The Memory Keepers

 

Listen: sometimes the past reaches up through the years like a hand from a grave, and when it does, you’d better hope somebody wrote it down right.

The Football Association of Malaysia learned this the hard way at the end of 2024. They had dreams, see—big dreams about the 2027 Asian Cup. So they did what desperate men do: they cheated. Seven foreign players, recruited like hired guns. Among them was Hector Hevel, a midfielder who’d played for the Netherlands U-20 team. Kid had decent footwork, probably. But what he didn’t have—what he really didn’t have—was a grandfather born in Melaka.

Oh, they said Hendrik Jan Hevel had been born there when it was still part of the Malacca Straits Settlements. They had documents and everything. The kind of documents that look good under fluorescent lights in some government office where nobody asks too many questions.

But here’s the thing about lies in the digital age: they don’t age well.

September 2025, FIFA came knocking. Not with a polite tap-tap-tap, but with the weight of investigators who knew how to dig. And dig they did, all the way to The Hague, where the real birth records lived. Turned out Hendrik had been born there all along, right there in the Netherlands, not in some steamy Malaysian port town. The whole thing was a fiction, a story somebody cooked up late at night, probably over bad coffee and worse judgment.

The investigation pulled back the curtain on all seven players. Document manipulation, every last one of them. The FIFA report ran sixty-nine pages—think about that, sixty-nine pages of lies carefully documented and then carefully demolished. FAM got hit with a $440,000 fine. The players? Banned for a year.

The fools who’d forged those documents had forgotten something crucial: archives remember. Archives always remember.

The House on Gajah Mada Street

There’s a building in Jakarta that’s seen things. If buildings could talk—and sometimes I think they can, in their way—this one would have stories that could fill a library.

January 28, 1892. That’s when the Dutch East Indies government decided Indonesia needed a memory. They called it the Landsarchief, which is just a fancy Dutch way of saying: we’re going to write everything down, and we’re going to keep it forever.

The building they chose for this enterprise had a history of its own. It had been built in 1760 as the residence for some VOC Governor-General named Reynier de Klerk, who lived there from 1777 to 1780. Colonial style, two stories, high ceilings that made every footstep echo. In 1925, they converted it into the archives office proper. The upper floor—where de Klerk probably slept and dreamed his colonial dreams—became a storage room. Same with the old slave quarters.

Think about that. The rooms where slaves had been kept now held the documents that recorded their bondage. If that’s not horror, I don’t know what is.

The first archivist was a Dutchman named Jacob Anne van der Chijs. Historian type. He ran the place until 1905, then Dr. F. de Haan took over and held it until 1922. After him came E.C. Godee Molsbergen (1922–1937), and finally Dr. Frans Rijndert Johan Verhoeven, who kept the job until the Japanese showed up in 1942.

These weren’t just librarians shuffling papers around. They built systems—indexing, cataloging, the whole nine yards. The foundation of everything that came after. They understood something fundamental: information isn’t power until you can find it when you need it.

Between 1926 and 1929, during the nationalist movement, the Landsarchief got a new mission: participate in historical research and protect Dutch relics in the colony. Right from the start, you see, archives weren’t neutral. They were weapons. Tools of power. Ways to control the story of who owned what and why.

The Silence

Then came 1942, and the Japanese occupation.

For three years—1942 to 1945—the archives went quiet. The Japanese government produced almost no official records. They renamed the place Kobunsjokan, stuck it under something called the Bunkyokyoku, and basically let it gather dust.

But here’s the twist, the kind of irony that makes you shake your head: during those silent years, the archives became a lifeline for the Dutch themselves. The Japanese had rounded them up, stuck them in detention camps. If you wanted out, you needed proof you had Indonesian blood. And where was that proof? In the archives. The very system the Dutch had built to control the colony became their ticket to freedom.

Life’s funny that way. Except when it’s not funny at all.

Independence and the Tug of War

August 17, 1945. Indonesia declared independence, and everything changed—including who got to keep the keys to the nation’s memory.

The Indonesian government took over the Landsarchief collections. They renamed it Arsip Negeri—State Archives—and put it under the Ministry of Education, Teaching, and Culture. It stayed in that old Gajah Mada building, the one with all the ghosts.

But independence is never clean. In 1947, when the Dutch launched their first military aggression and briefly reoccupied parts of the country, they took the archives back. Renamed it Landsarchief again, put it under some professor named W. Ph. Coolhaas. Like they could just rewrite history by changing the name on the door.

After sovereignty was recognized at the end of 1949, Indonesia got the archives back for good. By 1974, it had evolved into ANRI—Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia.

That same year, they started moving everything out of the Gajah Mada building to a new facility on Jalan Ampera Raya No. 7 in South Jakarta. Took five years to complete the move. Five years of boxes and files and the accumulated weight of history being loaded onto trucks and transported across the city.

The old building sat empty for years after that, slowly decaying, until a group of Dutch entrepreneurs restored it as a gift for Indonesia’s 50th anniversary. Today it’s the Presidential Static Archive Study Center. The front section—designated a heritage building—hosts rotating exhibitions. The back is for presidential archives. The house remembers, even if the people don’t.

The Dutch Machine

Now, let’s talk about the Netherlands for a minute. Because if you want to understand why Hector Hevel’s fake grandfather got caught, you need to understand how the Dutch think about records.

