O Sengkewe. I wed you to the wind.
That’s what the old farmers sang when they planted coffee in
the highlands, their voices carrying across those mist-shrouded mountains like
prayers whispered to something older than God—or maybe something that was
God, depending on who you asked and how much arak they’d had. The Gayo
people, see, they didn’t think of coffee as a crop. No sir. They thought of it
as a living thing. Something with a heartbeat, maybe. Something that
could hear you if you spoke to it right.
Let your leaves grow lush, your fruits flourish.
The words came from deep in their throats, from that place
where fear and hope got all tangled up together like barbed wire around a fence
post. They sang to the plants the way you might sing to a sick child, or a
dying parent, or to yourself in the dark when the thing under the bed starts to
breathe.
Because for the Gayo people—and this is important, so pay
attention—coffee wasn’t just about money. It was breath. It was blood. It was
the backbone of everything that mattered. You want to send your kid to school?
Coffee. You want to get married? Coffee. You want to make the pilgrimage to
Mecca and wash your sins away in that desert heat? Well, friend, you better
hope those red cherries ripen fat and sweet in the cool mountain air, because
coffee was the only ticket you had.
The elders had a saying, and it was the kind of saying that
got into your bones and stayed there: Money can run out in a year, but
coffee is a lifelong savings. They’d seen money come and go—hell, they’d
seen governments come and go—but coffee? Coffee was forever. Or so they
thought.
The Thing the Dutch Found
Now, let me tell you about a man named Snouck Hurgronje.
Dutch fellow. Colonial adviser, which was a fancy way of saying he helped his
government figure out how to squeeze the most profit out of brown-skinned
people without starting too many riots. In 1883, he came to Gayo land, and what
he found there made his eyes go wide as saucers.
Coffee trees. Everywhere. Growing wild like weeds, thick as
thieves, their branches heavy with cherries that shone like drops of blood in
the dappled sunlight. And you know what the Gayo people were doing with them?
Nothing.
Well, not nothing exactly. They used the trees as fences.
Garden boundaries. The cherries fell to the ground and the birds ate them, and
the people? The people picked the leaves, dried them out, and brewed
them into a tea-like drink they called kewe.
Snouck couldn’t believe it. Here was one of the world’s
finest crops—Arabica coffee, the good stuff, the expensive stuff—and these
folks were using it to mark property lines. It must have driven him half-crazy,
like finding out someone was using hundred-dollar bills as toilet paper.
But here’s where the story gets dark. Here’s where that cold
finger starts tracing its way up your spine.
The Lies They Told
The Dutch, once they realized what they had, didn’t educate
the Gayo people about coffee. No sir. They did something far worse. They lied.
They spread rumors—whispered them in the markets, had their
agents plant them in coffee houses, let them grow like fungus in the dark, damp
places where fear breeds. They said coffee beans were used to make gunpowder.
Explosives. They said if you drank coffee, you’d die, just drop dead right
there with foam on your lips and your eyes rolled back. They said it would turn
your hair white, like the Dutch themselves. And the worst one, the one that
really took hold? They said drinking coffee could make you unfaithful to Islam.
Think about that. Think about the cruelty of it, the
calculated meanness. These people were sitting on a gold mine, literally
growing it in their backyards, and for decades—generations, even—they
handed those precious beans over to the colonizers while they drank boiled
leaves themselves. All because of lies. All because someone figured out that
the best way to rob a man wasn’t at gunpoint, but by making him scared of his
own shadow.
That’s the thing about fear. It’s cheaper than bullets and
it lasts a hell of a lot longer.
The Land That Time Forgot
The Gayo Highlands sit along the spine of the Bukit Barisan
Mountains, 1,200 to 1,600 meters up where the air gets thin and cold and the
mist rolls in like something alive. The rain comes steady—1,000 to 2,500
millimeters a year—and the hills drain fast so the roots don’t rot. Tropical
sun fights with mountain fog, and what you get is this perfect, slow
photosynthesis that makes the beans taste like… well, like nothing else on
earth.
It’s beautiful country. The kind of beautiful that makes
your chest ache. The kind of beautiful that can kill you if you’re not careful.
For centuries, it was terra incognita to the
Europeans—unknown land, blank space on the map. No rivers ran deep enough for
their ships. The Aceh Sultanate claimed it, sure, but the Gayo people lived
independently, isolated up there in their mountain fortress, untouched by the
coastal trade and all its corruption.
That isolation saved them. Until it didn’t.
When the Cannons Stopped
In 1904, after the Gayo-Alas War, the Dutch finally
conquered the highlands. The last cannon fell silent, and suddenly
Takengon—this quiet, isolated mountain town—started to change. They built a
road from Bireuen to Takengon, finished it in 1911, and with that road came
coffee seedlings and onderneming—plantations with processing factories
and workers’ dormitories and all the machinery of exploitation.
Local legend tells a different story, though. They say a
pilgrim named Aman Kawa brought coffee beans back from Mecca long before the
Dutch arrived, planted them in Daling Village like secrets in the ground. Maybe
that’s true, maybe it’s not. The thing about legends is they don’t need to be
true to be real.
