Stories from Deli

DeWit 1914

To a worse degree than ever since the beginning of this voyage I have got to feel here in Deli how far a distance separates us Westerners from the Oriental. There lies the great work of the Delian tobacco culture before all eyes. But of the tens of thousands who do that work, only several Westerners are the explainers for the Westerner. Even if he knew the many languages ​​of those crowds of Eastern workers, even if he could personally question Battaks, Boyans, Bandjarese, Javanese, Sundanese, Bugis, he would not know how they judge that work in relation to themselves. The historical distrust of the conquered race is too deep for it to take such an unselfish interest in the conquering. Whoever comes to Deli from outside, will not get to know it any other way than from the standpoint of the Westerner and the employer: never from the standpoint of the Oriental and the employee. My idea cannot be anything other than one-sided; for more I don’t give them.

It is well known from how small beginnings the industry has emerged that is currently serving the world market works: tobacco cultivation on the east coast of Sumatra. Everyone has heard the story of a young man who, while in Java, had accidentally heard that tobacco of an exceptionally good quality was growing in Deli, went there haphazardly, in a small Chinese vessel; how he, with a few furniture borrowed from the skipper as best he could, furnish a Native house which the Sultan gave him in rent; and how he went to work with European helpers who soon gave up and with Native workers who did not like to work. The pioneer tried the method which he had seen succeed in Java: in his royal landscape he tried to buy the labor of the people for the sake of the sovereign. But the trouble for the promised f 0. 50 per piquot of tobacco the Sultan of Deli did to plant his subjects was insufficient or in vain: and the planter had to look after other workers. He thought he would get there with Javanese, a group of hajjis left in Penang.

But the hadjis were much more eager to preach than plant or pick. Finally, he took the test with Chinese from Singapore. They turned out to be ignorant of agricultural work: but the desire to earn money and the teachings of the Chinese helped overcome that obstacle. A form was found for the relationship between employer and employees: the work would be performed in contract and paid according to a set task – the delivery of a thousand trees. This had resulted in what to such gigantic dimensions would grow up and produce both so much good and so much evil – an industry in a new country with workers brought in from abroad, working by contract.

Javanese, eager for the Haji title but averse to the Mekka journey, go to Penang to give the appearance of having completed the journey, and after a few weeks return as if coming from Mecca. The source from which the writer drew this question provides no certainty as to whether the planter was dealing with such counterfeit hadjis or whether the planter had accidentally stopped on the road.

The pioneer had gained tremendous fortune in a few years. Those who followed on his way came in groups. Companies were founded by numbers. The work now went on a grand scale.

The region in which it began was a wilderness — jungle laced with an innumerable multitude of streams and brooks, which run almost parallel along the eastern slopes of the Batak highland, gradually slowing down to the flattening ground; in pools and swamps their mouths lie along the sea beach. It took thousands and tens of thousands of workers to cut and dig space in that wasteland for the tobacco. It became like a moving people from all the surrounding countries where hunger was hungry to Deli: from the British Indies, from Java, from Borneo, from China. From Europe too, from the too hungry Europe. From Holland, from England, from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, France, even from Poland (if one can rely on the name of Polonia, who was given an enterprise, as others have the names of Gallia, Helvetia, Hessia) came workers for the tobacco field, workers with the head, sent out as leaders of the workers by hand by the finance groups in the various countries who poured their capital into the new industry. Between the beach marshes and the barren mountains, surrounded through the jungle, which had already pushed further away, something like a small state had emerged. And its workings soon spread to all sides.

The established existence was first changed to the new condition. Through a series of reorganisations, which began in 1873 and lasted until 1902, Deli was first detached from its association with the Sultanate of Siak, then from that with the Riouw residence; made a separate region, it became the capital of Medan and the other tobacco-producing regions as subdivisions. The Dutch authority was strengthened against that of the Sultan, who had to give way foot by foot. The government took charge of the rights over people and over money: a new law brought under Dutch authority and law all who worked in the Dutch state service or in the service of Europeans; a treaty with the Sultan brought into the Netherlands Indies treasury the already considerable amounts of import and export duties. There, besides the Sultan of Deli, who, because of his enmity with that of Siak, had an interest in a life in peace and friendship with the Dutch, all the Sumatran monarchs opposed the expansion of the Dutch sphere of power and tobacco companies were attacked by armed bands, troops arrived. who continue the new order of business with a strong arm. The planters were confirmed in the newly won possession, and new land was opened up to them.

In the meantime they had mutually understood to further their common interests: the Planters’ Association was founded. In the year following that of its foundation (1872), the new organization came to stand against the government in the relationship between the planters and their workers. The way in which the government wanted to regulate it the planters judged a disadvantage for them. They resist. The battle had begun, in which the coolie ordinances of 1880, ’91, ’97, 1903 were the armistice and the design last affected Blommestein with the counter-action of the planters.

