You don’t know about Jakarta? Well, pull up a chair. There’s
a story here, and like all the best ones, it’s got monsters. Not the kind with
fangs and claws—though some might argue there’s plenty of those too—but the
kind that grow in the spaces between what we want and what we get. The kind
that feed on hope.
It started back in 1619, when a Dutchman named Jan
Pieterszoon Coen—the kind of man whose name you’d mispronounce if you saw it on
a tombstone—planted his flag in a place called Jayakarta and renamed it
Batavia. You know how it goes: conquerors are always renaming things, as if
changing the label changes what’s inside the jar.
(It doesn’t.)
The Dutch wanted a replica of home—canals, forts,
warehouses—but they needed hands to build it. Not their own, mind you, but the
hands of others. And here’s where the darkness first crept in, silent as
cancer. They needed workers but feared the locals. So they imported
bodies—Christ, what an ugly word for people—from across the islands. Maluku,
Bali, anywhere they could find flesh to work under the merciless equatorial
sun.
A woman named Marsely L. Kehoe wrote about what happened
next, though his academic prose doesn’t capture the true horror of it. They
built walls around their precious city center and kept the Europeans inside,
safe and sound, while the Chinese, the slaves, the indigenous folks—they got
pushed to the edges, to places like Glodok. Segregation isn’t just an American
nightmare, friends. It’s a universal bad dream.
You ever notice how the worst things we do are the things
that last the longest? By the 1880s, Batavia had around 100,000 souls. Not many
by today’s standards, but each one carried their own hopes, fears, and
resentments. Their ghosts still walk those streets, I’d wager. The dead never
really leave places where they’ve suffered.
Independence came like a fever breaking, but the
sweat-soaked sheets remained. Jakarta—now bearing its proud new name—became the
center of power, drawing people like moths to a porch light. And we all know
what happens to moths, don’t we? Some find warmth. Others find fire.
By 1950, 1.4 million people called Jakarta home. Ten years
later? 2.6 million. Growth that fast isn’t natural. It’s tumorous.
I knew a man once from Surabaya who came to Jakarta in the
sixties. “The city,” he told me, eyes clouded with cataracts and memory, “she
promises everything and gives just enough to keep you hoping.” He’d come
chasing government work, ended up selling cigarettes from a cart for forty
years. Still, he wouldn’t leave. “Jakarta gets in your blood,” he said, tapping
his wrist where the veins showed blue under paper-thin skin. “Like a disease
you don’t want cured.”
The migrants kept coming—from Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan.
Each with their own story, their own private terrrors driving them forward.
Some ran from the DI/TII rebellion in West Java, others from the emptiness of
pockets in Central and East Java. The city absorbed them all, a vast creature
with an endless appetite.
By 2018, the greater Jakarta area—they call it Jabodetabek,
a mutant word for a mutant metropolis—housed 34 million people. Ten million in
Jakarta proper. That’s more than the entire population of Michigan, all crammed
into a space that floods when God sneezes.
The United Nations tried to count them in 2014. Said there
were 10.2 million. But they missed the suburbs, where two-thirds of the true
population hides. Numbers are funny that way. They never tell the whole story,
especially when the whole story might give you nightmares.
After each Lebaran holiday, when the city empties like a
punctured lung, new faces arrive with the returning crowds. In 2023, it was
25,900 fresh souls. During the pandemic—that shared horror story we all lived
through—113,000 people moved to Jakarta in 2020 alone. Think about that. A
plague stalked the land, and still, they came.
Money talks, and in Jakarta, it screams. The city has the
highest GDP per capita in Indonesia, a fact that sounds like salvation until
you see the slums that ring the glittering center like a dirty collar. The
minimum wage—Rp5,396,760 in 2025—sounds princely to villagers earning a third
of that, until they discover that a decent apartment costs double their monthly
salary.
Jakarta is what Rizal Malarangeng called “a paradise of
inequality and excess.” Ain’t that the truth. Paradise for some, purgatory for
most, hell for more than a few.
The water system—a skeleton left by colonial ghosts—serves
less than half the population properly. The rest make do, same as they always
have. Floods come regular as heartbeats, each one worse than the last as the
city sinks into the swamp that always wanted it back.
Walk through the old town and you’ll feel it—the weight of
history pressing down like a thumb on your neck. Colonial buildings stand amid
modern chaos, silent witnesses to centuries of human struggle. They’ve seen it
all—the blood, the tears, the striving. They’ll be there long after you and I
are gone.
The newcomers live in kampungs—slums, to call a spade a
spade—where infrastructure is just a fancy word people use downtown. But even
in these crowded warrens, they hold onto who they were before Jakarta got its
hooks in them. They cook their hometown food, speak their native dialects, tell
their children stories of places they’ll probably never see again.
That’s the real horror of Jakarta, if you ask me. Not the
traffic that turns minutes into hours, not the floods or the heat or the press
of too many bodies. It’s what happens when hope curdles into resignation, when
dreams calcify into mere survival.
But then again—and here’s the twist ending you might not see
coming—maybe that’s the miracle too. They keep coming, these pilgrims to
concrete and chaos. Keep building lives in the cracks of a city that wasn’t
built for them. Keep finding ways to make this monster of a metropolis feel
like home.
Jakarta isn’t just a city. It’s a testament to that stubborn
human thing that keeps us going when sense says stop. Call it hope, call it
delusion. Sometimes they’re the same damn thing.
And maybe that’s the scariest thought of all.
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