In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  * * *

  The population of Bengkulu was some 60,000 in Raffles’ day, of whom about 10,000 lived in the town. Many were military, though the Company had come to rely on Buginese mercenaries. Topazes (‘black Portuguese’, like the Malaccans) and Malagasy troops. Behind many of the English names lurk Eurasians who had risen to positions of power within the colony. Raffles, as a nineteenth-century Westerner, seems to us orientally aware of the duties of patronage. He fixed a commission for his friend Raden Rana in the militia. He would later assist in the founding of Singapore.

  The trade was in the hands of some 500 Chinese, the rough work done by convict gangs from Bengal or the 300 African slaves owned by the Company. The last shocked Raffles deeply. The female slaves lived promiscuously with the convicts, as the superintendent cheerfully informed the new Governor, ‘to keep up the breed’. Sitting amid his cracked and collapsing fort and the wreckage of the town, his first thought was to free them all at once and set up a school for the children. The Editor adopted one, to set an example. At the end of his government she would be properly married off with a dowry supplied by Raffles.

  The Company immediately disapproved, but Raffles had by now learned to ignore disapproval. His commerce with the great and the good in London had given him confidence. He abolished gambling and freed the pepper trade. Most of the local slavery came from the Company’s policy of advancing money that would be paid off in pepper. Unable to ever deliver the goods, debtors and their children became slaves. Raffles wrote off the debts.

  The convicts were encouraged to rehabilitate themselves, marry and become settlers. Instead of beating everyone with sticks, he tempted them with carrots. Raffles was up to his old tricks of treating natives like human beings.

  * * *

  With unexpected efficiency, a gleaming new bus met us at the airport to transport the team to an official reception and the first match of the series.

  ‘You’re on the manifest,’ said the manager and shrugged. ‘There’s nothing else for it. You’ll have to see it through.’ And so I was embussed, given an identity tag and a blouson and disgorged at a crowded football stadium.

  All over Indonesia are Balinese policemen. They gathered round, adored their team, hugged them in ecstatic solidarity, shook my hand in wet-eyed gratitude and homesickness. ‘Thank you for helping our team. We are moved by your kindness. Lineker, Maradona.’ Magic words, uttered like charms. More Balinese policemen escorted us through to the cinder track where the other squads in tracksuits looked us up and down in stony-faced semi-hostile appraisal, as at a sixth-form dance.

  East Timur has been declared Indonesia’s newest province, and its team was being propelled around the country to familiarize the idea. East Timur translates as ‘Timor Timur’, is abbreviated to Tim-Tim, and compounds with the loanword ‘team’ to give tim Tim-Tim, ‘the East Timur team’. The Balinese contemplated the ripplingly muscular tim Tim-Tim with horror. ‘God, they’re black!’ someone breathed in awe. In the bright sunshine, their features disappeared into a matt blackness.

  An American-style marching band, complete with drum-majorettes, formed up in satin uniforms and exhaled a patriotic air. The leader had a baton with a great dented knob that spoke of the need for further practice. The Balinese team went into an elaborate routine of synchronized bum-wiggling, thigh-stretching and shoulder-shrugging.

  ‘This is quite irrelevant,’ the captain confided, ‘but it excites the girls.’

  Someone blew a whistle. We set off, pounding round the track in a travesty of a military parade. Civilians marching are always unconvincing, like soldiers pushing prams.

  It was already clear that some of the Balinese were very well off, the tribute of tourism flowing into their coffers, while others were very poor. The captain had revealed that, despite his youth, he owned a hotel and drove a BMW.

  ‘Watch this,’ he said. Drawing from his pocket a bundle of money, he casually tossed a couple of 5,000-rupiah notes over his shoulder. There was a thud and a furious scrimmaging behind as the tim Tim-Tim broke ranks and flung themselves on the notes in total shambles. It destroyed their impact splendidly. The Balinese captain smirked.

  We formed lines in the hot sun. Heat rose from the track in a shimmering curtain and wavered across the pitch, bare of grass, earth impacted like concrete. There was a lot of military shouting from officials and painful stamping on the cinders in unsuitable plimsolls. In the heat, the Balinese began to wilt and slump against each other in comradely discomfort. Masters of beach technique, they flashed furious sexual semaphore at the drum-majorettes. The male members of the band flourished their trumpets in sexual rivalry.

