Jakarta (An Insane Administration and Insanitary Town)

Jakarta, 2008

Acutally that is Batavia or no, it’s Jakarta, or no it’s Batavia…

Sometimes it is hard to tell with out having to consult a calendar to see which century I’m in.

File this in Batavia trivia I suppose…

I finally have obtained a copy of Leonard Blusse’s essay on Batavia: “An Insane Administration and Insanitary Town: The Dutch East India Company and Batavia 1619-1799″ published in Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, 1985, by Martinus Nijhoff. The essay is full of wonderful gems (as is the rest of the book)… of which here are a particular few regarding Jakarta… err, I mean, Batavia.

“These impressionistic sketches may suffice to illustrate that at the turn of the nineteenth century a fundamental change had taken place in the morphology of Batavia. Almost as a snake sheading its skin, the town population had crept out of the walls and the stately buildings that had housed it for almost two centuries, and started a new life about ten kilometers inland in a garden city with a totally different outlay. In this chapter I would like to focus in depth on the origins and causes of the insalubrious conditions that forced the Dutch during the government of Marshall Daendels to make a leap for survival to Weltevreden”.

What were the causes of the process that turned the ‘Queen of the East’ into the ‘Graveyard of the East’? This question has only been partly and unsatisfactorily answered. Medical specialists of the past stressed in their analysis the bad climate of the city, the low, hanging, poisonous mists, the polluted canals and of course the main object of their interest: exotic diseases with pregnant names like ‘remitterende rotkoorsen’ (intermittent rotting fevers), ‘roode loop’ (red diarrhoea), ‘febres ardentes’, malignae et putridae’ and ‘mort de chien’.”

[I translate 'febres ardentes' as 'strong fever', ' malignae et putridae' is something like 'evil boils with stinging pain', and, of course, 'mort de chien' is the dreaded 'Chinese death' which I suppose you may or may not actually die from or if you caught it maybe you wish you had. ]

Blusse has some interesting things to say about the Mookervaart Canal [Kali Besar] as well. The thing was poorly built for one, it screwed up the natural flow of the rivers it crossed, most notably the Angke, it silted in and people threw their muck and trash into it which they called ‘f’olia novi horas’ which means ‘nine o’clock flowers’ because that was the time it was allowed by the town regulations when you could throw your horse manure into the canal (and I assume anything else under the cover of dark).

There were also a group of people called the ‘Modder-Javanen’ (the mud-Javanese) who hailed from Ciredon and whose job it was to once a year come to divest the canals of the “redundant mud”. Imgaine THAT employment! Blusse notes that “eventually this turned out to be an endless task, which only resulted in the certain death of the poor courvee labourers” and the cleaning was given up. The Mookervaart finally was a source of such nasty pestilence that the Dutch literally ran for the lives out of the old city.

If you do not think that they REALLY ran then think again. The nickname the Dutch had for the hospital in Batavia was De Moordkuil (the death pit).

Blusse’s other point, and this one is not only interesting but also well worth pondering vis-a-vis modern Jakarta, is that what really screwed up Batavia was the deforestation and the growing of sugarcane in the ‘hinterlands’ or as the Dutch called it the ‘Ommelanden’ of Batavia. Converting the native forests into sugarcane plantations induced an ecological disaster in the entire surrounding area from which the city did not fully recover until the sugar commodity crash in the late 1770s. Ironically this crash left a lot of angry and unemployed workers (read: slaves) to have to fend for themselves.

Later the VOC would run Batavia by edict. They were a kind of Dutch MUI, if you will. “The so-called ‘Reglement ter beteugeling van Pract en Praal’ (Regulations to check pomp and magnificence) in which was precribed to the Batavian population in 124 articles exactly what kinds of diamonds, clothes, hats they were to wear, how many slaves were allowed to follow them in the street, etc., according to rank and status” and other high matters of the sort…

Such was the VOCs psychosis that they wrote regarding their policy of adminstration that “We must remain the masters of the enterprise, even if it means the disposal of the Batavian citizenry’.

They damn near succeeded.

There is also in the essay examples of VOC corruption, embezzlment, blackmarkets, and general running-a-amok. The Dutch fear of the local “native”, either because they thought their throats would be slit while they slept or because they regarded the locals as a source of contagion, became so pronounced that they booted them out of the town. The locals then responded by forming their own “kampungs” and so there you have it.

Here is colonialism at its finest.

Hello Jakarta! There are some lesson to be learned here. For one don’t build more suburbs over the Jakarta aquifer.

Also good reason to check out the Book of the Week.

In the Nature of Cities Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism edited by Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw

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Jakarta (The Menteng Kids)

Somewhere in Jakarta 1932

Still not fixed after all these years. My, those crazy Menteng Kids.

The Jakarta Post reports  on January 14, 2009 (yes it is that time of the year again):

FLOODS: Torrential rain and high tide swamp city’s northwest
Heavy downpour coupled with high tide Monday caused deluge in several areas across North and West Jakarta.

The City Coordination Board for Disaster Mitigation (Satkorlak) reported that two community units (RW) in Muara Baru and Penjaringan in North Jakarta were submerged in 20 to 35 centimeters of floodwater.

The morning rain raised the water level at Pasar Ikan floodgate in North Jakarta, to 205 cm, higher than its normal level of 170 cm.

The board upped the floodgate’s alert status to second level, or one level below the top alert, to warn the residents of possible flooding.

