The Blood-Red Dawn of Banten

 

A Tale of Faith, Fury, and the Darkness That Dwells in Men’s Hearts

Chapter 1: The Sickness in the Land

If you were to ask the old-timers in Coldwater—hell, if you were to ask anybody who’d lived long enough to see the way darkness can spread through a place like black mold through damp wood—they’d tell you that trouble doesn’t just happen. It grows. It festers. It sends out tendrils through the community like some malignant thing, touching this person and that person until the whole damned place is infected.

That’s how it was in Banten, back in the 1800s, when the Dutch were squeezing the life out of Java like a man wringing water from a dirty rag. The place was sick, you see. Not sick like a person with the flu, but sick in the soul, the way a town gets sick when its people have been pushed too far, too long.

E.S. de Klerck, that Dutch historian with his fancy words and his clinical observations, he wrote that no district in northern Banten was free from what he called “social unrest.” Social unrest. Christ, that’s like calling a tornado a “weather disturbance.” What was happening in Banten wasn’t unrest—it was a sickness that had been brewing for decades, the kind that makes men do terrible things in the name of something higher than themselves.

The symptoms were all there, if you knew how to look. Rebellions popping up like boils on infected skin. One here, one there, each one a little worse than the last. The Dutch officials, sitting in their cool offices with their brandy and their certainty, they thought it was just random violence. Isolated incidents. But the people who lived there, who felt the heat and the anger and the hopelessness pressing down on them like a weight—they knew better.

They knew something was coming. Something big and red and final.

Chapter 2: The Thousand-Year Dream

Now, there was this scholar, Sartono Kartodirdjo—a man who understood that sometimes you have to look at the monster square in the face to understand what it really is. He had a name for what was happening in Banten: millenarianism. Fancy word for a simple, terrifying concept. The belief that the world as it is will end, and something better—something pure and just and right—will take its place.

Millenarianism. From the word “millennium,” meaning a thousand years. But in the hearts of the Bantenese, it meant something else entirely. It meant hope. It meant that someday, somehow, the boot would be lifted from their necks. That the foreign devils with their pale skin and their strange god would be driven into the sea. That the righteous would inherit the earth.

It’s a beautiful dream, really. The kind of dream that can make a man willing to die for it. The kind of dream that can make a man willing to kill for it.

In Banten, this dream wore the clothes of Islam. The people whispered about the coming of the Imam Mahdi, the one who would set everything right. They spoke of him in the same hushed tones that folks in Coldwater might speak of the boogeyman, except this boogeyman was their salvation. He would come, they said, and the infidel government would crumble like a house of cards in a stiff wind.

The Dutch, of course, had their own word for this kind of thinking: anarchism. They were wrong, but they weren’t entirely wrong. Because when you take away everything a man holds dear—his traditions, his dignity, his hope—what’s left isn’t pretty. What’s left is the thing that lives in the dark corners of every human heart, the thing that whispers that maybe, just maybe, the only way to fix the world is to tear it down and start over.

Chapter 3: The Holy Men and Their Terrible Purpose

The thing about movements like this—and I’ve seen enough of them in my time to know—is that they don’t start with the common folk. They start with the leaders, the ones who know how to talk, how to inspire, how to take the raw material of human anger and shape it into something focused and deadly.

In Banten, these men were called kiai and haji. Holy men. Men who’d made the pilgrimage to Mecca, who’d studied the Quran, who commanded respect in ways that the Dutch-appointed officials never could. While the secular elite—the nobles and civil servants—sold their souls to the colonizers for a few guilders and a comfortable position, the religious leaders held themselves apart. They watched. They waited. They planned.

These weren’t wild-eyed fanatics, understand. These were intelligent, charismatic men who understood that power comes not from the barrel of a gun but from the hearts and minds of the people. They knew that a peasant who believes he’s fighting for God will fight harder than a peasant who’s fighting for money. They knew that a man who thinks he’s going to paradise will walk into hell without flinching.

Men like Tubagus Jayakusuma, who taught something called Ilmu Tarik—a mystical practice that was part religion, part psychology, part theater. He’d gather the village peasants in the flickering light of oil lamps and tell them about the holy war that was coming. About the glory that awaited those who died fighting the infidels. About the new world that would rise from the ashes of the old.

The peasants ate it up. They swore oaths of loyalty to him, bound themselves to his cause with words and rituals that felt ancient and powerful. They probably didn’t understand half of what they were getting into, but they understood enough: that someone, finally, was promising them a chance to fight back.

Chapter 4: The Gathering Storm

By 1884, the air in Banten was thick with more than just the tropical heat. It was thick with anticipation, with whispered conversations that stopped when strangers approached, with the kind of tension that makes dogs howl and birds fall silent.

