0013: Australia in 1884: Ngarra Burra Ferra

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PREVIOUSLY on 1884 

Barmah Lake, Victoria, Australia

Sunday 3 August 1884

Rowing up the Murray river, separating Victoria from New South Wales, in a native canoe, Thomas Shadrach James passes several paddle boats carrying wool and other agricultural produce from the outback which will be unloaded at Echuca wharf and transported by land to Melbourne. The 24-years-old Tamil Mauritian started teaching Aborigines children at Maloga Mission three years ago, but this is the first time he traveled up the river. 

After arriving at the shore of the Barmah Lake, his companion William Cooper – a 23-years-old half-European half-Aborigines of the Yorta Yorta Nation – suggested that they make a simple ‘mia-mia’ – a temporary shelter. They then goes out to shoot some rabbits before the short mid-winter day ends.

While Thomas skins the preys, William makes fire to cook them under the winter night sky. The whole colony seems far away – the chaotic life at the mission which has become a small village, the busy town of Echuca, and furthest away Melbourne, Victoria’s capital.

As they finally sit down to eat, William looks across to the other shore of the lake and slowly tears come to his eyes. Thomas waits for him to tell why they came out so far in the bush, when he was only expecting a verbal reply to his question. 

It’s certainly not the question of William’s English. Among all the Australian natives that Thomas has met, he speaks in the best English. Daniel Matthews, who founded the mission, told him that from knowing nothing of the language 13-year-old William mastered the English alphabets in three days and became fluent in no time.

Aboriginal Australian women and children, Maloga.

William was born by the banks of the Murray River in 1860. His mother, Kitty, was a traditional Wollithiga woman who made first contact with white settlers and lives in the Moira Forest. Their Moitheriban group, are known as the “reed people” by neighboring tribes. Kitty and her children speak a dialect of Yorta Yorta. William’s father, with whom he has no contact, was a white man called James Cooper. 

Finally, William utters, “My mother told me about this place some years ago. She was just a girl when white men first came to Yorta Yorta land. You must have heard of Edward Curr?”

Thomas: Yes, the Father of Separation who split Victoria from New South Wales, right? His son, E.M. Curr, also published a book Recollections of Squatting in Victoria last year.

William: I wonder if he mentioned anything about the crime which he committed here 41 years ago. 

Thomas: I don’t recall reading that. What happened?

William wipes his tears and continues: In 1843, some Yorta Yorta men stole sheep from their farm out of hunger. the younger Curr, then reported to Henry Dana, the chief of the Native Police that large numbers of Aborigines had assembled on the south bank of the Murray River and claimed that they were "daily threatening the lives of his men and attempting to take the sheep". 

So they hatched a plan. Curr with a bullock dray and sheep acted as a decoy and enticed many of our people from their reed-bed shelter. The white officers then charged from their hiding place and seized Chief Warry whom Curr pointed out. They rounded up the rest like sheep, started firing and shot some of them in the river. At least 20 men, one woman, five children were shot and killed. My mother was among the few who survived. 

Thomas: … How atrocious.

William Oswald Hodgkinson's painting 'Bulla, Queensland, 1861' shows armed fighting.
(Credit: National Library of Australia)

William: There were many more of us before they came and took our lands, desecrate our sacred places and destroyed our livelihood. Some of us adapt by becoming slaves and servants in their farms, others hide away from them in the bush trying to survive by the old ways. 

Thomas: They said this whole continent is Terra Nullius – no man’s Land – because they don’t see natives as humans.

William: But taking our land is not all they want. What they really want is to eliminate us. They call us subhuman and vermin. After Sunday service, some would go out on “black hunts” or “black shoots” and shoot as many men, women and children as possible. They took pleasure in killing us for fun as though we were kangaroos. 

Thomas: I am very sorry for these horrific acts by fellow Christians who laid their hands on native people.

William: You are not responsible for what white people do. You are not white. I believe that your people have also suffered at the hands of white people. Even Daniel isn’t responsible. Even though he’s white, he’s different. He built the Mission to protect us from them. I remember the first day I met him ten years ago. He came to pick up my family, after taking a great risk to rescue my sister Lizzie and her baby from the white men who chained her and other native women as sex slaves. I don’t even know how to repay him.

Thomas: You don’t have to. As he always says, he does it to pay for his father’s sins. You know the story how his father used to be a slave trader? 

William: Yes, I know that his father was a sea captain who shipped enslaved people from Africa to the West Indies.

Thomas: One day when Captain John Matthews was on a voyage, he saw an apparition of a man pointing on the map in the chart house of the ship. With curiosity, he altered the course to that specific coordinates and found a man he saw in the chart-house adrift at sea in a raft. After being rescued, the man said he had prayed to God all night for an intervention. The captain marveled at the story and after soul-searching became converted. He threw the rum overboard, gave up slave trading and moved to Australia. 

William: When I learned about the plight of the Africans who are enslaved and dispossessed of everything just like us, I cried. While working as coachman for Sir O’ Shanassy in Melbourne, I also heard him speak about Pacific Islanders blalckbirded away from their islands into slavery in Queensland’s sugar plantations. It broke my heart. Why do white men do this? They claim the whole Earth as their own. Around the time Sir O’ Shanassy passed away last year, I heard politicians’ uproar over European and American invasions of “their” backyard. What an irony. The British Empire has taken Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Fiji and what not.

Thomas: Yes, they panicked that Germany was going to occupy the Eastern part of New Guinea, France going to take Vanuatu, and they were angry that the Colonial Office in London was doing nothing to stop it. So Queensland unilaterally claimed annexation of the part of New Guinea unoccupied by the Netherlands themselves, but it was later rejected, to their dismay, by London.

William: And precisely because of that, the Australasian colonies will unite and become a union. More bad news for natives like us. 

After a massacre, those Aboriginal people who were not killed were often enslaved, 
similar to these men photographed near Wyndham, WA.(Credit: State Library of Victoria)

Thomas: Never give up. I’m sure God is on your side. You are all an inspiration. When I hear the twenty-five of you singing in Melbourne three and a half years ago, it was like God spoke to me. That’s why I volunteered to help Daniel at the mission without thinking of money or anything. 