A top alert status will be issued if the water level at the gate goes above 230 cm.

Head of the board, Bobby Aryono, said the deluge was caused by rainwater buffeted by high tide at Jakarta Bay.in Muara Baru is only 20 cm deep.a normal incident,” Bobby told reporters at City Hall.

“It should recede within three hours.”

City Governor Fauzi Bowo said the flooding at Muara Baru was caused by a broken sea embankment at Nizam Zaman Port, which is operated by state-owned port operator company PT Pelindo.

“I hope Pelindo repair the broken embankment immediately,” he said.

Jakarta Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG) said the seawater level reached 220 cm Monday.

Earlier last week, BMG said several areas in North Jakarta would be hit by flooding as the rain was expected to peak at the end of this month.

Rainwater Monday also caused a river in Jelambar Jaya kampung, Petamburan, in West Jakarta to overflow. three days, the streets here have been deluged by river water,” said Surati, a Jelambar Jaya resident, as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.

“The 50-centimeter-deep flood should recede within three hours once the rain stops,” she added.

Toby, another resident, said residents in the area experienced regular flooding twice a month.

Knee-deep rainwater inundated the entrance gate, Carnival Beach and Festival Market of Ancol Dreamland in North Jakarta.

The 50-centimeter-deep water outside the recreation center on caused traffic congestion for several hours in the morning.

According to data released by Satkorlak on Monday, water levels at Karet floodgate in Central Jakarta as well as other 12 main floodgates in Jakarta and the uphill area of Bogor were below normal.

Jakarta was hard hit by flooding in 2002 when two-thirds of the city was submerged in water. Floods claimed 34 lives and forced more than 384,000 residents to evacuate their homes and live in shelters. — JP/Agnes Winarti

Those Menteng Kids

“The permanent and ever extending intervention of the state apparatus in the area of the processes and units of consumption makes it the real source of order in everydaylife. This intervention of the state apparatus, which we call urban planning in the broad sense, invloves an almost immediate politicization of the whole urban problematic, since the adminstrator and the interlocultor of the social claims and demand tend to be, in the final analysis, the political appartus of the dominant classes.”

  -Manuel Castells (The Urban Question)

 

Batavia Official Tourist Bureau 1920 – 1930

In this post I will continue my discussion of  Planning the Megcity, Jakarta in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 2008. NY, by  Christopher Silver from the previous post. All quotes are from his text with the page number cited unless otherwise noted. I want to examine some of the sections in Chapter One ‘Understanding Urbanization and the Megacity in Southeast Asia and Chapter Two  ‘Fashioning the Colonial Capital City, 1900 -1940′.

Silver notes at the beginning that, “The city’s [Batavia] development before 1900 was driven by events during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when planning intervention was largely limited to efforts to embellish the colonial city to suite the wishes of a minority of its citizens, namely the Europeans, and Asians who dominated the city’s economic activity.” /1

“Further, the direction and location of the eleven rivers that run from the mountains to the low-lying areas where the Dutch had established their colonial administration centre in the seventeenth century created natural barriers which determined both the direction and boundaries of the city’s growth. Even as population growth in colonial Batavia accelerated after 1900, there was relatively little divergence in the basic pattern of urban growth. The city remained compact, squeezed onto the highest ground between the frequently flooding rivers”. /1

Reflecting on his own experience of Jakarta Silver says that, “The Jakarta I first encountered was many respects the outcome of carefully calculated planning interventions; a city where planning was an integral part of the apparatus of government management”. /2

In his introduction Silver writes of Menteng,  ”Built in the early twentieth century for the European community at what was then the outer most edge of Batavia, Menteng helped to launch the modern planning movement in the city, and involved prominent Dutch planners and architects practicing in the Netherland Indies. The bequeathed to the city what was one of its most elegant and sought after addresses”. /10

And emphasizes that, “The foundation of modern Jakarta has roots deep within the Dutch colonial era”. /14

In Chapter One Silver begins, “The most enduring impact of colonialism on Southeast Asia cities was to link them more fully within a global economic network.” /25

And cites McGee: “…the most prominent function of these cities was economic; the colonial city was the ‘nerve center’ of colonial exploitation. Concentrated here were the institutions through which capitalism extended its control over the colonial economy – the banks, the agency houses, trading companies, the shipping companies and the insurance companies.” /27

And Dean Forbes: “…the colonial period disrupted the economic and social geography of Southeast Asia. It brought significant changes to the distribution of economic activities, reinforcing the rise of the colonial port city, which in turn provided the foundation for the post-World War II surge in urbanization. These cities were dominated by the colonizers, whose needs generally came first, with the indigenous economy at the margins of the city.”

Silver adds that, “An increasing concentration of wealth and political power within the urban elite accompanied the substantial increase in urban population, most of whom existed on the margins of society”. /29

Kramat, Salemba, Kebun Sirih, Prapaten, Pegangsaann, Jatinagara, New Gondangdia, and the prized Menteng all were Dutch designed extensions of Batavia.  And “everything in Batavia is spacious and airy” /43

Silver cites Furnivall “in 1900 the European community was detached from native life but had no complete independent life; by 1930 it lived within its own world, with its own cultural interests and with its trade unions and labour politics, alongside, but wholly separate from the native world” /44

And (amazingly) that, “In 1930 there were 35 daily newspapers, 54 weeklies, 91 monthly magazines and no fewer than 100 cultural, economic and political societies to support Batavia’s expanded European world.” /45

Accordingly “racial classification was the cornerstone of the colonial administration” and there was “no unitary political system”.  /45-46

 

And those Menteng kids… let me introduce you to some of those who planned and built Batavia.

