And then, finally, there is the overall siting of Krakatoa, halfway between Java and Sumatra. It lies directly above what might be called a hinge point around which the two islands are slowly swinging, the Strait ever widening, the islands turning like the pages of a northward-closing book – Sumatra moving to the north-east, Java to the north, Krakatoa in the middle.
There is certainly a complex network of faults in the Sunda Strait. Their existence is one of the reasons why there is a strait there, an absence of island mass, in the first place. Slowly, very slowly, science is trying to make some sense out of the complexity of it all. Geophysicists in Troy, New York, have spent recent years placing a rash of Global Positioning System receivers on the nearby islands, and have found that all manner of tiny movements are taking place – that the main subduction continues to creep away, as it has done for millions of years, but that tiny little sideways jogs are taking place too, small weakenings, creations of a blizzard of tiny faults that make the region into the most remarkable of geological laboratories – a fascinating study, even if Krakatoa had never existed.
The basic tectonic structure of the region: the Australian Plate is moving north to collide with the Asian Plate, while all manner of stresses and faults build up along the collision zones by Java and Sumatra.
But it does exist, and will play its tricks on the world once again, and before very much longer. The processes that led to the events of August 1883 are unstoppable. There is a subduction factory of monumental proportions to the south and east of Sumatra. It is uniquely sited around and beneath the small island that lies on the hinge-point between Sumatra and Java. The island is surrounded by the volatile waters of the sea, water that causes mayhem if it gets within a mile of boiling magma. The island itself is surrounded by countless small faults and zones of weakness, as well as by a raft of components of basic rock – acidic rock, sedimentary rock – that is twisting and turning every which way under a barrage of stresses and strains that exist more notably here than anywhere else on earth. Small wonder, indeed, that there is only one Krakatoa. The place where it blew itself apart is so geologically dangerous that one can almost imagine there being room for a dozen more.
*
They counted their dead, and they buried them where they could, which was usually where they found them. The Dutch officials reacted with commendable speed, burying bodies at the rate of several hundred a day, drenching the swamps with carbolic acid, pulling down wreckage, setting cleansing fires. The king back in Holland opened a fund. Dutch mothers sent blankets, tents, food. A flotilla of ships travelled east, to see what could be done. The Great World Circus staged benefit performances in Batavia, before packing up and going home, taking their distressed little elephant with them. The process of rebuilding began, with the Fourth Point lighthouse at Anjer, remade with iron plates, hurried back into operation to ensure the safety of the commercial shipping lanes, a symbolic beginning of the rebirth. The cable lines to and from west Java and south Sumatra were repaired. The aid workers came into town. The charities set up shop. The scientists fanned out to investigate, to report, to recommend.
But in time they all went home again, to deal with other problems and to answer fresher questions. They left the coastal people of Java and Sumatra, and those island shore-dwellers known as the Bantenese, among their patched-up ruins, and in time they forgot all about them. They did not stop to wonder where these people might eventually look for sustenance and succour.
Perhaps they should have done. For it turned out that not a few of these unhappy, dispossessed and traumatized people eventually looked to the west, to Mecca, and to the benevolent power of their Islamic religion to answer their needs. This was a political and religious consequence of the disaster – a consequence entirely unanticipated by the ruling Dutch colonists – that was to have the most profound and longest-lasting fallout, for the Indies, for Europe, and beyond.
9
REBELLION OF A RUINED PEOPLE
The leaders formed an élite group, which developed and transmitted the time-honoured prophecies or vision of history concerning the coming of the righteous king – the Mahdi.
— from The Peasants' Revolt of Banten in 1888
by Sartono Kartodirdjo, 1966
The central market in Serang, an unremarkable crossroads town a few miles inland from the little pepper port of Banten, sells everything and attracts everyone. On Tuesday 2 October 1883 – five weeks after the eruption, while the dead of Java and Sumatra were still being buried and the ruins of the towns and villages on the coast were still being cleared – a Dutch fusilier stopped by to purchase his weekly supply of tobacco.
In normal circumstances it would count for nothing that this man was a part of the ruling foreign enginework of the Indies: the merchants of Serang were ecumenical in their pursuit of trade, and the tobacco-seller, like everyone else, would happily accept the custom of anyone – brown, yellow or, as in this case, a white European from the curiously privileged group who ruled over them.
But these were not normal circumstances. All of a sudden there seemed to be a curious feeling of tension in the air. The Dutch had been aware of it for some days now – a kind of muted resentment, a vague hostility that made people look away, or mutter among themselves in hushed tones whenever a Dutch official happened by. Perhaps they were imagining things. After all, the Krakatoa relief operations – all organized by the Dutch – were now in full swing, Dutch money was pouring into the area, shelters were being built, roads cleared, businesses reopened. The Dutch governor-general himself, aboard the steam-yacht The King of the Netherlands, had paid an official visit.