William: We are all grateful for that. Although I was not at Maloga at that time, we could not have written the petition to Lord Loftus without your help. 

Thomas: It was not me or Daniel. It all came out from the hearts of Moira and Ulupna peoples. I can still remember parts of it now... That all the land within our tribal boundaries has been taken possession of by the government and white settlers; our hunting grounds are used for sheep pasturage and the game reduced and, in many places, exterminated, rendering our means of subsistence extremely precarious, and often reducing us and our wives and children to beggary….

William continues: We, the men of our several tribes, are desirous of honestly maintaining our young and infirm, who are in many cases the subject of extreme want and semi-starvation, and we believe we could, in a few years support ourselves by our own industry, were a sufficient area of land granted to us to cultivate and raise stock. We have been under training for some years and feel that our old mode of life is not in keeping with the instructions we have received, and we are earnestly desirous of settling down to more orderly habits of industry, that we may form homes for our families…

Thomas sighs: Unfortunately, the request was not granted. But at least the government began to take their responsibility and formed the Aborigines Protection Board as well as setting aside reserves at Cummera. Things are looking up. 

William: But it’s far from justice. Some of the petitioners still believe that it was a gift to them from Queen Victoria! We will have to do something again to make our points across.  In three years, it will be the queen’s Golden Jubilee and soon after that, the centenary of the New South Wales settlement. 

Thomas: There’s also a biblical teaching that in every 50th or jubilee year, property is returned to its original owners even if it had been sold in the meantime.

William: All the better. It will be a time to remind them how the last one hundred years has been apocalypse for us. All the Killing Times that happened must not be forgotten. We must have a fitting memorial.

William Cooper in later years

Thomas: What would you ask for?

William: That those among us who want it should be granted sections of land in fee simple or at a small nominal rental annual, with the option of purchase at reasonable prices for us under the circumstances. It should always be born in mind that we were the former occupiers of the land. This would enable us to earn our own livelihood, and thus partially relieve the State from the burden of our maintenance.

Thomas: That’s not much at all to ask for. Even poor rural whites would want the same thing, especially the Irish. If there were justice in treatment and distribution of land, there would not have been the Eureka Rebellion, and there would not be a Ned Kelly for them to hunt down and killed four years ago.

William: He was treated badly for stealing animals. But at least, they didn’t wipe out all his people.

Thomas: In many ways, the Ireland has also been occupied by the English like Australia. If the Irish were black, the English might have wiped them out too. Not that starving them in the Great Famine was much better.

William: We natives have had our whole world taken from us, yet we are not even demanding to be given back everything. All of us can learn to share this immense land with respect for each other’s way of life. And there would be less trouble for everyone. But now we, the original owners of the land, are entirely dispossessed of it by those who call themselves Christians.

Thomas Shadrach James in later years

Thomas: Frankly I am surprised that natives turn to Christianity at all. That’s why I asked you today how you decided to convert. But now I think I know the answer.  

William: I am the last among my family to convert. With all the things I learned during the time I traveled the country with Sir O’ Shanassy about Christian cruelties on natives, I couldn’t have brought myself to it. 

Thomas: What changed?

William: Six months ago, I woke up one night with music in my head. It came to me in my dream. I heard music that brought people with the same skin color from very far away. And they sang of a people who had been had been enslaved and taken from their homes. Then next morning at the service, when Daniel read from Exodus about Jews who were also dispossessed and enslaved by the pharaoh, I suddenly had an epiphany that this was where I was supposed to be. 

Thomas: I remember that. Exodus 15:4. “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army, he has hurled into the sea.

The best of Pharaoh’s officers are drowned in the Red Sea..” 

The University of Newcastle-led project has now mapped
more than 300 massacre sites around Australia.

William: White men have broken our faith. They have desecrated our holy places, our anchors in the world, and we have nothing left to hold on to. But with God, I feel connected with the world again. Never mind those men do not deserve to call themselves Christians. I have found Christ and his message of love and hope. I will follow Jesus and appeal to them as fellow human being. So after the service, I went to Daniel and said, “I must give my heart to the Lord”

Thomas: I can relate to that too. I don’t know where I belong or who my people are, really. My distant father is from Madras. My late mother was from Ceylon. I was born in Mauritius, and now I am in Australia.

William: You now belong with us. This is your land too. I welcome you as my brother. God has brought you to us.

William holds out his hand which Thomas holds firmly, feeling to finally belong somewhere.

Thomas: And God brought you all to me as singing angels. Praise the Lord.

William: Praise the Lord.

The two men – bonded as brothers – cross their heart, looking up to the Southern Cross high in the sky.

The Southern Cross

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Thomas Shadrach James found his home among the Yorta Yorta people, and soon married William’s sister, Ada. He and his son Shadrach James would continue to teach and influence generations of Aboriginal Australian activists. 

A few years later, the Frisk Jubilee Singers – an African American a cappella choir from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee – came to sing at the Maloga Mission.  

One song in particular deeply captured the hearts of the Aborigines at the mission so much that they would write, “"I shall never forget the effect of our singing there. The Aborigines were at first very shy of us, but when they heard us sing, they went into a state I can only describe as one of almost ecstatic delight… The music of the plantation stirred their souls as no other music could have done… They seem to recognize us as brethren from a far distant tribe. They followed our carriages for miles along the road, and waved adieus from fences, trees, and rising grounds in a way which showed that were we ever able to return there we would be welcomed with a welcome white men seldom receive."

It was “Turn back Pharaoh’s Army” – the story of Moses leading Jews out of Egypt. This song of deliverance and hope would be notated by Thomas James, translated into Yorta Yorta language and passed down the generations, now known as Ngarra Berra Ferra. 

Years later, William Cooper would found the Australian Aboriginal League, and on 6 December 1938 – weeks after Hitler’s Kristallnacht operation – lead a delegation of to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a petition which condemned the "cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany. 