The leaders met in secret. Wedding feasts became planning sessions. Prayer gatherings became recruitment drives. The Dutch had their spies, of course, but spies can only tell you so much when the people you’re spying on have been pushed beyond the point of caring about consequences.

One of the most important meetings took place in 1888, hosted by a man named Haji Wasid. Now, Wasid wasn’t just any religious leader—he was the son of a rebel, a man whose family had been fighting the Dutch for decades. The rebellion was literally in his blood.

The topic of discussion that night was weapons. Specifically, firearms. The Dutch had guns, after all. Modern rifles that could kill a man from a distance. Shouldn’t the rebels arm themselves the same way?

But here’s where the story takes a turn that’s both tragic and somehow inevitable. The peasants, for all their courage and commitment, weren’t soldiers. They were farmers and fishermen and craftsmen who’d never held anything more sophisticated than a hoe or a hammer. Rifles were foreign things, complicated things. Things that could jam or misfire or simply be too heavy for men who’d never trained with them.

So they made a choice that would seal their fate. They chose the kelewang—short swords that were like machetes with delusions of grandeur. Traditional weapons. Weapons their grandfathers might have used. Weapons that required you to get close to your enemy, to look him in the eye when you killed him.

It was a romantic choice. A noble choice, in its way. It was also a death sentence.

Chapter 5: The Oath and the Approaching Dawn

On April 22, 1888, under the light of a full moon that seemed to watch the proceedings with the cold interest of a hanging judge, three hundred men gathered at Haji Wasid’s house. The mosque was packed, the air thick with incense and sweat and the kind of electric anticipation that comes before a storm.

They took an oath that night. Three parts, simple and binding as a wedding vow:

First, they would participate in the holy war.

Second, anyone who broke their oath would be considered an infidel.

Third, they would tell no one outside the circle about their plans.

Each man signed his name to a document, making it official. Making it real. Making it impossible to back down without losing everything he considered sacred.

There was one dissenter, though. Haji Marjuki, a man who’d been with the movement from the beginning, stood up and said the words that probably saved his life: “Too soon.” He thought the date they’d chosen—July 9—was too soon. He’d seen enough of war to know that rushing into battle was a good way to get everyone killed.

For his caution, he was branded a coward. For his wisdom, he was exiled from the group. He left for Mecca before the rebellion began, probably knowing that he was watching his friends and followers march toward their deaths.

Sometimes being right is the loneliest thing in the world.

Chapter 6: The List of the Damned

The rebels weren’t going into this blind. They had a plan, a target list, a strategy. They’d gotten hold of something called the Javansche Almanak—basically a phone book for colonial officials. It told them where everyone lived, what they did, who they worked for.

The list read like a roster of the damned: Assistant Resident J.H.H. Gubbels, various local officials, clerks, controllers, and bureaucrats. Men who’d thrown their lot in with the Dutch, who’d helped build the machine that was grinding their people into dust.

At the top of the list was Gubbels himself. The Assistant Resident was seen as the symbol of everything wrong with the colonial system—a foreign devil who lived in luxury while the people he governed suffered. If they could kill him, the rebels believed, they could cut the head off the snake.

They were about to learn that snakes have a way of growing new heads.

Chapter 7: The Night of Blood

July 9, 1888. Two in the morning. The hour when the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead grows thin, when even the bravest souls feel the touch of something cold and otherworldly.

Haji Tubagus Ismail led his troop through the darkness toward the government housing complex. Their target: the homes of the colonial officials who’d been marked for death. They moved like shadows, like spirits of vengeance given form.

The first house they hit belonged to H.F. Dumas, a clerk who’d probably never hurt anyone in his life, who’d probably never even thought about the political implications of his job. He was just a man trying to make a living in a complicated world.

They burst through his door shouting “sabil Allah!”—the path of God. The holy war cry that was supposed to strike terror into the hearts of the infidels. Dumas woke up to find men with swords standing over his bed, and somehow—by luck or divine intervention or simple human reflexes—he managed to dodge the first blow.

What followed was a nightmare of confusion and terror. Dumas fled to a neighbor’s house while his wife ran in the opposite direction. In the chaos, their maid—a woman named Minah who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—was mistaken for Dumas’s wife and cut down with a machete.

The first blood had been spilled. The rebellion had begun.

Chapter 8: The Slaughter of Innocents

The rebels moved through the government compound like a plague, striking at everyone they could find. They cut telegraph wires, blocked roads, occupied markets. Within hours, they’d effectively taken control of Cilegon, the district capital.

At Jombang Wetan Market, seventeen hundred men dressed in white robes gathered with their kelewang glinting in the morning sun. They chanted “sabil Allah!” over and over, working themselves into the kind of religious frenzy that makes men capable of anything.

But revolutions, even righteous ones, have a way of consuming innocents along with the guilty.

