Listen, friend, and I’ll tell you a story that’ll make your
skin crawl like maggots on roadkill. It’s about scholarships—yeah, those shiny
academic baubles that parents dream about and kids kill themselves studying
for. But here’s the thing nobody wants to talk about at those fancy university
cocktail parties: scholarships have always been about power, control, and
keeping the puppet strings tight around young necks.
J.E. Sandys figured this out way back in 1903 when he wrote
his doorstop of a book about classical scholarship. The old boy knew something
most folks didn’t—that those ancient Greek and Roman scholars didn’t just
stumble into their ivory towers. No sir, they were bought and paid for,
every last one of them, through what we now call scholarships. Educational
grants, they called them then, but a leash is a leash, whether it’s made of
leather or gold.
Now, Rudolf Pfeiffer—a man who understood the dark machinery
behind the academic curtain—put it plain as day in 1976. Those early
scholarships weren’t independent gifts from generous benefactors. Hell no. They
were weapons. Sharp ones, too. Take old Callimachus in Alexandria, or
Petrarch during the Renaissance, or that German fellow Winckelmann in the 14th
century. All of them were handed classical texts and told, “Here, boy, use
these to stick it to the Church.” Counter-narratives, they called it.
Propaganda is what it really was.
You needed serious money to play this game, see. Knowledge
wasn’t free—it never has been, never will be. So if you wanted scholars to dig
up dirt on your enemies or spread your particular brand of truth, you had to
grease their palms. Scholarships became the grease.
But here’s where it gets really ugly, like finding a nest of
spiders in your morning coffee.
The Rhodes Nightmare
Cecil John Rhodes—now there was a piece of work that would
make the devil himself take notes. Picture this: a 23-year-old British
businessman sitting in some dim colonial office, probably sweating through his
starched collar, when it hits him like lightning on a church steeple. He’s
going to use his fortune to create a secret society dedicated to expanding the
British Empire. Not content with just mining diamonds and gold from African
soil—oh no—he wanted to mine minds.
John Flint’s biography lays it all out, chapter and verse.
Rhodes wrote it down in his will, clear as day: his entire fortune would go
toward educating “young colonists” at UK universities. But don’t let those
fancy words fool you—this wasn’t about enlightenment or bettering humanity.
This was about creating loyal servants, bright-eyed young men who’d go forth
and spread British influence like a virus through the colonies.
The Rhodes Scholarship. Even today, people whisper that name
with reverence, like it’s some kind of holy grail. But it was built on blood
money, every penny of it earned by crushing the backs of African natives while
white colonists got rich off their mineral wealth. Rhodes turned human misery
into academic opportunity, and somehow history remembers him as a benefactor.
Most scholarship programs followed this same twisted
blueprint. European philanthropic organizations—and isn’t that a laugh, calling
them philanthropic—saw dollar signs where others saw young minds. They weren’t
funding education; they were buying future politicians, future administrators,
future mouthpieces for their imperial ambitions.
The Dutch Disease
Now let me tell you about the Dutch East Indies, because
that’s where this story gets particularly nasty, like watching a beautiful
flower bloom from poisoned soil.
Conrad van Deventer—Coen to his friends—published Een
eereschuld (A Debt of Honor) in 1899, and it was like throwing a lit match
into a powder keg. The man had the audacity to point out what everyone knew but
nobody wanted to say: the Dutch were bleeding Indonesia dry, sucking out its
natural resources and human dignity without giving back so much as a thank-you
note.
Van Deventer saw the suffering, the poverty, the way the
Netherlands grew fat and prosperous while Indonesian families starved. The
archipelago’s wealth flowed west like water down a drain, and there sat the
Dutch, counting their guilders while children died of diseases that proper
medical care could have prevented.
But here’s the kicker—even van Deventer’s noble intentions
got twisted up in the machinery of colonialism. When Queen Wilhelmina finally
responded (two whole years later, mind you), she wrapped her acknowledgment in Christian
rhetoric about moral obligations. Pretty words that meant about as much as a
snowball in August.
The influence of a young Indonesian woman named R.A. Kartini
changed everything, though. At just 20 years old, she published an article
under her father’s name—R.M.A.A. Sosroningrat, the Regent of Jepara—about the
brutal tradition of contract marriages among Javanese nobility. This girl had
fire in her belly and ink in her veins, writing about how educated women were
being silenced and sidelined by traditions that should have died with the stone
age.
Kartini’s words lit a fire under van Deventer, his wife
Betsy, and their circle of friends. They established four foundations: the
Kartini Foundation, the Van Deventer Foundation, the Tjandi Foundation, and the
Max Havelaar Foundation. All aimed at promoting Indonesian education, they
said. Noble goals, genuine intentions.
But the devil, as always, was in the details.
About 50 Indonesian youngsters made it to the Netherlands on
these scholarships. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Young minds being exposed to
European education, broadening their horizons, all that feel-good nonsense.
Except it wasn’t open to everyone—oh no, that would have been too democratic,
too fair. Only the children of civil servants, nobles, and the priyayi
class got the golden tickets. The poor stayed poor, the uneducated stayed
ignorant, and the cycle continued.
Ernest Douwes Dekker—writing under the pseudonym
Multatuli—called it exactly what it was: educational apartheid dressed up in
ethical clothing. The colonial policy was “excessively exclusive,” he wrote,
like a country club that only let in the right sort of people.