Since January 1, 1850—think about that date, right in the middle of the 19th century—the Netherlands has maintained a continuous population registry. Not a census that captures one frozen moment in time, but a living, breathing record that follows people from birth to death and everywhere in between.

Every municipality keeps a register of residents. Births, marriages, deaths—all recorded where they happen. According to a 2013 European Union report, this event-based system is complemented by population registers that track addresses and personal information.

The system works because of four things:

Standardization. Clear procedures, uniform management. Everyone follows the same rules.

Centralization. Quality control from the top, even though local municipalities maintain their own registries.

Temporal continuity. The system has run without interruption since 1850. They started with books, moved to paper cards in the 1940s, went fully digital by 1994. Each generation adapted, but never stopped.

High accuracy. Multi-layered verification. Which is exactly how FIFA traced Hendrik Jan Hevel’s birth record to The Hague and caught FAM in their lie.

The roots go deeper than 1850, though. Way deeper. Back to 1602, when the VOC—the Dutch East India Company—first started keeping records. Every transaction, every shipment, every decision got written down. Why? Because each piece of paper carried economic value. Money leaves a trail, and the Dutch followed that trail all the way to empire.

The Archive of Horrors

The National Archives of the Netherlands today manages nearly a thousand years of history: 130 kilometers of paper archives, 15 million photographs, about 300,000 maps and drawings. Since 2003, they’ve maintained an e-depot for electronic journal literature—over 15 million articles.

But let’s get to the dark heart of it, shall we?

The VOC archives—scattered across Jakarta, Colombo, Chennai, Cape Town, and The Hague—comprise around 25 million pages. Twenty-five million. UNESCO calls them the Memory of the World, which sounds noble until you dig into what they actually contain.

Commercial records, sure. Financial data, diplomatic correspondence, administrative activities. But also: records of corruption, tax evasion, exploitation.

And slavery.

The archives catalog human beings like assets. Names, origins, ages, physical conditions—all noted down with the same care you’d use for livestock. In Elmina, Suriname, St. Eustatius, they documented entire slave populations. Where they came from, where they went, what they cost.

Pay slips. Debt lists. Departure times. The mundane machinery of horror, all preserved in meticulous detail.

Here’s the twist that’ll keep you up at night: those same records—tools of oppression—have become vital sources for descendants trying to trace their ancestry. The meticulousness of the oppressors, unknowingly, preserved the keys to recovering erased histories. The chains were documented, which means the chains can be understood, studied, remembered.

The monsters kept perfect records, and those records survive them.

The Digital Divide

Indonesia holds the largest collection of VOC archives in the world. They’re registered in UNESCO’s Memory of the World, which sounds impressive until you consider the challenge of actually managing them.

While the Netherlands races ahead with digital infrastructure—using handwriting recognition technologies like Transkribus to digitize and transcribe millions of pages, planning to scan 100 million more in the coming years—Indonesia faces a steeper road.

The problem is structural. Socio-economic. What researchers call the digital divide.

Cost. Digital literacy. Uneven infrastructure. According to ANRI’s research, this divide risks something they call “digital darkness”—a state where a nation’s memory could vanish due to poor management.

Think about that phrase: digital darkness. A void where history used to be.

For ANRI, the challenge is immediate and tangible. You’ve got to filter and preserve materials of permanent value from an ocean of data. You need advanced systems, vast resources. Digital formats become obsolete faster than you can sneeze. Storage media degrades. Cyber threats lurk around every corner. Converting conventional archives to digital form costs money and time that Indonesia doesn’t have in abundance.

The most fundamental issue? Human resources. The digital age demands archivists who understand both classical principles and IT, data management, cybersecurity. Building that capacity nationwide requires heavy investment and continuous training.

Here’s the nightmare scenario: if the colonial past ends up better documented than independent Indonesia’s digital era, the colonial narrative becomes the most enduring part of the nation’s recorded history. The oppressors get the last word, not because they deserve it, but because they wrote it down better.

Failure in digital preservation risks weakening Indonesia’s entire postcolonial identity project. The past threatens to swallow the present.

Fighting the Darkness

But Indonesia isn’t just sitting there waiting for the darkness to fall.

ANRI and the government launched the National Archival Information Network (JIKN) and the National Archival Information System (SIKN)—web-based platforms integrating national archives.

In 2012, they partnered with the Corts Foundation to build DASA—Digital Archival System at ANRI—a high-tech facility designed to digitize the oldest handwritten collections.

They’re fighting. That counts for something.

The Lesson

The Dutch archival system succeeded because of standardization, continuity, and technological adaptation. Simple principles, rigorously applied over centuries.

Indonesia stands at a crossroads. Rich colonial archival heritage behind it, ambitious digital transformation goals ahead. The challenge isn’t just preserving the nation’s collective memory—it’s ensuring equitable access to that information. Making sure the story belongs to everyone, not just those with money and connections.

Because here’s what I’ve learned, writing stories for all these years: the past doesn’t stay buried. It finds a way back, one way or another. And when it does—when FIFA comes knocking or historians start digging or somebody’s great-grandkid wants to know where they came from—you’d better hope somebody wrote it down.

You’d better hope somebody kept the archives.

The archives remember. The archives always remember.

That’s not horror. That’s just the truth.

Though sometimes, the truth is horror enough.