The rapid expansion, also in space, of the new culture had meanwhile created the need for means of traffic. A subsidiary company of the Deli, the Deli railway was established. She was considered sour in Holland. She was not rightly trusted. The Dutch investor, the great as well as the small, kept his trust and his dimes for American daredevils and the Russian Bird Grip, who can tear with two beaks at the same time and swallow with a double throat. The Deli trail wouldn’t have happened without the Delian tobacconists. She began to build in 1883. And such perseverance, spirit, and degree of science she contrasted with the initial lack of money and the seemingly unconquerable difficulties of nature of the swampy, heavily overgrown land that had been completed in 1890 on the line that, 102 KM long, the island-port of Belawan connected with Deli Tuwa, Medan and Timbang Langkat; and that that 102 KM length gradually grew to well over 262, running past twenty-three stations and stops, while carriages, wagons, and locomotives were increased to a number, which in 1911 carried over two million passengers and over 400,000 tons of freight.*) A start has been made for a further extension of 123 KM length to Assahan and Dollok Merassan, in the East of the Bataksche high plateau, where the newly begun cultures of rubber, gambier, copra and oil palm are in need of transportation for their products, while the plan is under consideration for the construction of an additional 200 KM of railway inland. And in the meantime the same society has built the highway through the air along which the thought and the living voice pass. The telephone runs past the harbor to the plateau and the entire ring of businesses; and the telegraph network has almost 200 KM in length.

*) Passengers 2,314,994 in 1911 against 823,860 in 1901. Freight goods 429,653 tons in 1911 against 205,577 tons in 1901. Report of the chief administrator to the resident on the east coast of Sumatra.

Against this growth, however, deteriorated: the inevitable side-effects of rapid industrial development emerged: speculation, overproduction, collapse. The years from 1884 to 1992 were the skinny ones that followed so many fat, and of those fat devoured many. Rich people became poor between morning and evening. Of the tobacco companies, everything that was outside the actual center of cultivation was destroyed. In Padang and Bedagei, only one of seventeen companies could be maintained. The misery became so bad that a fund had to be set up “for Europeans in need.” There was no money, there was no work, and it almost seemed as if it would never come again after the great tobacco market crisis of 1992, which followed a year of crop failures, low prices and bankruptcy. However, tobacco cultivation recovered, and became more vigorous after her severe illness than it had been before. As agriculture and the dairy in Holland did then, as the sugar industry in Java had done at all, she did: she improved her methods all the time, she improved her crops, she improved her labor. As early as 1988, the planters’ organization, working towards ever wider immigration of laborers from China, had established the Immigrant Bureau.

It establishes settlement and precise control and direct rapid correspondence with the Swatow Emigration Center. The question of public health demanded strict precautions against the many immigrant people from constantly contaminated regions: the planters built a quarantine station out of a large purse, according to the best methods. It was not over with that. Workers who fell ill at the companies needed medical assistance. The existing one was completely inadequate. Even with the best care and precautions, even the most prudent, and except prudent most humane planter, could not achieve that a sick coolie was required to be nursed in the small hospital of the company, nor prevent his illness from becoming the cause of the disease. who knows how many other people. The scattered, and therefore weak, forces were united and a central hospital was established at Medan, especially adapted to the customs of the Oriental and the nature of tropical diseases. And next to that home for the convalescent one was built for those who would not recover: an asylum for defective, sickly and old coolies.

But it did not stop there either: remembering that prevention is better than cure, the planters joined forces to establish an institute where the cause of the diseases could be studied and the means of prevention could be investigated experimentally. The Pathology Laboratory arose.

At the same time and in the same way – that of scientific research and experimentation – they proceeded to improve the whole culture. Trial fields were constructed and placed under expert management. And in the laboratory, work began with new methods of curing the diseases of the tobacco plant, of warding off targeting insects, and of always improving the conditions of its growth. While their tireless initiative broke through the so wide-spread and so many other interests encompassing circle of self-interest with the construction of a conduit which brought the city of Medan pure drinking water from the hills. Medan had grown in the meantime. It had become a city, one in one. Nederlandsch-Indië, a city with a ‘European’ tinge, spacious, regular, clean, with all conveniences; and with a very peculiar characteristic: the youth of all European inhabitants. Like almost everything else, this too – that there are no old people in Medan or in Deli – is another effect of the prosperity of the tobacco industry: people can earn enough money here in a shorter time than elsewhere to make further work in the tropics unnecessary. And when they are still young and can be used by others in their jobs, they return to their native country, not thinking about ‘Indies’ and staying. Just as that lonely native house with the household goods borrowed from a skipper, in which the pioneer of the Delian tobacco cultivation began to live, was the mirror image of Deli in 1863, so the popular and money-rich city of young people Medan is the mirror image of Deli in 1912.

So many and such have been the effects of what now began almost fifty years ago. Others are waiting. And among them will most likely be those who will not be applauded by those who, rightly, applaud those former. Not only the workers made the work: the work made the workers too. They are different people now than they were twenty or even ten years ago, the Delian coolies. They have heard of the struggle of the workers against capital in Europe; they have seen the same struggle begin in their own country, and consciously or unconsciously, have experienced its consequences even those who did not participate themselves. For the Javanese and the Sundanese from a remote little dessa where no European ever came, for the men from the interior of Borneo and the Sumatran mountains, the coolie ship in Deli has become the entrance to a new world. And the Chinese has awakened to political consciousness. – How’s all that gonna do to Deli? Only about that is there a difference of opinion: about the manner of the effect. Not about the question whether, yes or no, an effect will be felt. That is assumed for certainty.

Natuur en menschen in Indië(1914)–Augusta de Wit

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