And then there’s the heartbreaking story of Kartini herself.
The girl who sparked this whole movement, who caught the attention of Jacques
Henrij Abendanon, the Director of Education for the Dutch East Indies, who
approved her scholarship application—she gave it all up. Family tradition, a
noble marriage, the weight of expectation—they crushed her dreams like a boot
heel on a flower.
She offered her scholarship to Agus Salim, the leader of
Sarekat Islam. But Salim, God bless his pride, refused it. Said it wasn’t worth
the name if it came through someone else’s recommendation rather than personal
merit. Even in generosity, the system was poisoned.
The Japanese Juggernaut
World War II brought a new player to the scholarship game,
and they played it with typical Japanese efficiency and brutality. The Land of
the Rising Sun saw what the Dutch had been doing and thought, “We can do this
better.”
The Pan-Asia movement, the Free Asian People’s Commonwealth,
the 3A Movement (Japan the Light of Asia, Japan the Protector of Asia, Japan
the Leader of Asia)—it was all propaganda wrapped in academic opportunity. The
Japanese were optimistic, drunk on their victory over Russia in the Tsushima
War, and they opened their universities to Indonesian youth at bargain prices.
But every yen came with strings attached, strings that led
straight back to Tokyo’s war machine.
In 1943, they launched the Nampo Tokubetsu Ryugakusei
program—Extraordinary Students from the Southern Region. Sounds impressive,
doesn’t it? About 95 students from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Burma got to study
in Japan between 1942 and 1945. They even published memoirs later, talking
about their experiences like they were some kind of academic adventure.
But let’s call it what it was: intellectual conscription.
Take Muhamad Djuli from Batusangkar, West Sumatra. Poor kid
went to study ceramic production in Seto City, probably thinking he was going
to learn a trade, maybe make a better life for himself. Instead, he became a
radio broadcaster, spending his days convincing his own people that Japan was
their liberator, not their new master.
Not all of them bought into the lie, though. Oemarjadi
Njotowijono earned his business degree from Hitotsubashi University and had the
brass to lead demonstrations against Dai Nippon, calling them out as just
another flavor of colonizer. Takes guts to bite the hand that’s feeding you,
especially when that hand belongs to an empire that’s conquered half of Asia.
The Cold War Shuffle
After Indonesia won its independence, you’d think the
scholarship game might change, become something cleaner, more honest. You’d be
wrong.
Sukarno aligned with the Eastern Bloc, and suddenly
Indonesian students were being shipped off to Russia, Czechoslovakia, and other
communist countries under programs like the Ikatan Dinas Scholarship. The Duta
Ampera program targeted future civil servants, molding them in Moscow’s image.
But then came September 30th, 1965, and everything went to
hell. The communist scholarships dried up faster than spit on a hot sidewalk,
and suddenly being associated with the Eastern Bloc was about as healthy as
swimming with hungry sharks.
Still, the Americans had been playing their own game all
along. Thanks to the Round Table Conference agreement, from 1952 to 1958,
Indonesian students were getting Ford Foundation Scholarships to study in the
USA. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was behind it, funding students like
Mohamad Sadli, Ali Wardhana, Widjojo Nitisastro, and Emil Salim—names that
would later become synonymous with Indonesia’s economic policy under Suharto.
They sent these bright young minds to MIT, Cornell,
Berkeley, Harvard—the ivory towers of American academia. There, they rubbed
shoulders with George Kahin from Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project, Guy Pauker
from the RAND Corporation, and economists like Ben Higgins and Paul Samuelson.
When these scholars returned home, leftists called them the “Berkeley
Mafia”—and the name stuck like tar. They shaped Suharto’s economic policies,
implementing ideas that had been carefully cultivated in American universities,
watered with American money, and fertilized with American ideology.
Young writers and intellectuals like Sutan Takdir
Alisjahbana, Mochtar Lubis, and P.K. Ojong also got their golden tickets to
Western institutions. Every one of them came back changed, carrying ideas that
would reshape Indonesian culture and politics.
The Pattern Emerges
See the pattern? It’s been the same story for over a century
now, repeated like a broken record that nobody wants to fix. Scholarships aren’t
gifts—they’re investments. Governments, corporations, political
organizations—they all use education as a tool to create the kind of citizens
they want, the kind of leaders they need, the kind of future they’re trying to
build.
Today, the Van Deventer Foundation still exists, rebranded
as the Van Deventer-Maas Indonesia Foundation, based in Yogyakarta. They
provide scholarships to 800 Indonesian students annually, sending them to 35
universities in the Netherlands. Their website talks about supporting students
from “diverse family and economic backgrounds,” but you have to wonder—diverse
according to whom? And what invisible strings come attached to those
opportunities?
The machinery keeps turning, friend. The names change, the
countries shift, the ideologies evolve, but the basic transaction remains the
same: knowledge for loyalty, education for influence, opportunity for control.
Every scholarship tells a story, and most of those stories
are written in blood and gold, ambition and compromise. The next time you hear
about some bright young student getting a full ride to study abroad, remember
this tale. Ask yourself: who’s paying the bill, and what do they expect in
return?
Because in this world, nothing—not even education—comes
free. There’s always a price, and somebody, somewhere, is expecting to collect
on their investment.
The End
---
The most important things are the hardest to say, because
words diminish them. But sometimes you have to try anyway, especially when the
truth is buried under layers of pretty lies and good intentions.
Comments
Post a Comment