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Womeriga Moses nyinin wala 

When Moses struck water 

Wala yapunei yeiputj 

Water came together 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumina 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army  

bura fera yumina 

Pharaoh’s army 

bura fera yumina yala yala 

Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Yunduk bekuk Jesu 

We’re going to sing to Jesus 

Browal bokuna yumina 

to bring some valiant soldiers’ 

Nowra bura fera yumina yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army  

bura fera yumna 

Pharaoh’s army 

bura fera yumna yala yala 

Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna yala 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army Alleluia 

Nowra bura fera yumna 

Turn back Pharaoh’s army  

bura fera yumna 

Pharaoh’s army 

bura fera yumna yala yala 

Pharaoh’s army Alleluia

Next Installment will be online on August 30 or slightly later.

0011 Aceh in 1884: Heart of Dutchness (Part 2)

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PREVIOUSLY on 1884 (Continued) 

 

Flag of the Aceh Sultanate

For the next few months, Kwabena assisted Thepen in training Acehnese soldiers to use modern weapons acquired from Singapore and particularly Penang, while learning Acehnese customs and language.

As months passed, news began to thicken of another Dutch invasion. In October, Aceh prepared itself for another round of do-or-die fighting. One day, Kw noticed that Thepen was missing from the training session and had to take over the role himself.

Kwabena sought them out but couldn’t find them in their quarter which appeared disorderly. After hearing whispers that Thepen and Swendsen were under detention, he found them in a prison cell.

K: What happened?

T: We are being banished, as soon as they can find a boat for us.

K: But why?

S: Because we have violated the law of God.

K: How?

Both of them fell silent and said nothing more. Kwabena noticed how Thepen held Swendsen’s hand tightly.  

He reached inside his pocket and produced two necklaces with wooden Osram ne nsoromma pendants similar to the one that saved his life, and showed them to the two.

K: Here. I have been meaning to give you these to pay for the helps you have given me these several months. I made them myself and hope that they would protect you as well. 

Surprised, Thepen and Swendsen looked at each other and then at Kwabena.

S: How did you know?

K: I have caught glimpses of how you two looked at each other, and I knew it was more than comradery or friendship. 

T: And you’re not disgusted by it?

K shook his head: Why would I? We also have people like you where I come from, including a childhood friend of mine. They are laughed and sneered at, but I am not one who would deny anyone the ways they live their lives. 

The two received the necklaces through the bars and put them around each other’s neck.

Osram ne nsoromma (Moon and star) adinkra symbol

K: Is this why you are outcast by the European community too?

T: Yes. As soon as they found out, no one would not give us works or any kind of support. But we always stay together. 

K: I am jealous. That’s something I hoped for me and my wife too.

S: You must miss her a lot. How long has it been?

K: It’s been six years since I was sent off by the Ashanti king to the Dutch as their army recruit. It was a form of banishment. 

T: But most Gold Coast soldiers in Java are peoples from other tribes enslaved by the Ashanti. I thought you’re Ashanti yourself.

K: I am. But even within the Ashanti Kingdom, there are factions. And I was young and stupid.

I am a nephew of General Asamoa Kwanta. Upon the death of King Osai Kwaku Dua in 1867, according to the tradition, the princes of the blood were allowed by custom to take the life of any subject. Prince Buakji Asu killed my brother, Yaw, who he thought was having an affair with his wife. 

As my uncle gathered men preparing for revenge and the whole Kumasi was approaching a civil war, I made a hasty decision and tried to kill Asu himself. I managed to kill a few of Asu’s men but was caught and kept as prisoner. To make peace, the new asantehene Kofi Karikari intervened and send Asu to pay for his crime at my uncle’s hand, and I was sent off to the Dutch as ‘recruit’ among the slaves. That’s the last time I saw her. 

T: When will you get to see her again?

K: After paying off the debt of my ‘recruitment’ I will be free to return. The contract is for fifteen years, but I know she will be there waiting for me. 

S: I don’t know if you know this. While in Penang, I heard from the British that they are preparing for war with Ashanti. This time they are going to send the bloody-handed Wolseley to Cape Coast.

K: They can’t fight jungle wars away from the firing range of their gunboats. I am sure they will be humiliated again as they were in ‘63. If it were not for the death of the previous king, Cape Coast would have been razed to the ground already.

T: What was the cause of that war?

K: Gold. A traitor called Jamin escaped to Cape Coast with gold that belonged to our king, but the British refused to turn him over. Jamin must have promised them access to the source of the gold. 

T: Of course, all European powers want the gold of the famed Gold Coast. That’s why the Dutch king invited Ashanti King to send his sons to study mining in Holland so that he would return to help with the Dutch gold-mining venture.

K: Prince Kwasi Boachi is a traitor. His father the king sent him to study in Holland, but he chose to come to Java instead of returning to Ashanti.

T: Well, the Dutch must find him useful to get their hands on Acehnese gold too. That’s why they keep here, although they would never give him a high position over white engineers.

S: Not just the Dutch, the French also. Our “friend” Roura also has his eyes on it to compensate for his loss in the pepper trade.

At that point, the chief entered and told Kwabena to leave. Soon Thepe and Swendsen were taken out of the cell and led to their boat …. 

That was the last Kwabena saw of the two unlucky lovers.

Ashanti prince Kwasi Boachi

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Things happened much more quickly in the following weeks. Having become a laughingstock in British Penang and, to a lesser extent, in Europe for their defeat, the Dutch were determined to heap revenge on Aceh. The news spread across the whole archipelago, causing fear in Batavia of widespread uprising. To reclaim colonial authority, they returned to Aceh with twice many troops.

Lucky for them, the second invasion was more successful than the first. The colonizer managed to storm the Sultan’s kranom and occupy the capital. As the Achenese fighters retreated to their jungle strongholds, Kwabena pleaded with the chief to be taken along with them but was refused. Perhaps they were afraid that he would slow them down, or they were still not sure about his loyalty. 

