Book summary: Indonesia, Etc

Summary: Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation is a 2014 travel book by epidemiologist and former journalist Elizabeth Pisani, which following her travels throughout Indonesia in 2012-2013. Pisani visits Sumba, Flores, Sulawesi, the Maluku Islands, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Java. She mostly visits smaller cities and villages, most of which see few tourists. Along the way, she discusses recent Indonesian history, culture, politics, and economics, as well as the logistics of her trip and the people she meets during it.

Improbable Nation

It was the Japanese occupation that really catalysed Indonesian independence. By dispatching the Dutch so swiftly, the Japanese shattered the myth of European superiority.

Espousing ‘Asia for the Asians’, they encouraged Sukarno and other nationalists to prepare for self-rule within an Asian commonwealth.

Very like the founding fathers of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Indonesia’s young leaders disagreed about the best political format for the new country: should it be federal, or a unitary state with a strong central government? Hatta and Sjahrir, who were to become Vice President and Prime Minister respectively, were both from West Sumatra.

They feared that in a centralized state, Javanese colonizers would simply replace the Dutch, imposing their will on other islands and cultures.

Sukarno, later President, believed the nation’s disparate elements could be held together only by a strong centre. He invoked a mythical past in which the Sriwijaya and Majapahit empires ruled the whole area coloured Dutch on the imperial map.

Jakarta

Jakarta is not an easy city to love. It is a vast, chaotic, selfish, stroppy monument to ambition and consumption, a city that seems to know no bounds. When the Dutch left, it was home to 600,000 people. But in the years that followed, Jakarta burst its banks and sprawled over 661 square kilometres, 40 per cent of it below sea level.

By the time I started my trip in 2011, there were 17 times as many people living in Jakarta as there had been at independence, and the metropolis was gobbling up surrounding towns too. Greater Jakarta is now home to 28 million people – the second largest urban agglomeration in the world after Greater Tokyo.

Unlike Tokyo, Jakarta has no mass transit system to speak of, so traffic jams are legendary. A few years ago, the city government decided it would cut congestion on the city’s main arteries by insisting that in rush hour, each car must have at least three passengers. Again, Jakarta’s infinitely creative residents made the most of the change.

Within days, the pavements of the feeder roads were crowded with unemployed people hiring themselves out as ‘jockeys’, extra passengers for rich people’s smooth, air-conditioned cars.

Cloves

The biggest consumer of Indonesia’s cloves nowadays are Indonesia’s smokers, who like their cigarettes scented with the spice, not least because it doubles as an anaesthetic and smoothes the passage of toxins into the lungs.

The country smokes 223 billion clove cigarettes, or kreteks, every year, thirteen times more than ordinary ‘white’ cigarettes.

Indonesia produces nearly 80 per cent of the world’s cloves, and its cigarette industry translates most of them into the thick, languorous smoke that hangs over virtually every conversation about politics, family affairs or the price of rice or rubber in rural Indonesia. This did not escape the attention of the Suharto family.

The President’s youngest son Tommy decided to try a replay of the strategy that made the VOC rich three centuries earlier: a clove monopoly.

Clove trees are moody as teenagers, coming out with smilingly generous crops one year, then sulking through periods of low productivity that last an agonizingly unpredictable length of time. Tommy claimed his enforced, fixed-price purchase of all the country’s cloves was a way of stabilizing prices for farmers. Then he sold them on at three times what he paid for them.

Striking at kreteks in Indonesia is like messing with tea in Britain. Smoking is a social activity: every kretek smoked became an opportunity to have a little rant about the excesses of the First Family. That’s over 600 million rants a day, nationwide. The normally silent Indonesian press began openly poking fun at Tommy’s ham-fisted greed.

Suharto had little in common with the flat-nosed, curly-haired, plain-speaking men and women from the faraway eastern islands of Indonesia where cloves were grown, and he did little to defend their interests.

Javanese farmers, on the other hand, were closer to the Old Man’s heart. He rarely appeared happier than when he was among farmers in the rice paddies close to his birthplace, speaking in Javanese, using metaphors from the wayang shadow-plays which everyone in rural Java knew by heart.

These were his people; when the greed of Suharto’s own children threatened the welfare of Javanese farmers, he sided with the peasants.