  ‘They are all too young,’ announced the captain censoriously. There was a pause.

  ‘God, but they’re pretty young,’ sighed an anguished voice from the rear. Everyone laughed.

  ‘Sporting spirit and the five principles of the nation are the eternal watchwords of Indonesian youth…’

  An official had stood up, shrugged on the glasses that were the sign of his learning and come to rigid attention with a huge wad of foolscap from which he intoned.

  ‘My fiancee is white,’ the man behind whispered. ‘I’m off to Australia when I finish university. I really miss her. She’s not a tart like most of the tourists, a nice girl, keeps her blouse on on the beach. She works in a cheese factory. Will you help me write a letter to her?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. Hadn’t Alfonso, the Malaccan Portuguese, said he was going to work in a cheese factory? Perhaps Indonesians saw all of Australia as one vast cheese factory.

  ‘Tell me,’ whispered another voice, ‘what are groupies? I have heard the word but the idea seems strange.’

  I explained. They heartily approved of the notion.

  ‘…as a step towards the completion of the purposeful harmonization of the common people beneath the banner of unity within diversity …’

  The teams wilted further.

  Another voice. ‘It’s funny. I can’t stand the smell of cheese. Yuk! It’s like the way you bule people talk about durian.’

  ‘… moving forward in the spirit of solidarity towards the expression of the cultural value of the vaunted ethic …’

  ‘Which team are you playing?’

  The captain yawned and absently ogled a chubby girl untangling her pom-poms like a chimpanzee grooming its young. ‘We’re not playing today, just watching. You’ll know when it’s our turn because we can’t shave that day. It’s our religion.’

  ‘… in accordance with the presidential instruction making official the upgrading of the programme for sustained youth development and conscious implementation of …’

  He talked so long, it began to get dark. By the time the match started no one could see the ball, let alone the tim Tim-Tim.

  * * *

  One reason that Bengkulu looked so depressing to Raffles was the absence of verdure. Later he would come to see it as a place of natural rather than human history. But for the moment, every shrub and tree had been cut down, the English fearful lest hostile natives skulk behind them. They had good reason to be fearful. In 1801, Parr, the British Resident, had been beheaded. His memorial is still there, at the crossroads by the fort, standing empty, like, indeed, a body without a head. In local memory, Raffles is credited with building it, but then local memory has Raffles doing everything, including constructing the fort – an ungainly beetle-browed thing of battlements – which was certainly there before him. Parr’s memorial is remarkably similar to Olivia’s memorial, and to her tomb in the original form, with its circular shape and roof like an inverted saucer. But this is simply to argue that it is a Company monument, class A, higher ranks for the use of.

  Bengkulu impresses for other monuments. It was a hotbed of Freemasonry. We know little of Raffles’ connections with the sect but his secretary, Travers, was ardent in his attendance. The lodge in Bengkulu was named ‘The Rising Sun’. The name is significant, suggesting the lodge takes its origin myth
from the cult of Osiris in ancient Egypt, fashionable at that time from Napoleon’s recent campaign. Belzoni the Great, mountebank and explorer, would shortly claim to have discovered an ancient Masonic temple in Thebes, and the conflation of the builder of the Temple of Solomon and the god Osiris would be complete. Freemasonry would have ingested Egypt wholesale. The mark of the cult was the obelisk, inevitably interpreted as the god’s erect penis, and Freemasons of the time laboured to bring obelisks into the hearts of many major Western cities.

  In Bengkulu, obelisks are everywhere. The cemetery of the English church is full of the obelisk tombs of Company men. The church itself was rebuilt by the Dutch and is now colonized by Christian Bataks, the tribe whose dedication to cannibalism would later provoke Raffles to anthropological fieldwork. The mournful cemetery is nowadays bathed in the music of Mozart, played on a Japanese organ by Christianized Batak fingers. On some tombs locals have chalked ‘Watch out – the Devil’, writing perhaps truer than they know. A marble angel, wings snapped by local children, is associated in popular memory with a child of Raffles. But it is obelisks, buckled and heaving following the attentions of goldhunters, that dominate the place.