So Kwabena reconciled with the fact that he must go back to the Dutch side but how would he explain his survival from the first invasion to the advancing Dutch force? After racking his brain in a pinch, he came to a workable solution. He would have to be found a prisoner in jail, and tell them that he was spared because he lied to the Acehnese that he was an Ottoman subject...

The Dutch soldiers who found Kwabena alone in prison were surprised and amused at the story of his survival. While the Dutch began to take control and establish themselves in Aceh’s capital, Kwabena was sent back to Batavia for investigation. Fortunately, his story was believed. A low rank soldier like him could not have betrayed anything to the Acehnese anyway, so they concluded and reinstated him in service. 

Armed with a “veteran” status, his fluency in Dutch and intelligence, Kwabena quickly earned the trust of high-rank Dutch officers and soon found himself as a personal guard at the office of the Governor of Batavia. It was during this time that he stealthily taught himself to read with archived materials in the office. 

Third Anglo-Ashanti War 1873-4

For a few years he had heard nothing of the Gold Coast. Dutch recruitment in the Gold Coast ceased after they left the territory to Britain. Therefore, there were nobody to carry news from faraway Africa. Kwabena was, however, still confident that Ashanti, abandoned by their former ally the Dutch at the mercy of their long-time enemy Britain would prevail against Wolseley’s troops.

Just when he finally managed to convince himself out of worries. News arrived from his brother Yaw who managed to pay a Dutch sailor on a British ship to bring Kwabena heart-breaking news from home.

The sailor told Kwabena that Wolseley’s troop managed to reach Kumasi and burned down the Ashanti capital, after failing to capture King Karikari. Most of the populations safely escaped to surrounding towns. However, conditions were difficult, and his delicate wife Kisi, who Kwabena left in Yaw’s protection, succumbed to jungle diseases two years earlier .... 

1874 Burning of Kumasi by Wolseley's troop

At first, Kwabena refused to believe what he heard, but the sailor gave him Kisi’s pendant which is identical to his. For weeks, Kwabena wept for his wife. Now his life has nothing to hope for and no one to return to. For all of this, Kwabena blamed it squarely on the Dutch.

No longer able to serve the Dutch, he leveraged his basic knowledge of Acehnese language to take  employment with the French colons-explorateurs who, after the defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, were returning to Aceh on “scientific” expedition which was only a thinly-veiled exploration of exploitable Acehnese gold. The existence of gold in Aceh was already known in Europe. Some believed it to be potentially as rich as the Californian and Australian goldmines.

One day, Kwabena finally met Edouard Roura, the French sea captain well known to the Acehnese and a friend of their regent Habib Abdul Rahman. Roura had heard of Kwabena’s story and took interest.

It’s from Roura that Kwabena heard about the true intentions of these “exploration” as expounded by Brau de St.-Pol Lias, one of Société de Géographie Commerciale’s loudest proponents, in writing thus:

“… the true way to study a country seriously is to support exploration upon colonial establishments which allow it all the length of time, all the continuity which it must have, all the security which it must enjoy; just as the way to harvest all the fruits of exploration is to have the exploration radiate from these establishments, to place, behind the explorers, colonists of which they are the avant-garde, who can profit from their discoveries, take root where they have penetrated, and push them yet further afield.”

Tuanku Mohammad Daud Syah II (c. 1903)
the last Sultan of Aceh from 1875-1903

For them, the Society is meant as a way for France to return to its “traditional place of honor” among nations by forging a new vigor in the fires of overseas adventure. Colonization would be their effective spring where the powers of the French people would be refreshed. It was not only the need to dispose of excess manufacturers which demanded that France acquire colonies, but the “problems of excess talent, education and leadership.”

For Kwabena, these French “pioneers” were no less disgusting than the British that they hated (and the only reason they hated the British was because they refused to participate in their idea of “patriotism of race”.)  Therefore, Kwabena took no small amount of joy in delivering two of them, Wallon and Guillaume, to the hand of an Acehnese lord on their fake expedition to “buy pepper”. 

During another expedition by the French, Kwabena met with another Acehnese lord who recognized immediately as the chief who had spared his life six years earlier and was now serving under Teuku Imam Muda of Teunom.

Faintly, Kwabena started to see a way to avenge Kisi’s death. What is a better way to spend what has been saved of his life than to fight for Aceh whose fate exactly mirrored that of Ashanti -- abandoned to fight the Dutch by their former ally Britain? How many lived would be spared from the pangs that he felt?

After the French expeditions failed, Kwabena went to the army headquarter in Banda Aceh had become an established center of Dutch administration in Aceh, and was quickly reinstated as a corporal of an African company.

In November 1883, when Kwabena heard the news of the S.S. Nisero crew being taken hostage by Teuku Imam, he knew his time has come …. 

Dutch map of the Kraton, 1874

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Soon after fulfilling their ultimatum by bombarding Teunom port and burn all the huts and plantations within a day’s walk, the Dutch troop returned to their ship without the hostages who had been taken further inland. They also found that an African corporal was missing ….

Holding upright his rifle whose tip was tied with an Acehnese flag he had secretly made and carried,  Kwabena ventured alone deep into the unknown jungle where untrained eyes would see only foliage and mud. But Kwabena had learned those many years ago how to read imperceptible paths taken by Acehnese soldiers.

Six hours later, he was found, tied up and taken at gunpoint by some Acehnese fighters to their hideout. Having been told of a black devil soldier, the chief laughed when he saw Kwabena.

Chief: This time you came with the correct symbol.

Kwabena smiles: Yes, chief. I know that my pendant alone would not protect me this time.

Chief: Holding our flag won’t save you either, Dutch soldier.

K: You are wrong, Chief. The flag is just a friendly gesture. But I have something else that will show you which side I am on. 

Chief: What do you have? Where is it?

Kwabena taps his forehead: In here. Over the past three years, I have been in and out of almost every civil and military building in Banda Ache. Let me show you…

With a stick, Kwabena started to draw some shapes and lines on the ground. After he finished, he sticks the flag right in the middle.

