Stories from Deli

Anthony Reid, Deli in 1920-30

In the eyes of Western capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, the scattered Malay and Batak indigenous population of East Sumatra might not have existed. The area was a frontier; whose essential image was a European planter and a team of perspiring Chinese coolies clearing a patch of rich volcanic soil from the endless primeval forest. It was pictured as a bitterly hostile environment, less because of the occasional Batak resistance than because of the tigers and diseases of the forest, and the sullen hatred of the indentured work-force. For the needs of the booming tobacco estates everything was imported. The food, supplies, and men were introduced, morever, not from the established colonial world of Java with its relatively syncretic, hierarchic, Indisch life-style, but from all parts of the world. The managers of the tobacco estates were overwhelmingly Dutch, though the rubber, tea, and oil-palm estates which developed in the twentieth century brought an equal number of British, Americans, French, and Swiss.

The assistants on the estates were a very mixed bag, drawn by the high wages and call of adventure directly from Europe. ‘Training is not required. One just must be able to shout well at the coolies.’ Differences in status were vitally important within the planter community of the plantation district. The estate managers had European wives, the assistants took Javanese concubines; the two ranks did not mix socially whatever their respective social origins in Europe. These distinctions, however, paled before the absolute tyranny of race. The pioneering planters had felt so few, so isolated, and yet so proud of the fantastic wealth they were wrestling from the jungle, that they forged solidarity of colour among the Asian population which surrounded them.

Every fortnight this solidarity and mastery was celebrated in drunken, boisterous ritual at the club on the hari besar (holiday). The twentieth century rolled the plantation frontier back, and created settled amenities for the European population, which were second to none in the Indies. Yet the Deliaan, as planters of the whole plantation district, were proud to call themselves, remained a distinct type, stereotyped as coarse, hard-drinking, impatient of ‘culture’, of civil servants, or whatever else interfered with the efficient accumulation of profits. ‘The Chief Administrator of the Deli-Company is for him a more powerful deity than the Governor-General.’

The Deliaan took great pride in the modern, international, character of East Sumatra, and the smartness of its capital, Medan. But if he had many contacts with Malaya, Europe, and America, he had few with Indonesians except in the most menial capacity. The 11,000 Europeans of East Sumatra (1930), who included relatively few Eurasians, were separated by a wide gulf from the other peoples of the Residency. Even in the relatively progressive atmosphere of the Senembah-company, Tan Malaka found the gulf impassable:

‘The sharp antithesis between a white race stupid, arrogant, cruel, imperialist; and a brown race whose experience is in the sweat of their brows, but who are cheated, exploited, oppressed. . . this was what disturbed the climate of Deli.’

The harsh pioneering background of Deli, the huge cultural and social gap between its diverse immigrants, and the stubborn pride with which the Deliaan viewed the fruit of ‘his’ labour, made the region a stereotype of the neuroses which characterized colonial society. This paranoia reached its most hysterical point in 1929, when attacks on Europeans by desperate indentured labourers reached a peak. The fact that a woman, the wife of a planter at Parnabolan, in Simalungun, was killed in such an attack became the occasion for a great campaign among the Deliaan. The funeral was widely attended, telegrams of outrage descended on the Governor-General and the Queen, and preparations were made to ensure that planters could defend themselves if they were not protected by a ‘weak’ government. The movement climaxed with a privately convened meeting on 16 July 1929, attended by 2,300 ‘Fatherlanders’, demanding sterner measures. The Indonesian daily Pewarta Deli, which had the courage to dismiss the murder as a ‘small matter’ (perkara kecil), earned the bitter hostility of the whole European community.

It was in this vengeful mood that the right-wing Vaderlandsche Club was born in Medan, before it had even taken clear form in Java. The chairman of the 16 July meeting launched the local branch himself less than a month later. Although the specific policies of the Vaderlandsche Club were unclear, it represented a conviction that Dutchmen in the Indies had to stand together to defend the imperial bond against nameless threats from all sides, Almost immediately it became the most active European political group in East Sumatra, with 500 members and the beginnings of its own defence corps. The Vaderlandsche Club lost its momentum only in the period 1934-8, when the Dutch Nazi party, the N.S.B., provided a more flamboyant outlet for the vigorous minority of the extreme right. The East Sumatran branch of the N.S.B. appears to have provided a substantial proportion of the financial support for Dutch fascism. The branch was rewarded by visits from the Dutch party’s leaders, Mussert and Van Geelkerken, who drew crowds of up to 600 Europeans in Medan.

 LABOUR

If Europeans were the ‘general staff’ of the capitalist conquest of East Sumatra, contract labourers were its reluctant foot soldiers. From the beginning, the planters found the indigenous population unwilling to toil on their terms. They became dependant on a constant flow of indentured labourers, powerless captives, first from China and later from Java. In the violent pioneering 1870s Chinese labour was in effect ‘bought’ by the payment of large sums to ‘coolie-brokers’ in Singapore and Penang, to overcome the notoriety of Deli among migrants. From 1888 the Deli tobacco planters began to bring about 7,000 Chinese labourers a year directly from China. About half a million Chinese had entered East Sumatra on contracts by the 1930s, although the peak was passed with the tobacco boom of the late 1880s, when up to 20,000 entered annually.