The local people had every reason, one would have thought, to be grateful for the colonists' help in speeding along their programme of rescue and rebuilding. It wasn't the fault of the Dutch that the tragedy had happened: but, without a murmur of complaint, the Dutch were quite generously helping the people who were worst affected. True, the relief efforts organized from Rotterdam and Amsterdam were more concerned with ensuring that Dutch-owned businesses were able to stagger back on to their feet; but if the native people derived benefit as a result – well, that was in part what colonialism was all about, surely? And they thus had ample reason to look kindly on their faraway benefactors, n'est-ce pas?
But then here in Serang, the unimaginable happened. It was while the young soldier was in the process of handing over a fistful of guilders for a package of fine-cured and locally grown tobacco with which to pack his meerschaum, that a bearded man, dressed entirely in white and armed with a curved dagger, suddenly threw himself on the soldier and began to stab him repeatedly in the back.
The astonished fusilier, gravely wounded, managed to stagger into a nearby Chinese shop. The attacker, his task completed to his satisfaction, ran away and was soon lost in the throng. The market was thrown into chaos. Nothing like this had happened before. Troops from the garrison – one of the five in Java's First Military Region, and one of the smaller – immediately flooded into the area, and promptly arrested a number of known malcontents. But none could be proven to have been the attacker: the would-be assassin seemed to have got away with it.
Then much the same thing happened again six weeks later. Another young man, also dressed ostentatiously in white robes, somehow managed to infiltrate the garrison headquarters itself, and when he was challenged brandished a long knife and slightly wounded a locally raised sentry named Umar Djaman. The attacker was this time captured and interrogated: military investigators, bewildered by the man's confusing answers to their questions, suggested in their report that the motive for his assault was an inexplicable case of ‘extreme religious zeal’.
To the local military commander the attacks were unprecedented, and sinister. True, there had only been two of them, and they might well have been perpetrated by the same deranged man (though the assailant held in custody in November refused to confirm that he had also carried out the October incident). But two attacks or not, it seemed to the
puzzled soldiery, and to those already aware of the sullen mood, that there had been a mysterious outbreak of a weirdly fanatical anger, and that it was for some reason directed specifically against the Dutch masters. It would be prudent, the soldiers suggested to their political superiors, that the authorities from henceforth be permanently on their guard.
They were right to be careful. The events in Serang that autumn turned out to be the beginning of a long and exceptionally violent period in western Java – a period that culminated in a memorably dangerous and politically ominous rebellion that erupted five years later, in 1888. The Banten Peasants' Revolt, as the episode is now generally known, is thought by many today to be a turning point in the region's colonial history – one of the milestones on the road leading to the eventual expulsion of the Europeans in 1949, and the creation of modern independent Indonesia. There had been many small rebellions in Java over the years; but what happened in Banten had a significance that transcended many of the other outbreaks of violence and hostility.
For what took place among the population of the north-western tip of Java between 1883 and 1888 was not, however, of political significance alone. The time also had great religious significance, since it marked a period when Islam had become fully entwined with the local political developments of the day and – so many scholars now accept – had also begun actually to dictate at least some of the major political developments of the period. It was not the first time, of course. In India, the Mughal rulers had become amply caught up in the politics of the subcontinent; and in Spain, ever since the Arab governor of Tangier had invaded via Gibraltar in AD 711, Arabs were to run large tracts of the peninsula for much of the next four centuries. Islam had wielded enormous power in southern Europe too.
In the East Indies, matters proceeded rather differently. A close look at these five years, particularly among the unusually pious people of Banten, shows clearly the beginning of militant and anti-Western Islamic movements – movements spawned in Java, but that have since become an important feature of the realpolitik of the modern world. An examination of the events that began with this pair of attacks on the colonial military in the autumn of 1883 suggests that the driving force behind most of the subsequent violence in west Java – prefigured by the bearded men in white, acting out of their ‘extreme religious zeal’ – was without a doubt fundamentalist, militant, anti-colonial, anti-infidel Islam.
Many reasons have been put forward to account for the late nineteenth century's upsurge in anti-Dutch feeling in the region – and for the parallel upsurge in Islamic zealotry in the East Indies. Poverty, alleged colonial tyranny, corruption, the unbearable heaviness of the imperial yoke – all of these factors, here in the Indies as in a score of other territories similarly burdened by the authority of outsiders – bore down on the local people and, as their education and awareness of the world increased, began to make them restless. Sporadic revolts, irritatingly persistent outbreaks in other regions of Dutch East India – in Aceh and Macassar and the Moluccas particularly – all appear to have been driven by what historians would later accept was a growing mood of restlessness – just as anti-colonial movements were developing at much the same time in India* and Malaya, and elsewhere.
In Java and Sumatra, however, there was one additional factor that seemed to have played a role in fomenting a mood of general popular unease – and that, surprisingly, was the devastating eruption of the huge volcano. The geological processes that destroyed Krakatoa, in other words, appear to have played no small part in creating the political mood of the moment. That the volcano and the economic and social dislocation it caused had an effect of some sort seems now undeniable; but whether its impact was limited and peripheral, or whether it can be linked to the development of movements that in turn led to the eventual seeing-off of the Dutch, is a matter of some debate.