Adat

Adat is one of those Indonesian words that defies translation; quite specific, but somehow hard to grasp, like a cloud. Crudely, Adat is a cultural tradition, Adat is rarely spoken of in big cities like Jakarta.

But in many islands, the engines of communal life – birth and death, marriage and divorce, inheritance, conservation, education – are fuelled by the body of lore and transmitted wisdom that is adat.

Indonesia’s diversity is not just geographic and cultural; different groups are essentially living at different points in human history, all at the same time. In the early twenty-first century, some parts of the country are hyper-modern. In other areas, people spend their days much as their ancestors would have done.

This presents the nation’s leaders with a headache. If ancient and modern Indonesia coexist, which should they make laws for?

Look at Bali, which has one of the most ‘modern’ economies in Indonesia, and one of its stickier cultures. Bali was the last bastion of the Hindu courts that once dotted Sumatra and Java, and it has inherited their traditions of pomp. Now hardly a day goes by without a miniaturized version of those court ceremonies. For every temple festival, every tooth filing, every torching of the funeral pyre, people knock off work, get dressed up, beat the gongs of adat.

Sumatra

One thing that both unites and divides Indonesia is food. On the streets and in hole-in-the-wall restaurants, food is provided by a handful of itinerant tribes who have cooked their way across the nation.

Most famously, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra who gave us Nasi Padang, the cuisine named after their provincial capital.

The Minangkabau gave us the word most Indonesians use to describe migration: merantau. Merantau means to travel abroad to seek one’s fortune. It’s something Minangkabau men have always done. Young boys could live with their mother, but they had to move out when they grew up.

The West Sumatrans conquered the nation one restaurant at a time, just as McDonald’s conquered the United States.

Padang restaurants are signalled by a truncated version of the buffalo-horn roof, often sticking incongruously out from a row of flat-fronted shop-houses selling mobile phones or motorcycle parts. If there’s no space for a curve of corrugated zinc, then they will at least have a Minang house logo painted on the window.

The symbol is universally distributed across the nation, as recognizable as the Golden Arches to fast-food fans.

Spoils of the Earth

In terms of land mass, Indonesia is the fifteenth biggest country in the world. But it is among the world’s

top three producers of palm oil, rubber, rice, coffee, cocoa, coconuts, cassava, green beans and papayas, as well as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and vanilla.

It’s also in the world’s

top ten for tea, tobacco, maize and groundnuts, together with avocados, bananas, cabbages, cashews, chilli, cucumbers, ginger, pineapples, mangoes, sweet potatoes and the humble pumpkin.

It’s a top-ten producer of forestry products, and pulls more fish out of its seas and waterways than any country except China.

And there’s another layer of bounty, under the crust.

Indonesia sits above huge chambers of natural gas. The Grasberg mine in Papua has more known gold reserves than anywhere else on the planet, and it’s not even a gold mine; its day job is to produce copper.

Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of tin and coal, after China, and it’s by far the biggest exporter of both minerals. It produces bauxite (for aluminium) and lots of nickel – again, it’s already the world’s number-two producer (after Russia, this time) and number-one exporter.

Aceh

Aceh has always been rich. For centuries it sold pepper, camphor, gold, silk and other goods to Arab traders.

The threat of separatism has hung like a thundercloud over the nation since the earliest days of the republic, when Sukarno prevailed over fellow nationalists who sought either a federal or an Islamic state. Several parts of the new nation revolted in the 1950s.

Rebels wanting an Islamic government fought Jakarta in West Java, South Sulawesi and West Sumatra as well as in Aceh, while at the other end of the country, Maluku tried to hive off a Christian state. The republican army squashed all of those rebellions; their grip on the nation tightened even further when Suharto came to power.

But his rule fertilized another type of resentment. Jakarta is stealing the riches of our land and using it to build highways in Java, complained people in Riau, Sulawesi and Kalimantan as well as in Aceh and Papua. By the late 1980s, several parts of Indonesia were disgruntled. But there were active rebel movements in only three of those areas – East Timor, Papua (at that time called Irian Jaya) and Aceh.