 The difficulties of recruiting in China and the Straits Settlements drove the tobacco planters reluctantly towards the obvious Netherlands Indian source. Though continuing to insist that only Chinese tobacco growers would guarantee the high standards of the famous Deli wrapper leaf, the tobacco estates increasingly used Javanese indentured labour in other tasks. The coffee estates which began in the 1890s, and the rubber, tea, and oil-palm which expanded rapidly after 1900, relied exclusively on Javanese. The composition of the total plantation force changed as follows:

TABLE 1 CONTRACT LABOUR IN EAST SUMATRA

 1884 1900 1916 1920 1925 1929

Chinese                21,136 58,516 43,689 23,900 26,800 25,934

Javanese             1,771     25,224 150,392 212,400 168,400 239,281

Indian & Others 1,528    2,460     n.a.        2,000     1,500     1,019

This shift speeded the transition from turbulent frontier to Netherlands colony, for with the Javanese came a paternalistic involvement of the colonial government, and a less speculative spirit among the powerless contract labourers. Labour conditions were governed by the Coolie Ordinance of 1880, which provided a maximum of three years’ contract, after which the labourer had to be returned to his place of recruitment. The inadequate protection this provided in practice was dramatically shown in the pamphlet De millioenen uit Deli (1902), and the ensuing inquiry. More elaborate standards and safeguards were then devised, and by the 1920s it could generally be said that the health, education, and social amenities for workers in East Sumatra were relatively good. They remained, however, neither free nor well remunerated.

The minimum daily wage for male labour on initial contracts in East Sumatra fluctuated between 30 cents per day (1935-7) and 55 cents (1920-1). In 1924, when a government survey was made, the minimum contract labourers’ wage was 42 cents, while the figure for factory labour was  3 cents, and unskilled urban workers were receiving 80 cents.

It is difficult to find figures which are exactly comparable, but the bitter opposition of planters to reliance on market forces for their labour supply was itself an eloquent testimony. What kept the indentured labourers at their task was the ‘penal sanction’ which the 1880 Coolie Ordinance attached to their contracts. Workers who left their job or neglected their duties were subject to fines or imprisonment. Elaborate fingerprint records were maintained to trace the workers who ran away. From the beginning of the century Dutch ‘ethici’ fought against this penal sanction, and from 1918 the government was theoretically committed to its gradual abolition. The vested planter interest was too strong, however. Almost nothing was achieved until 1929, when the Blaine amendment to the U.S. Tariff Act barred with the effect from 1932 imports of tobacco produced under the penal sanction. The world depression spoke even more strongly to the tobacco companies, making it more of a problem to dispense with contract labourers than to hire free ones.14 The recruitment of Chinese indentured labour ceased in 1930, and for Javanese labour use was suddenly made of the so-called ‘free’ labour contract of 1911, permitting the worker to leave after giving notice.

Belatedly, therefore, a healthier labour pattern was forced upon the estates of East Sumatra. One symptom of the unhealthiness of the earlier relationship based on force was the frequency of attacks on European and Javanese labour bosses by indentured labourers who could stand it no longer. In the rough pioneering days, violence on both sides of the labour relation was to be expected. Yet even in the 1920s, when labour conditions were carefully regulated, such attacks were commonplace. Although planters denied that the penal sanction had any connexion with the attacks, experience proved them wrong. The attacks almost ceased with the decline of the penal sanction.

After 1932 attacks on Europeans were insignificant, none at all being recorded in 1940, although incidents continued with the immediate bosses, Javanese mandur and Chinese tandil. In the 1930s, therefore, the estates were losing their earlier aspect of an ‘outdoor prison’. The Chinese contract labour force had virtually disappeared, and those members of it who were not repatriated were in the course of being absorbed into the flourishing Chinese merchant community of East Sumatra. The Javanese estate labourers, about one-quarter of whom were by now women, were also taking on a more settled character. Overpopulation steadily increased the number of landless in Java, and many Javanese labourers, therefore, welcomed the opportunity to remain after their contracts in Deli. Some were given estate land for cultivation in the hope they would form the beginnings of a permanent labour force.

Many more became subsistence farmers in land around the fringes of the estates, where they frequently obtained titles from the kerajaan. Already in the 1930, census Javanese formed the largest single ethnic group in East Sumatra. Like the Chinese, however, if for different reasons, they played a minimal part in the political and social life of the residency. Those on the estates were tightly controlled and effectively sealed off from any outside political activity. Those who had left were still tainted by association with the semi-captive ‘coolie’.

Anthony Reid, The Blood and the People