K: Chief, this is how you win this war…. Maps… 

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 Next on 1884 

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0010 Aceh in 1884: Heart of Dutchness (Part 1)

PREVIOUSLY on 1884 

7 January 1884

Sultanate of Aceh

Osram ne nsoromma

As a new day dawns, the Dutch troops are getting ready to land on the northwest coast of Sumatra under Acehnese control. Their mission is to rescue 29 sailors of S.S Nisero --  18 of whom British --  being held hostage by Teuku Imam Muda of Teunom, after the British ship with its cargo of sugar from Surabaya ran aground near his territory two months earlier.

The Dutch-Aceh war, now in its 11th years, have caused strains in the relationship between the two Powers, as British Penang has a near monopoly on Aceh’s lucrative pepper trade accounting for half of the world’s total. Now with, Teuku Imam’s demand for Britain’s guarantee that his ports would be permanent free from Batavia’s shipping restrictions has caused heightened tension between Britain and Holland. After two months of negotiation and its ultimatum failed to secure the hostages, Holland has now decided to give force to its threat.

Teuku Imam Muda, Raja of Teunom (c. 1898)

This is not the first expedition to Aceh for Kwabena. As a barely trained soldier, he was among the first to be sent to Aceh war in a unit consisting mainly of African soldiers from the Gold Coast just like him. It was  part of the first Dutch invasion of Aceh under General Köhler's command… 

It was eleven years ago....

After two days of bombardment, the colonial force made a landing between the port of Ulèë Lheuë and the mouth of the Aceh river. They were suddenly ambushed by klewang-wielding Acehnese who had been hiding in the bush and lost a dozen of soldiers before beating back the attackers.

Six days later after the heavy fighting, the fortified Masjid Raya, the Great Mosque, was seized. But while General Köhler was looking through a binocular to survey the area under a tree behind the mosque, a rain of bullets fatally hit him and nearby soldiers. The shots are followed by a swarm of Acehnese who rapidly cut down survivors like falling leaves.

Aceh villager with klewang and blunderbuss (c. 1874)

Shot in his shoulder, Kwabena managed to block an attacker’s blade with his musket but was attacked by another from the side who opened a gash on his leg. As he fell on the ground bleeding into stupor, he saw General Kohler lying in a pool of blood not far away.

Just when the attacker was about to strike Kwabena the same fate with a deadly blow, his klewang stopped midair and slowly lowered. His fellow Acehnese, having finished off their victims, gathered around and started pointing at the unconscious soldier and discussed something among themselves. One, who appeared to be their chief, ordered his men to carry him back into the jungle with them….

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When Kwabena regained his consciousness in a hut, he found his hand tied but his aching wounds had been dressed and the bleeding stopped. He was puzzled by his own escape from death. Why did the Acehnese fighters spare his life and carry him here?

The chief he previously saw approached Kwabena with a few of his men. His hand clutches on something that Kwabena recognized immediately. It was the leather pendant that his wife had given him before he left his homeland.

The chief asked him in Dutch, “Are you an Ottoman?” Kwabena was puzzled by the question. The chief showed him the pendant and repeated the question but couldn’t get an answer to his satisfaction. He turned to say something to one of the men, who quickly disappeared and came back with what surprised him even more: a tall man dressed much like the Acehnese but appeared to be a white man.

The white man introduced himself in Dutch, “My name is Thepen. The chief wants to know if you are a subject of the Ottoman Empire.”

Kwabena shook his head, “No. Why would they think that? I'm just a Dutch soldier.”

Thepen: Your pendant says that you are protected by the Ottoman flag.

Kwabena: What are you talking about? It’s an adinkra symbol, Osram ne nsoromma. The moon and a star symbolizing love, bonding and faithfulness in marriage. My wife gave it to me.

Thepen chuckles and turned around to interpret Kwabena’s answer to the chief. He was stunned by the answer for a moment, while his men bellowed out their laughs.

Thepen: The chief said you’re a very lucky man. Without that pendant your wife would already be a widow.

Kwabena: But why didn’t they kill me?

Thepen: You see? For them, the symbol of a crescent moon and a star means the Ottoman flag which the Acehnese Sultan also adopted as Acehnese flag. These people are expecting the Ottoman troops to help them fight the Dutch. You have to thank your wife for saving your life.

Flag of the Ottoman Empire from 1844, also adopted by the Acehnese Sultanate

The chief then says something

Thepen: The chief said that you wife may have saved you with the pendant once, but only the Grace of God can keep you alive.

He then lowered his voice and said: If I were you, this would be the moment where you found a new religion ...

Religious conversion is not hard when your life depends on it. Besides, Kwabena has seen many ex-soldiers near Java Hill who have returned from the Dutch East Indies as converts. Happy to be alive, he nods and says thank you to the chief.

 

 

Meanwhile, the first Dutch expedition ended in a disaster. Having lost its commander and many men to diseases and Acehnese defense, they retreated to Batavia three weeks after landing. The Acehnese reoccupied their capital with highest morale than ever, having won a major battle against a European Power. It’s something unheard of, not only in Sumatra but the whole archipelago.

Over the next few weeks, Kwabena slowly recovered from his injuries under the care of Thepen who trained Acehnese soldiers to use small arms for a local rajah. One day, the Dutch man came in with another white man.

Thepen: Kwabena, this is my mate John Swendsen from Norway. He just came back from Penang.

Kwabena reaches to give Swendsen a handshake.

Kwabena: How did you end up here? Did you know each other from before?

Swendsen: Thepen and I were originally sailors. We met each other when he was training soldiers for the Raja of Kedah. After that we tried our luck as trade partners in Penang, but luck ran out and none of the Europeans would help outcasts like us. We were destitute until the local Muslims helped us. Then we entered the service of the Raja of Simpang Ulim and converted to Islam.

Thepen: They call us “rice Muslims” because we were a charity case, I guess.

Kwabena: I guess now I am one too.

Swendsen: I heard how you got here. That’s quite incredible.