Frans Johan Louwens Ghijsels, 28, architect, born in Tulung Agung, East Java, graduate of the Technical University Delft.  If you drive by or use Jakartakota Stasion you see his handiwork everyday. He was involved with  the Home municipality of Batavia, 1918, the Menteng Property Company (1920-21), Bukit Duri Manggara (1918), Indo-Eurasion Association (1923), and wrote plans wrote plans for Bandung and Batavia (1917-1918).

There was Henri Maclaine Pont and Thomas Karsten who wrote the 1916 Master Plan for Semarang (first modern urban plan). Karsten would note of  Menteng that ”satisfactory provision for the housing needs of the well-to-do seems assured” /56-57

Wikipedia has it about Karsten: “Herman Thomas Karsten (1885-1945) was a Dutch engineer who gave major contributions to architecture and town planning in Indonesia during Dutch colonial rule. Most significantly he integrated the practice of colonial urban environment with native elements; a radical approach to spatial planning for Indonesia at the time. He introduced a neighborhood plan for all ethnic groups in Semarang, built public markets in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, and a city square in the capital Batavia (now ‘Jakarta’). Between 1915 and 1941 he was given responsibility for planning 12 out of 19 municipalities in Java, 3 out of 9 towns in Sumatra and a town in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). He received official recognition from both the government through his appointment to the colony’s major Town Planning Committee and by the academic community with his appointment to the position of Lecturer for Town Planning at the School of Engineering at Bandung. He died in an internment camp near Bandung in 1945 during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia”. 

There was, Silver continues, F.J. Kubatz, Director of the Municipal Department of Land and Housing in Batavia involved with New Gondangdia, Burgermeester Bisschopplein (Taman Suropati). /51-52  And the Menteng plan itself  by P.A.J. Mooijen based on garden city model of Ebeneezer Howard. F.J. Kubatz would later modify Mooijen’s Menteng plan. There was J.F.L. Blankenburg designer of homes at Menteng. Silver provides an interesting list  of consulting firms operating in Batavia, Semarang, Bandung:

“Menteng provided a continuous stream of commissions for the growing cadre of design and planning firms that had set up shop in they city. There were several large consulting firms in Batavia and other key cities that appeared after 1909 and functioned in carrying out both design and construction. These included M.J. Hulswit, A.A. Fremont and Eduard Cuypers, Biezeveld and Mooijen, Bakker and Meyboom, and Ghijsels’ ‘trendsetting’ AIA, all operating in Batavia; Karsten, Lutjens, Toussaint, and Henri Maclaine Pont with offices in Semarang, and C.P. Schoemaker and Associates the leading firm in Bandung.” /60

Perhaps what is most telling is that Silver notes “The Public Works Department was influenced, and at several junctures, led in the early twentieth century by the Dutch Social Democratic Party, virtually all trained at the Technical University of Delft. According to Van Door, the development agenda of these engineers was progressive and… the indigenous population did interest as a matter of care, but in a round-about way (emphasis is mine) … Like all technocrats, these civil engineers were wholly concerned with the application of science in practice, with technical innovation and rationalization… They had pronounced admiration for productivity and for rationalization and planning springing froma dislike of traditional ways and capitalistic waste. The colonial system where engineers and planners were free to follow their own fancies offered these technocratic tendencies considerable scope”. /48-49

In a “round-about way” this would allow them, after all, to create spacious and modern enclaves where “European residents received four times the amount of water than delivered to native residents”. /52

And it would allow them, not withstanding their political principals, to accept a “local public policy” which was ” to avoid any interference, or investment, in the indigenous areas” and to sell their “technical innovation and rationalization” to the Dutch elites.  /52

Prior to the roaring 20s in Batavia in “1901, there were 304 private estates, 101 owned by Europeans and the rest largely owned by Chinese with 800,000 peasant holdings”. It is not detailed what exactly is meant by a “peasant holding” but it might be assumed that more than one individual lived on the holding owned by a Dutchman or a Chinese. And I assume “peasant” means a Javanese farmer.

It is hard to do justice to Silver’s book in these short posts so I do not want to appear as if this is a gloss. But it is clear that Batavia was built for the Dutch by the Dutch. That race, colonialism, power, and the right (or claim) to the city were urban topographies just as high and strong as the walls of Fort Batavia of 1619 which protected the Dutch from the “locals”. In  part this goes to explain something of why Jakarta is a city but NOT an Indonesian city. More of that later after we examine the kampung in Batavia.

The discussion will continue.

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Jakarta (multipoliCity metrochaotic)

A Saturday night dinner dance in Bandung’s fasionable Homann Hotel, ca. 1920. From: Java: Indonesia, Periplus Adventure Guides, Edited by Eric Oey, 1997.  Photo: Antiquariaat Acanthus   (scanned image)

Can you see them? They are there on the left and right, way in the back, lined up near the walls. Nearly invisible. Servants and shadows to the folks having such a grand time at the Homann Hotel.  Or it could very well be at the fashionable Harmonie Club, “the main cultural institution of high European society” of Batavia close on to the Konigsplein, a public square nearly a square kilometer in extent. “A European enclave, a spacious civic center ringed by two churches, the city’s two leading hotels (Des Indies and Der Nederlander), and the the town theater (Schouwberg).”  Where I am also sure many servants and shadows also tread. Though the Harmonie is no longer the Konigsplein remains a central feature of Jakarta. It is, of course, Merdeka Sqaure.

