Stories from Deli

Karl Pelzer (1978)

Among the many companies operating in East Sumatra after 1870, a few deserve special note for their unique contributions to the development of social features that improved the relationship between planters and their laborers or the conditions under which the latter worked. Perhaps the most important was the Senembah Company, which operated in the state of Serdang adjoining Deli.

This company’s predecessor was a partnership firm established by C. Grob, a Swiss, and H. Naeher, a Bavarian, who came to East Sumatra in 1870 and were employed at first by Albert Breker, another Swiss, the founder of the estate Helvetia north of Medan which specialized in nutmeg and tobacco cultivation.

In 1871 Grob and Naeher applied for their first land concession of 5,300 hectares on the banks of the Blumei river near Tanjung Morawa in the state of Serdang. Over the following eighteen years, the firm expanded its concession area until it controlled the Blumei valley on both sides of the river from ne ar the coast to the mountains. Near the mouth of the Serdang river, through which the waters of the Blumei reach the sea, lies Rantau Panjang, a small harbor which served the petty state of Serdang as Labuan served Deli. For about twenty years, the Grob and Naeher plantations shipped their products in sampans downstream and obtained all their supplies via Rantau Panjang.

The Swiss-German colony at Tanjung Morawa was a self-contained community, which in the early days had little to do with Deli in the absence of any overland connection. Convinced of the importance of a well-educated staff, Grob and Naeher recruited employees who had received good academic and practical training in agriculture in Europe. This gave the Tanjung Morawa planters a reputation for scientific leadership. There was emphasis too on medicine, with the result that the doctors of the Tanjung Morawa hospital were esteemed for their investigations in tropical medicine.

The soils of the Grob and Naeher plantations in Serdang proved to be slightly inferior to the Deli soils and produced a large, thick, dark-colored tobacco leaf. The latter was, however, no serious drawback so long as the American cigar industry bought thick tobacco leaves, since these were subject to a duty of only $ 0.35 against a rate of $ 0.75 per pound for thin leaves. But the coincidental combination of growing consumer preference for light-colored wrapper tobacco and the elimination of the lower duty rate for thick tobacco leaves in the United States seriously reduced the profits of the firm Grob and Naeher. This development plus Grob’s poor health led the owners of the firm to look for a buyer of their holdings. At the suggestion of the directors of the DeIi Company, which since 1875 had marketed the tobacco produced by Grob and Naeher, the firm was converted into a limited liability company. The statutes of the Senembah Company gained royal approval on 30 September 1889.

* Grob became so rich that in 1883, he acquired 13,000 m² of land in Riesbach, Swiss and built a villa called Villa Patumbah https://www.swiss-castles.com/villapatumbah

See also https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299566027_Die_Geschichte_hinter_dem_schnellen_Geld

From 1889 until 1927, Dr. C. W. Janssen, son of P. W. Janssen, co-founder of the DeIi Company, directed the Senembah Company. Thanks to his pronounced philanthropic bent, the company under his leadership repeatedly pioneered in the field of employee and labor welfare. In 1896 the company introduced the pension system for its European staff. Janssen had a special interest in the education of the Javanese children who grew up on estates of the Senembah Company. He rejected the government’s elementary education program, which used Malay as the language of instruction. Instead, his plan called for the employment of Javanese teachers who instructed in Javanese in the morning and supervised light, practical work in the afternoon. Each child received breakfast in school and each boy was assigned to a small garden plot to plant and maintain. The majority of the boys and girls who passed through these schools took employment on the estates.

* Tan Malaka was asked by Janssen to become a teacher in Tanjong Morawa from 1920-1921 where he described the poor treatment of coolies

Janssen also saw to it that the company improved the housing for its older  Javanese laborers by gradually replacing the traditional barracks for laborers with one-family houses, each surrounded by a lot of 700 sq. m. partially planted with fruit trees.

The houses were grouped to create the atmosphere of a Javanese desa and it was not long before the managers noticed a lower turnover among laborers living in these one-family houses than among those housed in the old-style barracks.

The Senembah Company carried on the tradition of good medical care established by its predecessors and even intensified it when cholera, typhus, dysentery and malaria caused heavy losses in human Iives among the laborers. Dr. W. Schüffner, brought to Tanjung Morawa to study the connection between the high death rate and the local environment, succeeded within a few years in sharply reducing the death rate and attained fame in medical circles as a pioneering specialist in tropical medicine. His great concern for preventive care is well illustrated by his recommendation that laborers working in the field he provided with tea in order to prevent their drinking polluted water, the main cause of dysentery. With obvious satisfaction, Janssen recorded that the Senembah Company had succeeded in lowering the death rate among its laborers to a level that even under European conditions could be considered normal.

See also: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115300022737