  By the sea stands another, the Hamilton monument, scrupulously whitewashed. But the biggest erection by far rears up, sharp-edged and mathematical, in the main square by the new Governor’s palace. Made of great blocks of stone it commemorates the Indonesian Revolution and has harnessed modern technology to the making of obelisks. I was stopped from photographing it by an officious policeman.

  ‘The design,’ he huffed, ‘is Bengkulu copyright.’

  * * *

  ‘I treat them [local rulers] as a wise man should his wife, am very complaisant in trifles, but immoveable in matters of importance.’

  – Governor Collet

  Parr brought his death upon himself. He had arrived with orders from the Company to cut costs. It was no longer willing to tolerate the onerous losses of Bengkulu. Many were thrown out of work and the Company employees were prevented from trading in their private capacity. Bengkulu was a place of mafias within mafias – the Company, the Freemasons, a shadowy association called ‘the Concern’. Instead of mitigating the situation with regard to pepper, he tried to introduce the forced cultivation of coffee. He insulted and humiliated the chiefs. Worse, he tried to abolish the Buginese corps which was the muscle behind the government and so met the fate of every despot who forgets to pay the army.

  The Malays had a meeting and it was decided, in accordance with customary practice, to take Parr’s head. The other Europeans were warned to stay at home on the intended day, lest they be inadvertently injured.

  ‘Just before midnight the first blow was struck; someone shrieked, “The Malays have come!” and the fighting was on … They cut down the guard and entered the house in short order, three of them finding their way to Parr’s room and dragging him out of bed. Parr had been ill and was no match for even one healthy man, let alone three, so that the execution would have been swift if Mrs Parr had not fought valiantly for her husband’s life. Patiently, the Malays asked her to let them proceed, explaining that they were afraid that they might accidentally injure her, but the unreasonable woman persisted in interfering, throwing herself upon Parr’s body and generally trying to get herself killed. At last, when she managed to be slightly wounded in the hands, the men were reluctantly compelled to use force on her. They shoved her under the bed and went about their business. They cut off Parr’s head and then, as quietly as possible, without any ill-bred fuss, they went away with it. As far as they were concerned, the revolt was over and everything was quite satisfactory.

  The Malays were astonished and aggrieved when the English seemed to resent the affair. At first it all went according to a design they recognized; a reward was offered for the heads of the assassins, and that, the chiefs thought, was intended to be the customary compensation paid for murder. They only wondered why the eccentric English didn’t ask them to pay compensation in turn for Parr’s murder. They were perfectly willing to stump up, shake hands all round, and thereupon forget the whole business.’

  – E. Hahn, Raffles of Singapore.

  The British were unwilling to let matters rest there. What the Malays viewed as a regular judicial procedure was seen in London as an example of the dreaded ‘running amok’ of the natives. Afraid to tackle the chiefs directly, they seized lesser protagonists, tied them to the mouths of their cannon and blew them to pieces. Then they systematically destroyed the peaceful villages within a certain radius of the town, shot the buffalo, razed the buildings, grubbed up the fruit trees and dispersed the inhabitants. This hardly helped the colony to thrive.

  Raffles recognized the need for a fresh start. He invited the chiefs to ponder with him how they could all make things better for everyone. He abolished the harsh regime of bodyguards and asked the chiefs to dinner. As a final sign that he understood the Malay point of view in the matter, he repealed the law forbidding men to carry the daggers that were the sign of freeborn dignity. Thus, when Sukarno married and was unable to attend the ceremony in Bengkulu, he sent his dagger. In accordance with tradition, the bride married that.

  * * *

  Bung Karno was exiled to Bengkulu by the Dutch in 1938. He had been in Flores for five years and hated it. He was half dead from malaria and it was said the Dutch moved him to Bengkulu for his health. It is hard to believe this was not a cynical joke. Bengkulu is notorious for its malaria. It was true in Raffles’ day and it’s true now.

