They say the devil finds work for idle hands, but on the
sun-baked plantations of Ciomas in 1886, the Devil was working overtime through
fingers that never stopped moving. The locals knew it. They felt it in their
bones, in the aching muscles that strained under colonial whips, in the hollow
eyes of women forced to bear burdens no human should carry.
This ain’t a ghost story—not the kind with rattling chains
and moaning spirits. No, sir. This is about the kind of monsters that wear fine
European clothes and drink imported wine while counting money stained with the
blood of the people they’ve crushed beneath their polished boots.
You see, Ciomas was one of those “private estates” outside
Buitenzorg—what folks now call Bogor. Just a stone’s throw from the
Governor-General’s fancy digs at Bogor Palace. Close enough that when the
screams started, they could’ve carried right through those palatial windows if
the Governor had bothered to listen.
The land changed hands like a hot potato since before 1810,
but nobody kept proper records—funny how that happens when you’re divvying up
someone else’s home. By the 1860s, it belonged to two fellas: F.H.C. van Motman
and P.W.N. Merkus. They grew everything there—rice, coffee, quinine, cloves,
nutmeg—squeezing the earth and the people both until they bled profit.
Then Merkus kicked the bucket in December of ‘63, and things
went to hell in a handbasket.
(I knew a fella once down in Laramie who said nothing good
ever comes from inheritance disputes. “Money makes monsters of men,” he told
me, nursing a whiskey at the corner of the bar. Two weeks later, they found
what was left of him scattered across three counties. But that’s another story
for another time.)
Where was I? Oh, right. Van Motman decided to wash his hands
of the whole mess and sell Ciomas. The asking price? 757,000 guilders. A
fortune by any measure.
But here’s where the story turns dark as midnight in a
graveyard.
J.W.E. de Sturler swoops in and pays nearly DOUBLE—one and a
half million guilders. The kind of money that makes men do terrible things to
ensure a return on investment.
And terrible things were exactly what his son specialized
in.
They called him “Tuan Kecil”—the Little Master. But there
was nothing little about the suffering he inflicted. A.L. de Sturler Jr. was
the kind of man who’d smile while he stabbed you, then charge you for
sharpening the knife.
The Coffee Contract of 1869 said women and the elderly
couldn’t be forced to work the plantations. Tuan Kecil wiped his ass with that
contract and put everyone to work—children, grandmothers, pregnant women—didn’t
matter to him as long as those coffee plants kept producing.
And God help the woman who caught his eye. There was a girl,
Mariah from Kampung Cibeureum. When she refused to warm his bed, he took
everything she owned. Just like that. Because he could.
(The worst monsters, you understand, are the ones who look
human but have forgotten what humanity means.)
When the Assistant Resident Burnabij Lautier tried
investigating in 1885, the Sturler family crushed him like a bug, spinning
tales of jealousy and corruption. Governor-General Otto van Rees—a spineless
sonofabitch if ever there was one—just promoted Lautier to Resident in Bali.
Problem solved! Or so they thought.
But pressure doesn’t just disappear when you ignore it. Like
a boil, it festers and grows until it bursts in ways nobody can control.
It started with a farmer named Arpan Ba Sa’maah. Simple man.
Worked the fields his whole life in Kampung Pasir Angsana. The kind of man you’d
pass on the street without a second glance. But sometimes, it’s the quiet ones
who snap the hardest.
When Hadji Abdurrachim, the Camat of Ciomas, refused to join
Arpan’s holy war against the Sturler family, Arpan put him in the ground.
February 1886. First blood.
Soon, Arpan was calling himself Imam Mahdi—the guided one,
sent by God to free Ciomas from its oppressors. He had a deputy, Leboj Ba
Nahidi, and together they gathered followers in Dramaga like moths to a flame.
The new Assistant Resident, Coenen, sent police to handle
the situation. But you don’t bring nightsticks to a holy war.
Arpan’s men ambushed them in Kampung Petier, sending the
cops running with their tails between their legs. So Coenen brought soldiers
next time—a whole damn platoon—and surrounded Nahidi’s house.
The gunfire that night sounded like the devil’s own
fireworks. When the smoke cleared, Arpan and his followers were dead, their
blood soaking into the floorboards of Nahidi’s house.
(I’ve seen blood soak into wood like that. Takes on a black
sheen after a while. Never comes clean, no matter how hard you scrub.)
But killing Arpan only scattered the seeds of rebellion
wider.
In May, a man named Mochamad Idris stepped out of the
shadows. Smarter than Arpan. More methodical. He’d been planning while Arpan
was fighting, gathering the angry, the desperate, and the damned in Kampung
Pepojok.
They called him “Panembahan Ciomas”—a title for royalty. And
on May 19th, he marched with 300 souls—men and women both—toward the Sturler
family’s landhuis in Kampung Taman.
The Sturlers weren’t home that night. Lucky for them.
Instead, Idris’s army fell upon the native nobility and servants, anyone who’d
collaborated with the colonial masters.
The next day, they nearly got Coenen and Tuan Kecil both.
Nearly. That’s the word that haunts history, ain’t it? Nearly.
When reinforcements arrived from Batavia, they surrounded
Idris at Pasir Paok. Captured him and his lieutenants. But they didn’t
know—couldn’t know—that Idris commanded an army of 2,000 souls.
Two thousand farmers, Two thousand people pushed beyond
endurance, beyond fear, into that strange country where a person has nothing
left to lose.
They vanished into Gunung Malang like smoke, becoming
phantoms that haunted the nightmares of every landowner in West Buitenzorg.
Some say you can still feel them there, if you walk the
plantations at dusk. The weight of their rage. The power of their hunger. The
darkness they carried that wasn’t darkness at all, but the terrible light of
justice too long denied.
But that’s just what some say. And who believes in ghost
stories anymore?
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