Kwabena shows him the pendant that saved his life: Yes, I only have my wife to thank and this.

Swendsen takes a closer look and turns to Thepen with a smile: Very nice. Maybe we should make ones too.

Thepen smiles back: Why not? If we can find some nice leather.

Kwabena: I’m curious. Why did Aceh adopted the Ottoman flag?

Swendsen: You see? In the 16th century, Sultan Alauddin al-Kahar of Aceh sent envoy to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent requesting to come under the Ottoman Empire’s suzerainty in return for military support to fight the Portuguese. There’s still an Ottoman canon called lada secupak guarding the dalam – royal enclosure – that testifies to that relationship. Again in 1850, Aceh sent envoy to the Ottoman Empire to renew the relationship. A few years later, Sultan Ibrahim also sent $10,000 to help the Ottoman’s expenses in the Crimean War.

Kwabena: Wow, you do know a lot about Aceh history.

Thepen: Of course, that’s his job nowadays, running to foreign consuls trying to find alliance for Aceh.

Kwabena: They must be pinning their hope on the Ottoman.

Habib Abdul Rahman in Turkey (1873)

R: Yes. Five years ago, 65 Acehnese notables signed an appeal requesting Ottoman protection against the intransigent Dutch, but it did not get anywhere. So our chief diplomat Habib Abdul Rahman is again carrying Sultan Mahmud’s letter to Constantinople. He must be somewhere between Mecca and Constantinople, as we speak.

Kwabena: How about other Powers?

Swendsen: Our other chief diplomat Panglima Tibang went to Singapore with the Sultan’s letters for the French and American consuls. France used to be interested in a base in this area to match British Singapore. Our sultan still has letters from Louis Phillipe and Napoleon III. But after the Opium Wars, all they are interested in is China by way of Vietnam. So the Sultan’s letter did not attract their interest this time.

Thepen: After their recent defeat at the hands of the Germans, France is very messy right now.

Kwabena: How about the Americans?

Swendsen: Consul Studer was sympathetic. That’s why I was sent as advisor and translator to the Sultan’s retainer to offer trade privileges in exchange for driving away the Dutch. We will have to wait for what President Grant says.

Thepen: We have to be careful not to repeat the same mistake. According to a captured Dutch officer, it was the first meeting with the American consul on possible treaty that alerted the Dutch consul in Penang, Read, who wrote a letter that so panicked the Kompeuni into declaring war. They must have a spy who tipped them off.

Panglima Tibang (c. 1878)

Swendsen: Especially now with the rumored discovery of oil on the island, they definitely do not want any other European Power on Sumatra, after all the sacrifices they have made to keep the British out since the 1824treaty. Britain controls north of the Strait of Malacca, and Holland south of it.

Kwabena: Sounds like what they did more recently in 1867 and 1870.

Thepen: Yes, you must have heard about those because it also concerned the Gold Coast where you’re from. 

Kwabena: Of course. Not only we heard about it, but the whole region and all the peoples went through chaos because they never bothered to ask our opinions, let alone consents. First, they swapped forts so that each would have continuous areas of control, and suddenly natives of the same tribes were separated, and enemies suddenly found themselves within the same border. 

Swendsen: I heard even the French wanted to get involved, trying to exchange their worthless forts for British Gambia which is surrounded by France's Senegal and Casamance.

Kwabena: I didn't know about the French, but it was messy enough just between Britain and Holland. There were wars among tribes and war against the Dutch which went so bad that they wanted out altogether.

Thepen: And that’s when they made the agreement. Britain gets all Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast. Holland gets to do whatever it wants on Sumatra, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize British Penang’s monopoly on the pepper trade. Also the Dutch got Indian workers to work in Suriname.

Kwabena: They carve out empires and swap lands and peoples like a game of cards.

Thepen: Like the good old day when the Pope halved the worldfor Spain and Portugal. I know Britain would rather have Sumatra in Dutch hands rather than more powerful counties.

Swendsen: My country – well, actually the Danes – also used to have slave forts on the Gold Coast -- part of which was robbed from Sweden. But after the end of the slave trade, it’s not profitable anymore, so they sold it off to Britain. I wonder why the Dutch hanged on to theirs for so long. Maybe gold?

Kwabena: I think the real reason is they have turned the source of slaves into a supply of cheap recruits to fight for them in Java and the Moluccas. I am one of them.

Thepen: I am sorry for that. I apologize on behalf of my people – well, they’re not my people anymore – but they have done that for a long time. Long before recruiting soldiers from Africa, they once used their exclusive access to Japan to recruit samurais to do all kinds of dirty works for them, like the annihilation of the natives of Banda islands just to take away their nutmeg plantations. Many atrocities have been committed like using opium to siphon the wealth of other counties, Java war, Bali invasion… 

Painting displayed at Museum Rumah Budaya, Banda Neira, Maluku, Indonesia

Swendsen chuckles: VOC, the Violent Opium Company. The Brits really learned from the best and went further until they were rewarded with Hong Kong.

Thepen: In turn, the VOC also learned from the Portuguese and beat them at their own game.

Kwabena: This may be a rude question. But why are you on the Acehnese side, and not your motherland's? Is it only because the Acehnese supported you during your hard time?

Thepen: I have completely lost all respect in Holland after I read Max Havelaar. Now I don't only hate the Dutch, but all imperialists.

Swendsen: Which means pretty much all of Europe. 

Kwabena: Do you think the Ottoman will help Aceh again this time, like when they helped Aceh fight  the Portuguese?

Swendsen: I sure hope so. Acehnese in Penang and Singapore are also finding ways to recruit fighters from across the archipelago to join Aceh’s war. For them, this is a jihad, a holy war. It’s like going to Mecca for pilgrimage, but they don't even have to go so far.

Thepen: Let’s hope that they can get to Aceh. If the Dutch finds out, they will definitely try to stop them.

Swendsen: They must be preparing for another invasion after the monsoon. We should be prepared, whether outside helps come or not.