It wasn’t until the tsunami of 2004 swept away 170,000 Acehnese lives that the unelected leaders of the movement, most of whom had not set foot in Aceh throughout the decade and a half of fighting, conceded that it may be time for the killing to stop.

The torrent of support from ordinary Indonesians helped too; the rebels could no longer argue that Indonesians wanted only to take from Aceh, not to give.

Kalimantan

Kalimantan is the Indonesian part of the giant island of Borneo, which dominates the map of island South East Asia. Though it’s relatively empty, Kalimantan manages to be racially complex. The forests of the interior have always been home to the many tribes that now crowd under the umbrella term ‘Dayak’.

And as early as the eighteenth century, a large Chinese community established an independent state in the west of the island. Much more recently, migrants from Java, Madura and other overcrowded parts of Indonesia filtered in, some on government-backed transmigration programmes, others drawn by work in the oilfields and coal mines that have made southern and eastern Kalimantan among the richest parts of the nation.

Nearly one in five people in Kalimantan was born elsewhere.

Some of the first written records of life in the islands that coalesced into Indonesia are written in Chinese.

Traders from mainland China have been an integral part of the archipelago’s economy for well over a thousand years, and they have contributed culturally too. The Chinese admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from Yunnan, was among those who introduced Islam to the ports of northern Java.

Many of the earliest Chinese immigrants were actually traders who had the doors to their home ports slammed on them by a Ming Dynasty emperor who banned private trade in the late 1300s. Unable to go home to China, these men settled in ports along the north coast of Java. They learned Javanese and married local girls.

In the mid-1700s the local rulers of at least four cities in Java were of Chinese descent.

The Chinese also brought skills that local rulers needed. Princes and sultans, admiring the merchants’ business acumen, often appointed them as harbour masters, customs officers and tax collectors. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, followed suit.

They used ethnic Chinese islanders to collect an unpopular rice tax that funded the company’s many skirmishes with local sultans and princelings.

Surabaya

Surabaya is about a third the size of Jakarta. It sits about three-quarters of the way east along the north coast of Java and has a huge port, a thriving industrial sector, and one of the biggest red-light districts in South East Asia. When I had last visited in the early 2000s, it seemed quite likely that the city would follow Jakarta on the road to perdition.

Now, a decade later, the riverside cruising areas have turned into well-lit, landscaped parks with free wifi throughout, and Surabaya is virtually litter-free.

It is hard for someone who has not visited Indonesia to feel the full impact of those last five words: Surabaya is virtually litter-free.

It is hard, too, to explain just how pervasive garbage is in this country. It is one of the strongest red threads binding the nation, and it is woven from the detritus of the commercial brands that get micro-packaged into sachets and find their way into every kiosk in the land.

Surabaya seemed to me like a city that had managed to preserve some of the better aspects of Javanese collectivism even while modernizing. Surabaya did not terrorize the ‘little people’, did not threaten punishment or impose unenforceable fines on people who litter.

No, the city did something singularly un-Indonesian. It worked through incentives, rewarding people for doing the right thing rather than punishing them for doing the wrong thing. And it showed that incentives can work at the community level.

Conclusion

Almost all Indonesians are bound into at least one important web of mutual obligation, often several. This provides many Indonesians with a quiet sense of security; daily life seems less anxious than in more socially fragmented nations. Faith (and the fatalism that so often shadows it) plays a part here too; there’s little point being anxious about a future that is in God’s hands.

Inevitably where personal networks count for so much, private and public obligations become tangled up, and the threads of collectivism get bound into stouter ropes of patronage and corruption.

Though international observers rail at the cost of corruption in Indonesia, few give much thought to the role it plays in tying the archipelago’s mosaic of islands and disparate peoples into a nation. In Indonesia’s current Etc., patronage is the price of unity.

Citizens of a bounteous land, Indonesians are united, too, by an extraordinary generosity of spirit, a tolerance of difference. Arguably, they can be too tolerant, too slow to take a stand in defence of larger freedoms against a minority of crooks, thugs or self-serving leaders.

And when the tolerance breaks down, Indonesians throughout the islands have shown themselves capable of brutality on a grand scale.

But the breakdowns are few, considering the country’s diversity. No other nation has welded so much difference together into so generally peaceable a whole in the space of less than seventy years