By 1920, the first official plantation opened in Paya Tumpi.
Nine years later, Gayo coffee went to Europe for the first time. Nine years
after that, exports hit 82,546 Gulden. Takengon transformed from a military
outpost into a garrison town, built in that colonial resort style that made
Europeans feel like they were still home, still civilized, still superior.
But the Gayo people? They wouldn’t work the plantations.
They had rice fields and gardens of their own. They had their pride, their
independence. So the Dutch brought in thousands of workers from Java—shipped
them in like cargo—and to keep them happy, they put on theater performances and
gambling stalls once a month. Those workers stayed, married local women, had
children who spoke a mix of languages and grew up between cultures. The
highlands became something new, something plural, something neither quite Gayo
nor quite anything else.
The Long Darkness
Then came 1942, and the Japanese, and the Dutch ran like
rats from a sinking ship. The plantations rotted. After independence, the land
got redistributed to local farmers—not like in Java, not like in North Sumatra,
but in a way that was almost… fair. Almost egalitarian. More than ninety
percent of Gayo coffee now comes from small farms, families working a
half-hectare or a hectare at most, the money going straight into their pockets.
But nothing good lasts forever.
From the 1950s through 2005—over fifty years—Gayo land was
torn apart by conflict. The DI/TII rebellion. Political purges in 1965. And
then the big one, the nightmare that lasted thirty years: the war between the
Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian military.
During those years, coffee fields became killing fields.
Farmers were afraid to visit their own gardens. Plants grew wild, unpruned,
unharvested. Bodies of the dead were dumped near plantations, left to rot in
the soil that should have been nurturing life. The land soaked up blood instead
of rain, and the trauma went deep—deeper than roots, deeper than memory.
What Rose from the Ashes
The 2004 Aceh tsunami—that terrible, world-ending wave that
killed a quarter of a million people—brought something unexpected. Peace. The
disaster was so catastrophic, so absolutely devastating, that it forced a peace
agreement in 2005. Suddenly, the world was watching. Aid poured in.
Infrastructure improved.
And the farmers came home.
Young people especially, the ones who’d left for the cities,
who’d tried to escape the violence and the fear. They came back to build coffee
shops and tourism ventures in the highlands, to reclaim what their grandparents
had planted and their parents had abandoned. They brought new energy, new hope,
new dreams that didn’t smell like gunpowder and death.
Today, Central Aceh, Bener Meriah, and Gayo Lues produce
some of the world’s finest Arabica. The volcanic soil, the elevation, the
microclimate—it all comes together to create coffee with thick body, balanced
acidity, and those distinctive spice notes that make coffee snobs in Rome and
Paris and New York pay premium prices.
The latest data shows over 136,000 hectares of coffee
plantations—three times the official government figures, which tells you
something about how little the government really knows about its own country.
In 2024, Aceh contributed 155 million USD to Indonesia’s coffee exports.
Companies in Takengon export to fifteen countries, shipping out 100 tons per
month. Bener Meriah alone can produce 113,980 tons annually. Most farming
households there are food-secure, well-off, members of a strong rural middle
class built on bitter beans and backbreaking labor.
The Storm at the End
But here’s the thing about happy endings—they’re not endings
at all, just pauses before the next disaster.
Climate change has hit production hard. Disease has ravaged
the plants. Average yields have dropped from over 100,000 tons to maybe 30,000
or 40,000 tons per year. The land that once seemed invincible has started to
show its age, its weakness, its mortality.
And then came November 2025.
Flash floods. Landslides. Coffee farms underwater, roads cut
off, farmers trapped in their fields during harvest season—the one time of year
when they needed clear skies and dry ground most. Central Aceh saw 104 villages
become completely inaccessible. Ninety-five percent of Gayo Lues was paralyzed.
In Bener Meriah, 122 vital infrastructure points were damaged or destroyed.
It was a cruel irony, a cosmic joke with nobody laughing.
Gayo coffee had conquered the world. People in Berlin and New York sipped it in
expensive cafes, praised its complex flavor profile, posted pictures on
Instagram. But they didn’t know about Central Aceh, Bener Meriah, Gayo Lues.
They didn’t know about the floods, the isolation, the vulnerability. The name Gayo
lived on as a brand, a label, a marketing term, while the actual place—the
land, the people, the reality of it—remained invisible, unknown,
forgotten.
Just another blank space on the map.
Just another ghost.
The farmers still sing to their coffee plants, when they can
reach them. O Sengkewe. I wed you to the wind. But now there’s something
different in their voices—not quite hope, not quite despair, but something in
between. The sound of people who’ve been through hell and come out the other
side changed, scarred, wiser and sadder and maybe just a little bit broken.
The sound of people who know that the darkness never really
leaves. It just waits. Patient as stone, hungry as wolves, inevitable as
winter.
It waits in the soil, in the roots, in the blood-red
cherries that will ripen again next season if the rains come right and the
landslides stay away and the earth doesn’t open up and swallow everything
whole.
Let your spirit rise, they sing.
And in the mountain mist, something listens.
Comments
Post a Comment