Thepen: That’s my job to train our men so that we can beat them off Aceh again like Koxinga kicked their asses off Formosa two centuries ago...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Next on 1884.

0009 Art in 1884: On the barricade

PREVIOUSLY on 1884 

Nuenen, the Netherlands

30 December 1884

The Potato Eaters (1885) by Vincent van Gogh

As he lays down in bed, Vincent sees a cloaked visitor standing at the door of his studio who, with a hypnotic look, beckons him to follow. He has seen that face before but where and when?

Without thoughts, Vincent follows the visitor into the cold darkness of the Northern sky studded with stars that look like swirling comets overlooking a landscape of saturated colors where trees dances like emerald flames. They walks past a derelict church and toiling peasants into a city with busy streets where Vincent sees Sien and Margot being pushed away from him, his brother Theo ignoring him while feasting with rich clients, and finally at the bank of a river, his two cousins calling out to him to board a steamship ready to depart for the Dutch East Indies. 

When Vincent looks at him again, the cloaked visitor has morphed into a naked androgynous figure pulling him onto Fokke's ghostly Flying Dutchman filled coffee beans which, as he looks closer, swell into severed human heads. As he turns around in disgust, the visitor has taken the form of Matatuli, the author of Max Havelaar, laughing at him … 

Water Sprite (1882) by Earnst Josephson. It was a sketch of this painting
that Theo mentioned to Vincent in the letter.

Vincent wakes up… shaken by the strange dream with the face of the stranger still lingering in his memory – infinitely good and tender but also sad and melancholy, as though he had seen all the evils in the world… Indeed, he has. It was the face of Dante painted by Giotto. As it is said, the first thing Giotto puts in the facial expressions is goodness.  

In a letter Vincent received the day before, his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, wrote about a sketch by a Swedish painter with a prominent “Dantean figure -- the symbol of an evil spirit that lures people into the abyss.” And it crept into his dream, despite – or because of – its perplexing description.

Surely the two cannot be reconciled, Vincent thinks. A sober, austere Dante, who returned from Hell was entirely filled with indignation and protest at what he saw in the Inferno. He cannot be the same as a Mephistopheles who lures unsuspecting people into eternal condemnation with a promise of sweet rich rewards. We can’t have a Dantean figure play a satanic role without a huge misconception of character, can we?

Portrait of Dante by Giotto

Was the dream an agonized warning against or a sweet invitation to Hell? The answer entirely depends on the identity of the visitor, but what if Mephistopheles’ finest trick is to impersonate Dante convincing the world that Satan is already facing his punishment in the Center of Hell? Would there be  a way to see through his trick – a moral yardstick that can always tell right from wrong?

Man breaking up the soil (1883) by Vincent van Gogh

For months, Vincent has been grappling with the question. To him, there is one thing that stands above all: love for humanity. Just as in Les Misérables, a student sings of his love for his mother — the Republic — at the time of the Revolution of ’30,

“If Caesar had given me

Glory and war,

And if I was forced to forgo

My mother’s love,

To great Caesar would I say,

Take back your scepter and your chariot,

I love my mother more, hey!,

I love my mother more.”

With his art, Vincent hopes to sing his “love for mother” — that is, love of mankind. The old foundation of universal brotherhood that has been tested and found good for so many centuries is enough for him. Isn’t love of one’s fellow man something to take for granted in everyone as the basis of just about everything? He’s like to think so, but some people, however, believe there are better foundations.

Vincent remembers, when as a volunteer lay pastor among poor miners of Wasmes, he threw himself to his duties and was faithful in helping and comforting those people who worked in very dangerous mines where many die, whether going down or coming up, or by suffocation or gas exploding, or because of water in the ground, or because of old passageways caving in and so on. The great danger was tragically shown when many people lost their lives in the collapse of the L’Agrappe coal mine at Frameries, just east of Wasmes.  

Miners' wives carrying sacks of coal (1882) by Vincent van Gogh

Wasmes was a somber place, and at first sight everything around it had something dismal and deathly about it. The workers there were usually people, emaciated and pale owing to fever, who looked exhausted and haggard, weather-beaten and prematurely old, the women generally sallow and withered. All around the mine were poor miners’ dwellings with a couple of dead trees, completely black from the smoke, and thorn-hedges, dung-heaps and rubbish dumps, mountains of unusable coal. 

Vincent once took in a very sick patient, burned from head to foot by an explosion in the mine. He sat up with him and helped to bandage his wounds for months while his patient slowly recovered. Then the church authorities dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood” after they found him sleeping on straw in a small hut having given up his comfortable lodgings at a bakery to a homeless person. 

The dignity and respectability of institution must be rooted in its love of mankind,  Vincent believes. He no longer counts himself a friend of present-day Christianity, even though he believes the founder was sublime. He has seen through present-day Christianity only too well. Then, again, he has had his revenge since then. How? By worshiping the love that they — those at the theological school — call sin, by respecting a whore etc., and not many would-be respectable, religious ladies…

Sorrow (1882) by Vincent van Gogh 

Vincent has made peace with himself over the fallout with the Church. But family is a different thing. That’s why the heated quarrel with Theo has been traumatizing him since August.

Vincent thinks, the issue here is that if he and Margot choose to love each other, be attached to each other — indeed have been for a long time — this is no wrongdoing on their part nor something for which people may blame either him or  her. And in his view it’s absurd that people felt they should get worked up about her being twelve years older – supposedly in his or her “interest”.

Vincent couldn’t care less that after he proposed a marriage to Margot, people started to gossip or stopped visiting his father, the village minister, because they don’t want to meet him. Equally troubling for him is how they browbeat his “bad behaviors”, that is, associating with “dirty and drunk peasants” who model for his sketches and even living like them. 

“Why not paint something more cheerful, more respectable? People don’t want to buy at the poor and the suffering.”  Theo can go on and train himself well in that system of prudence and respectability and suchlike, then he will go far, precisely in mediocrity. To Vincent, the life we are in is such a mystery that the system of ‘Respectability’ is certainly too narrow — so, for him, that has lost its credit. 

