the prominent malaria expert. This was the night of our parting. Dr. Janssen had already instructed the office to pay me two months’ salary and to purchase a first-class ticket to Java for me.65
From my friends I heard, “By inviting you to the meeting of the Tuan Besar and by wishing you farewell, Dr. Janssen has shown his appreciation and has restored your honor, which has all this time been trampled on by the Tuan Besar.” But Bookkeeper No. 1, who had been the first to reject my request to become acquainted over two years ago, was whispering right and left: “What’s the use of buying a first-class ticket for that inlander Tan Malaka? He probably won’t even enjoy it (how could an inlander appreciate good things?).”
One day before I had left [the Netherlands] for Indonesia, I received an envelope containing money to cover my expenses and to serve as a mark of appreciation for a lecture on the institutions and traditions of a certain region in Indonesia, which I had been asked to give by Tuan Boissevain of the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce.66 This was a normal enough event. But what happened afterwards was unusual indeed. As I was traveling on the train from Bussum to Amsterdam, an old man sitting beside me in the third-class carriage asked, his eyes sharp as he spoke: “Are you Tan Malaka?” I acknowledged this with a little hesitation since I did not know the man. “I am Janssen,” he said. “I have received a report on schools for the coolie children in the Deli plantation. Why don’t you take a look at it?” When I began to read he said, “Just put it aside for now, and read it when you get home. After that I would like you to come to my office in Amsterdam to give me your views on it.” So it was that in his Amsterdam office Dr. Janssen offered me the job of working with Tuan W in Deli to develop an educational system suited to the conditions there.
[65] After parting from Dr. Janssen, and after being in Semarang several months, I received a letter from my teacher Horensma, which contained greetings from Dr. Janssen. The letter also said that Dr. Janssen was still extremely interested in me. And, in fact, after I arrived in the Netherlands, having been exiled from Indonesia at the beginning of 1922, I heard from my friends that he was present at one of my talks on education. And in one of the meetings during the campaign for the election to the Netherlands lower house, for which I was a candidate, I saw a relative of his.67 But I never met Dr. Janssen again. (His son, P. W. Janssen, is well known as a Dutch philanthropist.)68
Although possessing such noble ideals, he was sufficiently intelligent to sense the wide chasm between our political positions. It was not only on this occasion, nor only with white people either, that I was to experience the playing out of this tragedy of life: that you can go through good and bad with someone, eat and drink together, and yet be on opposite sides of the barricades.
Chapter 7
SEMARANG—THE RED CITY
[66] In July 1921, Semarang was known as Indonesia’s Red center. The present revolution, May 1947, has yet to overturn that characterization. In 1921, Semarang was the headquarters of the VSTP, the Vereeniging van Spoor en Tramweg Personeel [Union of Railway and Tramway Employees], the best-organized union in the whole of Indonesia. The VSTP was established in 1904; by 1921 it had reached a dues-paying membership of 17,000, had branches everywhere, and had a modern and well-organized printing press and newspaper.1 Semaun was the head of the union, aided by several Dutch employees who had had strike experience in the Netherlands and who can be said to have been the pioneers of the trade union movement in Indonesia.2 Apart from the VSTP there was also the PKI (Partai Komunis di India, formerly known as the ISDP, Indische Sociaal Democratische Partai), established by Dutch revolutionary socialists in 1914.3 When I arrived in Semarang, Semaun was the head of that party too. The Dutch leaders like Sneevliet and Baars had long been exiled.4 In 1922, after being recognized as a section of the Third International, the ISDP changed its name to PKI5 and issued the publications Het Vrije Woord and Soeara Ra’jat.6 The latter was headed by Darsono, the deputy head of the PKI. The PKI can be regarded as a cadre organization, while the party of the common people was the Red Sarekat Islam of Semarang, severed from the center by discipline imposed by the Central Sarekat Islam.7 To round out the picture of Semarang at that time, I must mention the Nationaal Indische Partij (NIP), which included among its leaders Dr. Douwes Dekker (now Dr. Settiabuddhi), Dr. Tjipto Mangunkusumo, and Suwardi Surjaningrat (now Ki Hadjar Dewantara).
[67] In 1921 the atmosphere throughout Indonesia approached that during the period from 1913 to 1919. The world economy had reached the peak of its upturn (in 1920) and was beginning to decline again. Except for its Deli branch, the NIP, the oldest national party, no longer made its voice heard.8 However, Sarekat Islam, at its third congress in Surabaya, had claimed eighty-seven branches and 450,000 members.9 According to the Dutch newspaper De Gids, Sarekat Islam had at one time during World War I been able to call out six million members and sympathizers to its general meetings throughout the islands. But this was all brought to an end because of the conflict with the Semarang group. The Jambi war in which the SI had taken part, the riots in Toli-toli in Sulawesi, and the Garut disturbances over Afdeling B were all ancient history.10 The actions of Dutch revolutionaries in the Soldaten-Bond, led by Sneevliet and Brandsteder, had shaken Dutch imperialism considerably.11 But they were only memories now. The PKI had but a small cadre, most of which was in Semarang.12
With the decline in spirit of Sarekat Islam, the Garut affair, the arrest of Tjokroaminoto, and the divisions within the SI, we saw a reemergence of the confidence of Dutch imperialism, which had actually been weak in opposing SI during the First World War. This renewed self-confidence was strengthened through the introduction of various laws shackling freedom of association, assembly, press, and speech. These laws significantly restricted human and democratic rights and hindered both the nationalist and trade-union movements. Nevertheless, they were all obvious traps that could be avoided or bypassed. But there was another trap which could not be seen by the leadership and which lay like a hidden bomb that could explode at any time. This was what was known as the exorbitante rechten— extraordinary powers held by the governor general of the Dutch East Indies which enabled him to exile any movement leader regarded as a danger to the public order (read: danger to what the Dutch colonizers saw as order). As long as the governor general held these powers, anyone considered a threat to Dutch colonialism could be arrested and exiled with no opportunity for self-defense in a legal and open trial.13
[68] In such an atmosphere, the November Promises, wherein the Dutch colonial government under pressure agreed to independence for Indonesia, were worth nothing and were little by little withdrawn.14 What was granted was the playhouse on Pejambon, Batavia, known as the Volksraad.15 And along with this came press, assembly, and association traps and the power to exile Indonesians from their homeland and society, or to the jungle as in Digul.16
“It is a long way to the prairy [sic], a long way to go.”17 I did not arrive in the midst of a fiery political situation, where the murba strove to implement a clear program through a disciplined and tight organization.18 The time of the struggling murba was far behind and that of a national organization—united and disciplined, able to seize and hold an area larger than Europe and having seventy million inhabitants—had not yet arrived. It was fitting, then, that I should enter Semarang through the door of education.
When I left Deli for Semarang, I was convinced that I wanted to set up an educational system suited to the existing needs and spirit of the masses. I had already determined the basic direction to take, and my experience at Deli for nearly two years served to reinforce this. What I needed now was a place where I might work in freedom, raw material in the form of pupils, a building and equipment, and, what was of equal importance, an environment that placed value on the work of education.
When I stopped in at the house of my teacher Horensma, now promoted to inspector of Indonesian primary schools and based in Jakarta, he asked whether I wanted to work in