  Bung Karno did not enjoy the town, describing it as ‘outstanding in absolutely no regard’. Fort Marlborough, Raffles’ fort, was in the hands of the Dutch police and for a while he was sequestered there, looking out perhaps through a Georgian window at Ambonese troops under Dutch officers and trying to make sense of the world.

  On the other hand, he disliked the orthodox Islam of the locals. Being half Balinese, half Javanese, florid religious syncretism was in his blood. The mosque he built is still there, a plain, unfussy structure with a multi-levelled Balinese-ish roof, just down the road from the Bengkulu obelisks. The locals ungenerously complained because it did not segregate male from female worshippers.

  Nearby is his house. There are several ‘Bung Karno’ houses in Indonesia. The one in Flores has a well, dug with his own hands, to whose waters are attributed healing powers. Once someone tried to heal my swollen feet with it. The house contains relics with their various – often unsought – symbolisms; the marital bed, the walking stick, the violin rotted and collapsed through termites’ mining, its strings a pubic tangle.

  The Bengkulu house also has its cult objects, the imponderabilia of everyday life, exactly the sort of thing we miss for Raffles. Its simplicity and homeliness seem incapable of bearing its burden of history. There are the photographs, Bung Karno somehow always staring into the camera, aloof, solitary, looking as if his face has been glued in afterwards. There are the clothes of his wife, sequined and outdated, the books – Dutch, French, Indonesian, politics, music, a study of manuscript traditions concerning the adoration of the Virgin Mary, another on the use of parachutists in war. A big red book on malaria has a slavering, golden mosquito on the cover. In front of the house there is the bicycle, a moral object, like George Washington’s axe or Nelson’s telescope. Generations of Indonesian children have been invited to consider the ethical implications of this machine with its vicious iron spikes projecting through its exploded saddle.

  ‘Because he truly loved that bicycle, he [Sukarno] cleaned it morning and evening until it shone. As it happened, there was only the one bicycle in the house. But Tjokro also had sons who wanted to try to ride Soekarno’s bicycle. But they hesitated to borrow it because it was still regarded as new.

  But one evening Harsono could no longer contain his urge to ride Soekarno’s bicycle. Quietly, he wheeled the bicycle out of the house and he even rode all round the town of Surabaya. But, unluckily, on one street he rode into a tree to avoid a horse-dra
wn cab. The front of the bike was damaged. Harsono tried to get it mended in a garage. But it could not be put back like it was before.

  In this affair, Harsono’s mistake was not to be honest with Soekarno. It would have been only right that Soekarno was angry with him to the point of booting him up the backside. After this, Soekarno was sorry. In secret, he saved up again cent by cent until he had eight guilders like before. Once more, he went off to buy a Fongers bicycle but not to replace the old one. Instead, he wanted to give it to Harsono. Of course, Harsono was amazed to receive such a gift. But what could he do? Refuse it? Of course not!

  Looking at this affair, one sees that Soekarno’s spirit was often unpredictable. Shortly before, wasn’t he so jealous of something a friend of his owned – that was better than his own – that he grabbed it and flung it away? (Remember the story of the spinning top.) However, now that his bicycle had been bent by Harsono, did he not save up his money in secret so he could give it away?’

  – R. Rahim, Bung Karno Masa Muda

  * * *

  Raffles had no intention of vegetating in Bengkulu. He immediately began to fret at the constraints placed upon him. Raffles was one of the first people to realize the importance of public opinion, and Dutch historians have seen him as someone who cynically constructed for himself a totally spurious reputation with blocks hewn from the moral credit of their own nation. He certainly understood how to arouse British chauvinism, but the constant references to British national honour and credit should not be too swiftly seen as hypocritical – as they would be if our own politicians had made them. Honour still meant something in the age of Raffles. His officers still fought duels.

  The first thing to do was to redraw the frontiers of his domain. He began a war of provocation with the Dutch, arguing about the interpretation of the Anglo-Dutch treaty, refusing to hand back the Dutch city of Padang, issuing protests. They were as nervous as cats at having him in the archipelago, convinced he was their dedicated enemy. They were right; he was. And the basis of that enmity was quite simply that it was in the best interests of the natives to be under benevolent British rule rather than groaning beneath local tyrants or Dutch oppression. Nothing steels a man’s purpose like moral indignation.