Avenue of poplars in autumn (1884) by Vincent van Gogh

Now it’s dismal outdoors — the fields a marble of clods of black earth and some snow, usually a few days of fog and mud in between — the red sun in the evening and in the morning — crows, shriveled grass and withered, rotting vegetation, black bushes, and the branches of the poplars and willows vicious as wire against the dismal sky. It’s quite in harmony with the interiors, very gloomy in these dark winter days, and with the physiognomies of peasants and weavers from whom one doesn’t hear complaints, although they have a hard time of it. 

A weaver who works hard makes a piece of 60 ells, say, in a week. While he weaves, a woman has to spool for him; that is winding yarn on to the bobbins — so there are two who are working and have to live on it. On that piece he makes a net profit of, say, 4.50 guilders in that week — and nowadays when he takes it to the manufacturer he’s often told that he can only bring a new piece in a week or a fortnight’s time.  

Weaver (1884) by Vincent van Gogh

So not only wages low, but work fairly scarce. There’s consequently often something harried and restless in these people.

It’s a different mood from that of the miners he lived with in a year of strikes and many accidents.4 That was even worse — but all the same, it’s often heart-rending here too — the people are quiet, and literally nowhere have I heard anything resembling inflammatory arguments, even though they look as little cheerful as the cab-horses or the sheep that are transported by steamer to England.

‘I would never do away with suffering, for it is often that which makes artists express themselves most vigorously’, Millet once said. Sensier even said of  Millet: A peasant dedicated to hard work on the land, he constantly had in his heart compassion and pity for the rural poor. He was neither a socialist nor an ideologue, and yet, like all profound thinkers who love humanity, he suffered at the sufferings of others, and he needed to express them. To do that, he had only to paint the real peasant at work. 

For his part, Vincent regards and respects the genuinely human, living with nature — not going against nature — as refinement. “The most touching things the great masters have painted still originate in life and reality itself.” Vincent thinks, “Painting peasant life is a serious thing, and I for one would blame myself if I didn’t try to make paintings such that they give people who think seriously about art and about life serious things to think about. He will paint them the same way that Breton writes about them in his poem “Return from the fields (To François Millet)”

 The Gleaners (1857) by Jean-François Millet

’Tis that uncertain hour in which the evening star,

Still pale against the pale night sky,

Appears, twinkles, slips behind a veil,

Tiring the watcher’s searching gaze.

’Twixt wheat and vetch,

With dusty thistles lined,

The tawny path still can be descried

Among the fertile fields.

From high above, ineffable,

Amethyst-colored light caresses it

And the artist, for want of other word,

Can only call it purple.

Across the flat or gently sloping mead,

Losing their furrows, finding them again,

It winds among the grass, where sounds

The cricket’s shrill and reedy song.

By banks gilded by eventide it goes

Under the clear air

Through which is heard the church bell’s sonorous note,

Tolling in silent village streets.

The Potato Planters (ca. 1861) by Jean-François Millet

The peasant twice browned

By the twilight and suntan,

Forehead bathed in the pale light,

Makes his way home, his labour done.

Bearing on his shoulder scythe or spade,

Slowly he goes,

Moistening his dry chest

With mist, and with the scent of wheat.

Slowly he goes, at his unhurried pace,

With calm and heavy tread;

The west, like a furnace smoldering,

Turns him a deep and fiery bronze.

Beneath his cottage’s black roof,

Where rises a faint blue strand of smoke,

There glows a spot of red;

The soup is singing on the fire.

His partner’s strong and firm,

The children thrive,

Old age approaches – what is its sting,

Set beside childhood’s gay springtime?

Thus he plods from habit long ingrained,

Thus will he plod until his dying day;

Content if through his humble toil

The wheat is heavy and the barley fair.

The Song of the lark (1884) by Jules Breton

When Vincent worked as an art dealer in London in 1873, he was shocked by the poverty on the streets of London. But social reform was gaining traction. Publications like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and George Eliot’s Middlemarch deeply influenced his idea of art.

For Vincent, there’s a cardinal point of distinction between before and after the revolution — the reversal of the social position of the woman, and the collaboration one wants between men and women with equal rights, with equal freedom. To his mind conventional morality is all back-to-front and he hopes it will be turned around and replaced in time.

This old society is going under through its own fault — there’s a new society that has come into being and grown, and will go on. There is what emanates from revolutionary and what emanates from anti-revolutionary principles. The minds that can’t agree are real. The mill is there no longer, but the wind’s still there.The barricade may no longer be visible in the form of paving-stones like in 1848, but still definitely exists and persists in society as regards the irreconcilability of old and new. 

Daumier’s The Revolution of 1848. A family on the barricades

Vincent had always believed that he and Theo were like the two brothers in Daumier’s The Revolution of 1848. A family on the barricades who were on the same side and both fell, one a day after the other, for the same cause. So among all the troubles that he is going through, the most distressing thing for him was to find that the barricade actually stands between him and his brother, Theo in front of it as a soldier of the government, himself behind it as a revolutionary or rebel.

Vincent knows that his duty compels him to love my father, my brother — and he does — but we live in an age of innovation and reform, and many things have changed utterly, and in consequence of this he sees, he feels, he believes differently from his father and from Theo. 

In the past Vincent may have been very passive and very gentle and quiet, but he has made up his mind that was enough. If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they’ll achieve it by offending no one — and that’s a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. And for his part, Vincent has no intention of being bored. 

He says to himself, “Do a great deal or die.”

By the end of that winter, Vincent would have made many sketches which led to a major breakthrough “The Potato Eaters” (1885).  Two years later at the height of his creative career, he would say, “What I think about my own work is that the painting of the peasants eating potatoes that I did in Nuenen is after all the best thing I did.”

Peasant burning weed (1883) by Vincent van Gogh

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Note: Apart from the imagined dream sequence in the beginning, almost all of the content are from http://vangoghletters.org which contains all of the artist's works and letters.

Next on 1884