The immense geophysical turbulence of the East Indies – with twenty-one active volcanoes and ten active solfataras on the island of Java alone – has long played an important part in mystical belief. Each volcano has a god – Krakatoa's being the widely feared Orang Alijeh – and he readily displays his anger with earthly conditions by spewing forth fire and gas and lava. But more: the Javanese in particular take a global view of their vulcanicity, believing that their island is where the earth and heaven have been arranged closest to one another, and where transmissions between one sphere and the other are more common and more intimate than anywhere else on the planet.
So, on Java, volcanic eruptions are much more than simple expressions of dismay by distempered deities. They are astral messages sent directly down to the earth, and of an importance that would be ignored only at man's peril. Given such a system of beliefs, it might perhaps not be wholly unreasonable to suppose that Krakatoa's almighty act of self-immolation in August 1883 was seen locally as possessing the most profound of inner meanings.
So did the eruption somehow act as a political catalyst? Did it, for reasons rooted deep in this Javanese mysticism, drive a wedge between the terrified and dispossessed people and the paternalistic Dutch authorities? Did it then nudge them towards the comforting stability of Islam? And did Islam's subsequent defiant stance against colonialism then somehow offer such succour and comfort to those who were dispossessed and terrified that they wholeheartedly accepted the invitation to follow its precepts and demands, however extreme they might be?
And still further: did Islam come to act as a banner under which these people might turn against the Dutchmen whom they could now, all of a sudden and with the clarity of a new perspective, see not as their benevolent leaders and well-intentioned mentors but, as so many imperial agents are eventually viewed, as their oppressors? And if Krakatoa played a part in this chain of events, then can the eruption of Krakatoa come to be seen in a sense as an unwitting, readily adopted political event in and of itself – an event with effects that would resonate in the East Indies for many years to come?
At the time of the eruption, the Dutch in the East Indies were showing signs of momentarily losing their grip. The imperial purpose, quite coincidentally, seemed to be faltering. The old self-confidence of the Hollanders had taken a beating, and a mood of reform and change was in the air.
The cause of their discomfiture, though they might be loath to admit it, had been the publication in Amsterdam twenty years earlier of the book that had sent a shudder through the conscience of an entire Dutch people, and forced them to wonder just why they were running, in so questionable a way, a colony so far from home. The short novel that had had this extraordinary effect, Netherlands-wide, was written by a man who briefly hid behind the pseudonym Multatuli, and it was called Max Havelaar.
The author was in fact a young colonial official named Eduard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli, a somewhat self-pitying by-name, is Javanese for ‘I have endured much’). In 1855, as the protégé of the governor-general of the day, he was appointed Assistant Resident of a small west Javan regency called Lebak, which is coincidentally not far from the garrison town of Serang. He arrived there under the impression that he was on a secret mission to correct a slew of injustices that he knew had been visited on the local people – but over the three months he remained in the post he managed, by a relentless campaign of whistle-blowing, to ruffle the feathers of the entire Dutch administration. After uncovering tales not just of mismanagement and inadvertent cruelty, but of murder and corruption on a far greater scale than he had imagined, he resigned, returned to Holland and eventually wrote the book that was to become one of the great landmarks of recent Dutch literature.
It was published in 1860, to the shock, astonishment and dismay of an entire country, which learned for the first time the details of the manner in which their officials were running their most distant and wealthiest possession. The book was a savage indictment of the colonial attitudes of the Dutch – and in particular of that astonishingly exploitative Dutch invention known as the Kultuurstelsel, the Cultivation System, which was introduced in 1830 and which co
mpelled all villages to set aside one fifth of their crops for the government in order to pay the cripplingly high land taxes. All villagers were held collectively responsible for the tax payment, and to ensure that responsibility was met no one could travel beyond his or her village without official permission – which was seldom given.
The system made the Dutch rulers fabulously rich; but upon its exposure in Max Havelaar one critic wrote that he had now seen demonstrated ‘that almost nothing of the great revenues from the island was devoted to the education or benefit of the natives; that no mission or evangelical work was undertaken, or even allowed, by this foremost Protestant people of Europe; and that next to nothing in the way of public works or permanent improvements resulted to the advantage of those who toiled for the alien, absentee landlord, the country being drained of its wealth for the benefits of a distant monarch’.
The Dutch – government and planter alike, for Max Havelaar focused much of its attention on corruption within the coffee plantations – were condemned as ‘synonyms for all of rapacity, tyranny, extortion and cruelty’. Dekker cheekily dedicated his book to King Willem III – ‘as Emperor of the glorious realm… that coils yonder round the Equator like a girdle of emerald, and where millions of subjects are being maltreated and exploited in your name’. For doing so, and for daring to write so intemperate an exposé and to lay it before a smug, insouciant Dutch public, he was vilified, attacked and forced into the same kind of exile (he died in Germany) that was suffered by the similarly evangelizing Dutchman, Vincent van Gogh.