During my soon to end vacation I have conducted a sort of discourse with myself and Jakarta. I just finished reading Planning the Megcity, Jakarta in the Twentieth Century, Routledge, 2008. NY, by Dr. Christopher Silver, Dean of the College of Design, Construction and Planning and professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at (of all places) the University of Florida, Gainesville. This seems to me a long way from Jakarta but Dr. Silver does have reliable and personal experience with the city and he tells a good story – there is historical background but his main focus is on the “planning” of Jakarta. His book takes a “planner’s eye view”, if you will.

So, to answer the question I posed to myself and my fellow traveller bloggers: Is Jakarta a city?” I say yes. In its current configuration of metrochaos it is a multipoliCity.

I will return to Dr. Silver’s book in a moment to pause to consider some definitions of just what a city is.  I will begin to seconding Marissa Duma’s astute note regarding  density of population as defining characteristic. It is a good place to start. (see the post: Jakarta (apa?) )

Phil Hubbard in his book City cites R. Davis who describes cities as ‘concentrations of many people located close together for residential and productive purposes’ and Saunders who points out that ‘cities are places where large numbers of people live and work’. Simply enough. But as Hubbard notes ‘the city is many things: a spatial location, a political entity, as administrative unit, a place of work and play, a collection of dreams and nightmares, a mesh of social relations, an agglomeration of economic activity…”  A city is everyday life.  But as Andy Merrfield asks in Metromarxism in the chaper on Henri Lefebvre: “Is the city a “technical object” or an “aesthetic object”?” And like Lefebvre I ask how is the “space” of urban Jakarta “produced”? To what ends? I will have more to say regarding this  but for now lets take a look at a few  more definitions and some numbers from  demographia via wikipedia: List of Urban Areas by Population. (note: there is also a link to additonal demographia information in the right sidebar under ‘Urban Issues’.

“Demographia defines an urban area (urbanized area agglomeration or urban centre) as a continuously built up landmass of urban development containing a high population density, without regard for administrative boundaries (i.e. municipality, city or commune) or a labor market (i.e. metropolitan area).”

 Here are the current top three urban areas (the numbers are 2008 estimates so they are as good as ‘hot off the press’):

Tokyo – Yokohama, Japan:    34,400,000

Jakarta, Indonesia:   21,800,000

New York City, United States:  20,090,000

There is not even a hint of the qualitative differences between Tokyo, New York, and Jakarta of which there are many. There are only the numbers and numbers and density of population Jakarta does have. It’s number two in urban population extent  (for now).

City, megacity, conurbation, megalopolis, multipoliCity. This is the urban age. Now is the urban century. Definitions merge and mingle. And as far a numbers go Jakarta meets the test.

Back to Dr. Silver and the “planner’s eye view”:  Here is Batavia of 1905.

“The spatial distribution of population within Batavia underscored the traditionally deep social divisions based on race, class, and ethnicity. In turn this reflected the uneven division of power in the colonial capital. In 1905, the European community represented just 9 per cent of the total population but occupied 50 per cent of the residential land, while the native, which made up 71 per cent of the population of Batavia’s residents, crowded onto just 20 per cent of the city’s land. That left the Chinese (and Arabs and Indians), who constituted 20 per cent of the population and occupied a more generous 30 per cent of the land.” /38

Yes, Jakarta is a city but I am going to argue that it is NOT an Indonesian city. Jakarta has had too long a history as Batavia. Its historical and material development are at heart colonial and the implications of this are significant.  This is the thesis I will explore  in further posts.

 

Note: Both Dr. Silver’s book and Dr. Hubbard’s book were posted as “Book of the Week” a new and transitive feature of this blog.  Another reason to visit.

 

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Jakarta (urban language, cultural gado-gado)

Detail from Borobudur

Indonesian is part of that great language family group known as Austronesian  which is the most widely spread language group on the planet. Stretching as far west as Madagascar and a far east at Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it is known by it original Polynesian settlers.

The Hawaiian language, for example still shares words with modern Indonesian: Hawaiian, ahi = Indonesian, api (fire, though I was told that in Seram the tool used to make the fire is called ‘ahi’), Hawaiian, maka = Indonesian, mata (eye), Hawaiian, maki = Indonesian, mati (dead). The name ‘Hawai`i may be a cognate of ‘Java’, the name of Indonesia’s most populous island; you can see it in the ‘awa’ and the ‘ava’. On Seram there is the village of Wahai, perhaps yet another cognate. Also on Seram the prefix ‘wai’ is used to mean river and in Hawai`i it means ‘water’.

Back in the deep time when people pushed their sailing canoes off the beaches somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago they carried with them the roots of the Austronesian family group. They also carried the real roots of taro, banana, kukui, sugar cane, ti, and the other Polynesian “canoe” plants which are known to have their biological and evolutionary origins in Indonesia.

Thus the world is linked and it is always bigger and more connected than we might assume as first glance. The word moa has a long reach; it means ‘bird’ or ‘chicken’ and is still in use today in Madagascar, Aeotearoa, and Hawai`i.