Assistant Resident Gubbels wasn’t home when the rebels came for him. He’d fled to safety, leaving behind only servants and his two young daughters—Elly and Dora. Children who’d never harmed anyone, who’d probably never even understood what their father did for a living.

The rebels found them anyway. And in the madness of the moment, in the heat of their righteous anger, they murdered two little girls whose only crime was being born on the wrong side of history.

When Gubbels learned what had happened to his children, something broke inside him. Something that can never be repaired. He turned around and rode back toward Cilegon, alone and unarmed, driven by the kind of grief that makes a man welcome death.

He found it at 2:30 in the afternoon, cut down by rebels who dragged his body into the street and cheered over it like hunters celebrating a kill. The Assistant Resident was dead, but so was something essential about the rebellion itself. You can’t slaughter children and claim to be fighting for justice. You can’t murder innocents and say you’re doing God’s work.

Chapter 9: The King of Ashes

For a brief, shining moment, Haji Wasid ruled over Cilegon like a king. He decided who lived and who died, who could be trusted and who needed to be eliminated. Government officials fled in terror or were forced to convert to Islam at sword-point. The colonial administration collapsed like a house of cards.

But kingdoms built on blood and terror don’t last long. The Dutch weren’t about to let a bunch of peasants with machetes overthrow their empire. They sent troops equipped with modern rifles—not the old-fashioned achterladar rifles the rebels might have expected, but new repeating rifles that could kill multiple men in seconds.

The two forces met at Toyomerto, and the result was inevitable. Dozens of rebels with swords faced a few dozen soldiers with guns. The mathematics of warfare are simple and brutal: range beats courage, technology beats righteousness, and good intentions don’t stop bullets.

Nine rebels died in the first exchange. Several more were wounded. The survivors, seeing their comrades cut down by weapons they couldn’t even get close enough to strike, lost their nerve and fled.

The revolution was over. What followed was just the bloody cleanup.

Chapter 10: The Hunt

The Dutch weren’t content with victory. They wanted vengeance. They wanted to make sure nothing like this ever happened again. So they began a systematic hunt for the rebel leaders, offering bounties like the ones posted for notorious outlaws in the American West.

Five hundred guilders for Haji Wasid, dead or alive. The same for Haji Tubagus Ismail and the other leaders. It was more money than most Bantenese would see in a lifetime, but the people who heard the offers just nodded and said “yes” without meaning it. They weren’t about to turn in their own, even if those men had led them to disaster.

The rebel leaders scattered like leaves in a hurricane. They hid in forests, moved from safe house to safe house, lived like hunted animals. Some of them probably wondered if this was what God had intended when He inspired them to take up arms against the infidels.

One by one, they were found. One by one, they were killed or captured. The rebellion that had started with such hope and righteousness ended with isolated men dying alone in the jungle, far from their families and their followers.

Chapter 11: The Final Stand

The last act of the Banten rebellion played out at Citeureup, where five men armed with machetes made their final stand against a military expedition. They fought like cornered animals, with the desperate courage of men who knew they were going to die but refused to surrender.

It was a hopeless battle. Five swords against modern rifles. But they fought anyway, because sometimes the fight itself is more important than the outcome. Sometimes dying on your feet is better than living on your knees.

All five were killed. On the government side, four soldiers were wounded, one seriously. The rebellion was over.

The next morning, soldiers found eleven bodies in the forest, including those of Haji Wasid and Haji Tubagus Ismail. The men who’d dreamed of a new world, who’d believed they could drive out the foreigners and restore the glory of the sultanate, were just meat for the flies now.

Epilogue: The Darkness That Remains

Sartono Kartodirdjo, the scholar who studied these events decades later, called the Banten rebellion a “proto-nationalist movement.” A stepping stone toward the larger struggle for independence that would come later. He was probably right, but that’s the kind of perspective you can only have when you’re looking back through the safety of time.

For the people who lived through it, for the families who lost sons and fathers and husbands, for the children who grew up hearing stories about the time the holy men led the faithful into a slaughter, it was something else entirely. It was a reminder that the world doesn’t care about your righteousness. That good intentions can lead to terrible consequences. That sometimes the monster you’re fighting is inside you all along.

The Dutch went back to their brandy and their bureaucracy. The surviving rebels went back to their fields and their prayers. And the darkness that had infected Banten—the sickness that had turned ordinary men into killers—retreated back into the shadows, waiting for the next time conditions were right for it to spread.

Because that’s what darkness does. It waits. It’s patient. And it never really goes away.

In the end, that might be the most terrifying thing of all.

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Author’s Note: This retelling is based on historical events that occurred in Banten, Java, in 1888. The original account emphasizes the complex social, religious, and political factors that led to the rebellion, while this version explores the psychological and human elements that make such events both inevitable and tragic. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the darkness between hope and horror.