Baboe was executed on 20 December 1943, along with about 250 others accused of subversion including Resident Haga in the so-called Haga Case (Borneo Post 29-05-1948). His three eldest sons were later to die at Japanese hands as well: Gunther, Leonard, and Walter. But Dayak politics here after the war showed remarkable continuities with the late colonial precedents. Its high points were the Greater Dayak Council of 1946-‘49, the creation of Central Kalimantan as a ‘Dayak’ province in 1957, and then the ethnic cleansing of nearly all the Madurese by a militant Dayak movement in 2001. The Dayak movement of 2001 claimed a direct continuation with the politics of 1956-‘57, while several key actors of those years were sons or proteges of Hausmann Baboe (Van Klinken 2002). After its early leftist phase, the movement never again raised issues of social inequality or political freedoms. The defining moment in this history was the re-traditionalization put into motion by Dutch colonial authorities after the 1926-27 communist revolts. The Dayak urban group led by Hausmann Baboe, until then open to cosmopolitan ideals of emancipation as typified by its association with Serikat Islam and later (indirectly) the PKI, was at that moment persuaded to turn. They were drawn into a politics of ethnic competition for the perks of office over against the much better organized Banjar. Their politics were typical of many other minorities: submissive, elitist and pragmatic. How might this story cause us to rethink our concept of civil society in Indonesia? The vast literature on this subject often utilizes the spatial image of a ‘public sphere’ free
from intimidation located between the state and society. In this space, citizens consult together and with government agents and thus exercise collective control over the government. McAdam et al. helpfully called this a process of ‘protected consultation’ (McAdam, Tarrow et al. 2001: 267). Ethnic cleavages, since they are non-negotiable givens, make it more difficult to engage in free consultation. Furnivall had already identified this as the major impediment to Indonesian democracy in the 1940s (Furnivall 1944: 446). However, ‘ethnic cleavage’ is an essentialist term that does not capture the dynamics described in this chapter. The real question is the identity of the empowered ‘citizen’. In this story that person is not a member of the general population, who wants protection from government arbitrariness, but an (aspiring) government agent or client. Ethnicity is used in such circles to buttress petty-bourgeois class interests, which overlap increasingly with those of state officials. It is part of intra-class conflict for power and wealth. Africanists have long recognized this phenomenon (Melson and Wolpe 1971). The Africanist Bruce Berman insightfully traced the birth of this state-dependent urban class to a distorted and conservative late colonial process of state formation . His bleak conclusion ran: ‘it is clear that civil society in the sense in which it ostensibly exists in Western liberal democracies does not exist in Africa, where the boundaries between state and society, public and private, are neither clear nor consistent’(Berman 1998: 338) The creation of a public sphere in Indonesia’s outer islands is certainly not an impossible project. But it is a much more difficult one than sometimes portrayed in the literature of democratic transitions. It continues to face the legacy of a state that is in origin imperialistic. Despite its evident weakness in areas such as security and minimal welfare, that state continues to enjoy a surprisingly high level of autonomy over against the general population. Its ambition is no longer as grand as De Kat Angelino once imagined it -- ‘to bring to life its own unborn mother’. But so long as it continues to see the communist phantom in the public sphere (of which Sarekat Islam’s inclusiveness was such a potent symbol nearly a century ago), and instead to privilege customary hierarchy and its attendant ethnic and minority stereotypes, proponents of civil society have their work cut out for them.
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