The other lesson here is that language is, in and of itself, not static. Language is pliable and transforms over time. I like to think of it as a mental plastic; resilient, and absorbing. Perhaps there is no language which gives such a good example as this as Indonesian.

Modern Indonesian is rooted to Old Malay originating in southern Sumatra and spreading during the 7th through the 9th century under the Hindu Sriwijaya kingdom. Modern Malay came in to its own in the 13th and 14th centuries as a lingua franca (or trading language) when it was spread through the archipelago coincident with the spread of Islam.

That is how I think of Bahasa Indonesia; a commercial trading language at the core, having incorporated words from Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic, and later Portuguese, Dutch, and English, with good portions of Javanese, Sundanese, Maduraese, Minankabauese and other far flung indigenous languages thrown in the mix for good measure.

Traveling the far reaches of the archipelago I always get the humbling impression that people speak two, three, or even four different languages. Modern Indonesian really is “unity in diversity“.

Jakarta, of course, is particularly interesting because it has always been, since the days of Batavia, a place where all these influences rubbed up against each other and mixed together, both metaphorically and physically.

The Betawi of Jakarta is a cultural result.

The Dutch actually got around to building a city in the eighteenth century when the walls surrounding Fort Batavia were finally pulled down and hauled up to Gambir. From this time onward, and especially in the early nineteenth century, Indonesian ethnic groups increasingly found their place in the life of Batavia, however marginal that may have been.

The Dutch,  for administrative purposes and security reasons divided Batavia into small ethnic enclaves, or kampungs. But, as Abeyasekere states, “By the 1820s… …intermixing had gone so far that observers could no longer divide the Indonesian community into distinct ethnic groups. In the nineteenth century Indonesians born in Batavia generally came be called Orang Betawi, a recognition that the Indonesians of the city formed a distinct ethnic group”.

The cultural force which held the Orang Betawi together was their common faith of Islam; in fact they had a reputation of being fanatically Islamic. In the Dutch colonial world of Batavia which set the economic and social rules of the day this was at least something the Betawi had under their control and could claim as their own. They sent their children to Muslim schools. They avoided employment which would bring them into contact with Europeans.

They spoke their own language, a distinct dialect of Malay. From this, other distinct cultural practices evolved; wedding ceremonies, architecture, dress, music, dance, oral traditions, ondel-ondel, and Silat.

By the 1930s the growth of Batavia was so rapid that the Betawi were viewed as an ethnic minority in the very city which created them. Their culture persists in Jakarta today in their language, art, theatre and they came still be found, on a Saturday morning, practicing Silat.

Silat, Kampung Betawi, Jakarta, 2008

The urban scene has always been a hothouse of cultural evolution. In the case of Jakarta the crowding together of large numbers of people from widely diverse areas throughout the archipelago results in a blend of  varied ethnic traditions mixing under the influence of the social stress of urban living and enhanced by the pressure of external cultural influences.

Abeyasekere notes how quickly new immigrants to the city become Jakartans.

It’s a cultural gado-gado.

“…language is the colour of our skin, in a way- it will never wash off. It isn’t necessarily about the language, it’s about the message, the perseverence of culture implied somewhere in the context.”

-Marisa Duma

PROKEM: An Analysis of A Jakarta Slang. Thomas H. Slone. Masalai Press, Oakland, California, 2003. 95 pages.

What is a “ludling” you might ask?

The literal meaning of the term is “play-language”. Linguists use the term to describe languages created from ordinary languages “as the result of a transformation or series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering form but not the content of the original message, for the purposes of concealment or comic effect”. Slone states in his Introduction to PROKEM that, “As such, ludlings exist as a subset of play languages, namely those that are formed by regular transformation of a standard, base language. Ludlings as well as most other slang languages retain the grammar of the base language”.

Oing-gay o-tay karta-jay o-tay uy-bay ome-say ice-ray.

What is this?

In the US, and perhaps in England, every school age child comes across this sooner or later. This is a ludling known as “Pig Latin” where the words are formed by taking a standard English word, transposing the initial part of the word to the end, and adding “ay”.

So the above is: Going to Jakarta to buy some rice.

Or something like that. I am a bit rusty on my Pig Latin as I probably have not spoken it since the fifth grade.

Slone defines Prokem as “a slang language that is spoken in Jakarta, primarily by youth who speak the Jakartan dialect of Indonesian. It most likely originated as a secret criminal language, but is today spoken by both high school and university students and by members of street gangs, preman, from which the name Prokem comes”.

Jakartan is a dialect of Indonesian and Prokem is a slang Jakartan.

Slang has its roots in puns, jokes, crime, sex, violence, politics, arcronyms, generational changes, fashion, “the scene”. It is the same for the beatniks, hippys, or surfers. To speak slang is an entrance ticket to a  community which is often opposed to and out of the norm.

As Abayesekere notes:

“Some of the more well-to-do clearly felt that Western influence had most to teach about shaping a modern urban society. They watched Western films frequently and tried to keep in touch with trends abroad. This troubled many nationalists, who feared that Jakartans were absorbing all the worst aspects of Western culture. In 1952, Vice-President Hatta noted that Indonesia’s large cities were much influenced by Westerners: “In these places, most of our people just become imitators. As usual, the easiest thing to imitate is the shallow, the superficial…” He pus this down to the fact that, “most of our cities did not arise from our own society but rather as appendages of a foreign economy. These cities are not the centers of the creative activity of our own people but primarily distribution centers of foreign goods”.

In the Jakarta of the 1950s, Hatta’s remarks seemed to be supported by the appearance of the so-called ‘cross-boys’. These were gangs of youths who modeled themselves on the juvenile delinquents portrayed in Western films and who were usually associated with jeans and motor bikes. Some view them suspiciously as a sign of imported social decadence, but they also had much in common with the pemuda of the Revolution days. When martial law was introduced in 1957, the military authorities in Jakarta banned ‘cross-boy organization’, of which there seemed to be a large number: thirty-six were listed by name, including Cross-Boys Club, Deddy [sic] Boys Club, and James Dean Club. And for good measure, the wearing of jeans in public by anyone over the age of ten was forbidden. This was no hollow threat: arrests were subsequently made at cinemas.”

Slang emerges to meet the social surroundings.

Here are some examples as given by Slone.

“What does MBA [ Master of Business Administration ] mean?” (pun, riddle)  Prokem = “Master by Accident and “Masih belum apa-apa.” (“Still nothing”).

APIK (acronym) : Indonesian = Akademi Pendidikan Il mu Keguruan [ "Training Academy of Science Teachers" ]   Prokem = agak pikun ["rather senile"]

ANGGUN (acronymic redefinition of regular word meaning “well dressed”) in Prokem = angota ragunan, [ "ugly person, literally "member of the Ragunan Zoo" ].

SIMPATIK (another acronymic redefinition whose standard meaning is “congenial” or “sympathetic) in Prokem = simpanse pakai batik [ "chimpanzee dressed in batik" ].

 CHICAGO Indonesian = Cikini, Kali Pasir, Gondangdia Lama; Prokem = Chicago, Illinois; three street names in Jakarta that form a triangular area and may have been a gang territory.

OPEC Indonesian = Organisasi Pedagang Ekonomi Cukupan; Prokem = Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Organization of Economic Tranders [providing] Just Enough).

These are just a small sample of Prokem which Slone cites in his book. There may be well over 4,000 words in the Prokem vocabulary; some words dropping away and new ones added. The book itself is a slim volume but rich in the technical understanding of where Prokem comes from, how it functions, and where it is going. It’s detail is thorough, educational, and entertaining. It shows the reach of Bahasa Indonesia; “the perseverence of culture implied somewhere in the context”.

Other Sites of Interest:

Indonesian Language Resources

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Jakarta (Batavia, Djakarta, Jakarta, population and the Chinese)

 

House detail, Pasar Baru, Jakarta

Population

How many people live in Jakarta? (And who counts them?). That number varies depending on what you mean by ‘Jakarta’. Is it Jakarta or Daerah Khusus Ibukota or Jabodetebek? Is it the number within metropolitan Jakarta or greater metropolitan Jakarta? Is it nine million or thirteen million or twenty-three million people?

Prior to 1619, how many people lived in Jayakarta? Perhaps, maybe one or two thousand people.

When the Dutch anchored their ships in Jakarta Bay at the mouth of the Ciliwung River how many scruffy lice bitten Dutchmen were there? Not many.

Here are some interesting notes gleaned from Abeyasekere’s Jakarta: A History, with some additions.

Batavia – Jakarta 1673 to 2004

Year       Population

1673     27,000 (including 13,278 or 49% slaves and 2,024 or 7%
                          Netherlanders, 2,747 or 10% Chinese)

1730     20,000 (walled town) 15,000 (suburbs)

1779     12,131 (old town) 160,986 (scattered to the mountains)

1815     49,000
1850     70,000
1900     116,000
1930     435,000

1945     844,000 (20,000 or 2.3% of this population were ‘beggars’)

1948     1,050,000 (in 1948, the first 1 million people)

1952     1,782,000 (in 1953, 75% of Jakartans were born outside of
                               Jakarta)
1965     3,813,000
1976     5,700,000
1980     6,500,000
1989     9,000,000

2004     13,000,000 (2004 population exceeds that of 1900 by 112 times)

 

 

2008? 19 to 23 million people in greater Jakarta. Does anyone know? And is it possible to count everyone? Making Jakarta the seventh, eighth, or ninth, largest city on the planet. There are new arrivals daily.

It took 329 years, from 1619, when Dutch slaves built Fort Batavia, to 1948, before the city’s population reached one million

In the period from 1900 to 2004, the city’s population grew by 112 times to reach a population of thirteen million and more. This is one-third the time it took the city to reach its first one million residents. This is also where Batavia, essentially a Dutch colonial city, disappears to become Jakarta, the ‘mother city’ of Indonesia.

During the 1950s things really started to roar.

The rapid rise in population was such that, as Abeyasekere writes,

“The majority of new immigrants shared existing housing… …The state of affairs is described by the poet Ayip Rosidi, who arrived in Jakarta as a boy in 1951. Coming from Jatiwangi in West Java, he was appalled at the place where his uncle took him to live in. It was an alley in Galur sub-district, east of the Senen Market. The area was only a few years old, very muddy and full of huts with grass-thatched roof. Rosidi lived for several years in one of these huts backing onto a river lined with privies.

Houses were built in an unbroken row; his row measured 33 feet by 23 feet, and contained 57 inhabitants. The boy shared a bed with two other men in a small room inhabited by five people.

He later wrote: ‘It was entirely beyond anything I had imagined before actually coming to Djarkarta, and I felt nauseated. I had never, never thought I could live in such squalor. Yet little by little… I grew familiar with Djakarta housing, knowing that it was sometimes possible to live in a row of shacks, as we did, only after some stroke of good luck’ “.

That is 57 people in an area measuring 33 feet by 23 feet or 759 square feet. Shared among 57 people this would allow each person a space of 3.5 feet by 4.5 feet. If you calculate the space needed for cooking, sleeping, or other household items this space is further reduced.

Later, Abeyasekere quotes Rosidi in his attempt to come to terms with urban life,

“…I felt that I’d been placed in a sickening cage, that I’d lost my roots, that I stood right in the middle of an international city’s whirling confusion, a city that opened itself to every current and never flinched away, a bustling activity without direction or purpose, a city of lies and tricks“.

In 1951, there were only 47 trucks and 600 handcarts available to collect rubbish. Of the trucks which were available about one in six was out of action and in need of repair.

For the entire city there were only 60 men and 4 trucks employed to empty privies. In 1954, in a city of nearly two million people, there were only 84 public restrooms, none of which had water.

If you wanted to ring up City Hall to complain there were only 8,204 telephone connections. The joke was that it was quicker to walk across town to deliver a message than use the telephone (if you could find one).

The Chinese

Chinese presence in Java dates from as early as the ninth century. Trade in spices and Chinese luxury goods was long established before the arrival of Europeans.

Before the Portuguese and the Dutch started mucking things up the Chinese were present in the town of Jayakarta where they grew sugar cane and distilled arak. The de Haan map of Jayakarta shows ‘Chinese Houses’ along the left bank of the Ciliwung River between the ‘defense line’ north of Kyai Aria’s District and Fort Batavia. Neither in or out of one camp or another but always potentially in the line of fire of either.

Abeyasekere quotes Coen as saying that “…there is no people who serve is better that the Chinese, and so easy to get as the Chinese“. She writes, “So keen was he [Coen] to build up their numbers quickly in Batavia that in 1622 he sent ships to kidnap people on the coast” … and “The Europeans were heavily dependent on Chinese labor and on merchandise from East Asia brought in by Chinese junks. In 1625, the Chinese fleet trading in Batavia had a total tonnage at least as large as that of the whole VOC return fleet” … and concluding that “so dominant was the role of the Chinese, in fact, that a recent historian has argued that from 1619 to 1740 Batavia was, economically speaking ‘basically a Chinese colonial town under Dutch protection’.

Abeyasekere: “The rapid influx of Chinese contributed to the opening up of the country around Batavia, and it was this development which caused anxiety to the Company, since outside the walls it was much harder to keep the Chinese under surveillance”.

It was these Chinese, as Abeyasekere points out, which developed Batavia’s sugar estates and its only original export of raw sugar and arak.

“From 2,747 Chinese within the town in 1674 the registers show a jump to 4,389 in 1739; in the environs (a nebulous term denoting the hinterland as far south as the mountains) 7,550 Chinese were counted in 1719 and 10,574 in 1739 (likely to be an understatement)”.

To control this rapid rise of immigration the Dutch concocted escalating regulations. They tried to place a quota on how many Chinese could be brought in by junk. This was evaded by the Chinese simply through landing people along the coast away from Batavia. Finally, in response to a glut of sugar on the global market which threw many Chinese coolies out of work the Dutch proposed to move them to their company outposts in Ceylon, “which rumour had it amongst the distressed Chinese, was just a ruse for dumping them at sea”.

The year 1740 marks a bloody turning point in the Dutch and Chinese relationship. The economic down turn in the sugar markets eventually led to a peasant revolt on the outskirts of Batavia. Abeyasekere writes, “Carrying home-made weapons and flying banners inscribed ‘To assist the poor, the destitute, and the oppressed’ and ‘Follow the righteous of old times’, the Chinese coolies marched on the city, where hundreds of their compatriots lived behind the walls. Although the latter had little or no contact with the Chinese outside, rumors spread that they were planning to assist the rebels. When the ill-armed Chinese force attacked the town on 8 October, the fact that they were easily repulsed did not save the Chinese inside”.

And so it began. Europeans and Indonesians “attacked, burned, and plundered” six to seven thousand Chinese homes and massacred perhaps as many as one thousand Chinese while the government stood by and did nothing. Five hundred Chinese were arrested and held at the Town Hall only to eventually be led out and executed one by one. “For a week the town blazed with fire and the canals ran red with blood.” While order was eventually restored the peasant rebellion would continue to 1743.

The events would set the pattern for later incidents in Jakarta’s history such as the anti-Chinese protests of the 1960s, the Soeharto purge of the Communist Party in 1965, and the ethnic riots in 1997. Still, the root of anti-Chinese violence lies with the Dutch who created and enforced the highly stratified society of colonial Batavia which is something the Indonesia elites of Jakarta have taken advantage of, have promoted, and have yet to address and resolve.

Abeyasekere concludes that, “Jealousy of Chinese commercial success simmered among many other citizens, who took advantage of a break down in law and order to attack the Chinese and loot their property. Little protection of the Chinese has been offered by Jakarta’s governments, who have often seemed prepared to allow the Chinese to be treated as scapegoats for the inadequacy of their own administration”.

Indeed.

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Jakarta (Batavia)

Batavia, 1929

This remarkable photo (the scene may be along the canal in the Pasar Baru area) is posted (along with some other old scenes from Batavia, Bandung, Malang, and Semarang at morning coffee ~o)

Click on the photo to view at its full size.  It’s laundry day in Batavia. A time to meet friends, share some gossip, exchange the news in the community of women.  There is much going on in this photo. Take some time with it. 

In the next series of posts Jakarta Urban Blog will visit Batavia.  To know where you are it is useful to see where you have been and to see where you have been is often useful in understanding where you are going.

In my library of Indonesian books Susan Abeyasekere’s Jakarta: A History is a much loved volume. This is the book which has inspired my own effort here. My copy of this book was published by Oxford University Press and shows a copyright date of 1987. Susan Abeyasekere at this time was lecturer in Southeast Asian History and Politics at Footscray Institute of Technology, Melbourne.  According to my search in Google Scholar this work is cited in 54 books and journal articles.  Her work prominantly figures in my Urban Studies Reading List. “A” IS for Abeyasekere.

Susan Abeyasekere clearly knew and loved Jakarta (in all its faults).  A close reading of her book reveals her interests in colonialism, social justice, human rights, gender equality, and the meaning of historical processes. These themes which she developes in Jakarta: A History are as valid today as in her own time.

I have not been successful in finding information about Susan Abeyasekere’s biography. She apparently was active in researching and writing about Indonesia through the 1980’s.  I do not know if she is still living, still teaching, or retired.  If there is anyone who is familiar with her career and work a comment here would be greatly appreciated.

In November 1980 she published an article in the New Internationalist (issue 093) titled “In Search of the Good life” where she wrote,

“Neglect of the countryside in favour of foreign investment in extractive industries and Jakarta-based manufacturing and construction has proved disastrous on the island of Java with its rural-based population of 90 million. Since there is not enough land to support them, millions of poor, unskilled people have flooded into the big cities.

Yet Jakarta’s affluent persist in believing that the capital is their city, to be developed in ways which will serve only their needs. This is justified on the grounds that the poor cannot afford to pay for facilities, even basic ones like pure drinking water. Less than 15 per cent of the city’s houses have mains water, and people in those houses pay several times less than those who buy it from street-sellers (necessary in many areas where well water is polluted).

Forty per cent of the city’s daily rubbish is not collected for disposal. There is no sewage system. Only 20 per cent of the city’s budget is spent to improve the areas where 60 per cent of the population is living. Thewealthy have monopolised the scarce supplies of water, electricity (available to only 21 per cent of the city’s houses), medical care, education and well-drained land. There is regular flooding of areas occupied by the poor. While the swelling population suffers from escalating land costs, speculators benefit from absurdly low rates of municipal property taxation”.

 Remember, she is writing this in 1980, some twenty-eight years ago.  Has much changed?

 Batavia (from Jakarta: A History)

“Javanese were not permitted to live in the city. Batavia was not intended to be the colonial capital of a large territory; it was run by a trading company which envisaged the town as a port where its ships could be serviced, as a collection point for goods and as an administrative headquarters for company activities in the region. Coen’s [the notorious VOC governor] vision rapidly materialized: in the seventeenth century Batavia became the centre of a great web of Dutch commerce in Asia, with trading posts stretching from Capetown and Persia through India, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Malacca through Formosa and Deshima in Japan. And most of these places contributed to the building up the population of Batavia, which was not a Javanese but a Company town”.

Perhaps most remarkable was that very few Europeans were actually engaged in the trade and commerce of Batavia and what Europeans were there Coen called “the scum of the earth”.  The number of Eurpean women could be counted on one hand.

Coen wrote his VOC directors that, “Everyone knows that the male sex cannot exist without women. Yet it seems that your Excellencies wish to have a colony planted without them. To make good that lack, we have sought finance here and have many women purchased. But just as up to now you gentlemen have sent me only the dregs of the earth, so it seems there here also only dregs are bought for us, for several good fellows have been poisoned by the women, for which some have been severely punished. Shall we, on account of these rejects, give up seeking good citizens, as it seems you people have done? Do we have to die out entirely? On this matter we request that, if Your Excellencies cannot get any honest married people, do not neglect to send under-age young girls: thus we hope to do better with them than with older women”.

Still the number of European women remained “infinitesimal.” Abeyasekere states the even as late as 1900 there were only 1,363 European women in Batavia while the men “consisted of fortune hunters, careerists, and pavenues. Everyone was obsessed with rank and completely uninterested in ideas”.

Abeyasekere writes that, “Batavia continues as it had begun, a town of people brought in from all over Asia at the convenience of the Company. Good and loyal fighters were recruited from as far afield as Japan and the Philippines for the town’s garrison; Chinese were encouraged to settle as shopkeepers and as a link to the lucrative China trade, and labour was provided by slaves from anywhere but Java, whose inhabitants were too suspect. It was a society assembled by the Company exclusively for its own interests“.

By the late 1790s “the VOC [Dutch East Indies Company] slipped more deeply into that bankruptcy, nepotism, inefficientcy, corruption, maladministration and military decline of which Batavia was cause, symptom, and symbol”.

Here are the roots of the city which would become Jakarta.  In future posts Jakarta Urban Blog will examine the role of the Chinese in Batavia and the expanding population.