On August 9, 1890, the first Javanese plantation workers set
foot in Suriname, and the world did not pause to notice. It never does, does
it? The world keeps its great indifferent spin, the sun rises over cane fields
and over the sea and over the hold of a Dutch ship where men and women and
children sit with their thin bundles and their thinner hopes, and the world
does not care a damn about any of it.
Thirty-three thousand of them, in the end. Thirty-three
thousand souls, which is a number so large it becomes almost meaningless—an
abstraction, a census figure, a footnote in some academic paper gathering dust
in a university archive in Utrecht. But each of those thirty-three thousand was
a person who had once stood in a village in Java, maybe on a warm evening with
fireflies in the tall grass, and listened to a Dutch colonial recruiter spin
his golden web of words. Good pay. Better life. Adventure, even. Come, come,
what do you have to lose?
Plenty, as it turned out.
They came to replace the Indian workers, who had been deemed
troublesome by colonial authorities—and isn’t that a word that could
curdle milk, when you think about what it means? Troublesome. Men and women who
wanted to be treated like human beings. Men and women who balked at being
cheated and worked to collapse in sugar fields under a brutal sun. Troublesome.
The Dutch had a talent for that kind of language, the kind that dressed naked
cruelty in bureaucratic linen.
“The descendants of these contract workers have been given
misleading information,” said Amber Muhamadkasbi, a researcher and Javanese
descendant, her voice carrying the particular quiet weight of someone who has
spent a long time staring directly at an ugly thing. “As if their ancestors
went to Suriname of their own free will. On top of that, true social equality
still hasn’t been achieved. For the descendants, having historical awareness is
vital. Our place here in the Netherlands wasn’t just handed to us—it had to be
fought for.”
Fought for. That’s the thing about history: it doesn’t
lie still. It kicks.
---
Most of those first workers were illiterate. You need to sit
with that for a moment. Illiterate doesn’t mean stupid—it never does, and don’t
let anyone tell you otherwise—but it meant they couldn’t read the contracts
they signed. Couldn’t parse the fine print, the loopholes, the elegant Dutch
legalese that promised them heaven and delivered something considerably further
south. They pressed their thumbprints to paper and trusted that the words
written there were the words they’d been told. This was, in the calculus of the
colonial project, considered convenient.
And yet something in them persisted. Something in them
endured. By 2012, people of Javanese descent made up 13.7 percent of Suriname’s
population—the country’s fourth-largest ethnic group. They maintained their
culture the way a vine maintains itself on a crumbling wall: quietly,
stubbornly, finding purchase wherever purchase could be found. They preserved
their traditions. They still spoke Javanese, that old tongue that had traveled
ten thousand miles in the bellies of ships and somehow arrived intact.
But is that all there is to it? The food, the language, the
festivals on certain holy days? The pretty surface of it?
Reader, it is not.
---
Consider Iding Soemita.
He was born in Cikatomas, in the Tasikmalaya region—Sundanese
parents, Priangan people, the kind of family that had its own particular pride
and its own particular sorrows. He arrived in Suriname on October 25, 1925,
stepping off the gangplank into air that smelled of cut cane and distant rain,
and went to work on the Marienburg and Zoelen sugar plantations. Hard work.
Repetitive work. The kind of work that gets into your joints and your back and
stays there like a bad tenant who won’t leave.
But Soemita was watching. That was the thing about him—he
watched, and he thought, and what he thought about was the particular,
grinding inhumanity of the way the Dutch treated these people he’d come to know
as his own. You could see it in the small things, if you knew how to look. Dead
workers buried like they were nothing—no ceremony, no dignity, just a hole in
the ground and move along, the fields don’t plant themselves. If you’ve ever
watched someone you know be treated as less than human, you know what that does
to you. It doesn’t just make you angry. It makes the anger permanent. It
gets into the foundation of you.
So Soemita built something. He built the Mulih Njowo
movement—Go Back to Java—and he aimed it like a fist at the Dutch
colonial administration’s jaw. Send them home, he demanded. The workers whose
contracts have ended, send them home.
The Dutch, to no one’s great surprise, proved slippery.
The government offered “ship money”—a premium of one hundred
Surinamese guilders, Sf100—as compensation. But there was a catch, and the
catch had teeth. Accept the money, the Dutch warned with their bland
administrative smiles, and you stay permanently. You waive your right to
return. You sign away Java. The choice wasn’t really a choice; it was a trap
with a pretty bow on it.
When Mulih Njowo stalled out against that wall of
colonial cunning, Soemita didn’t fold. He launched Nagih Djangjie—Collect
the Debt—and there is something almost biblical in that name, isn’t there?
The idea that a promise was made, that the ledger remains open, that someone
will be made to pay. It had the potential to change the entire political
direction of the country, this second movement. Soemita had found his people’s
anger and given it a spine.
On November 28, 1949, his political allies formed the Kaum
Tani Persatuan Indonesia party—the KTPI—and they marched into the Surinamese
parliament with four seats: two in Paramaribo, two in Commewijne. Four seats,
maybe, but four footholds, and from footholds you can climb.
---
Now consider Salikin Hardjo, who was Soemita’s great rival,
though rival is almost too clean a word for what men become when they
are both fighting for the same desperate cause from slightly different angles.
Hardjo was a printer by trade, not a journalist—though God
knows he wanted to be. He worked for the newspaper De Banier van Waarheid en
Recht between 1930 and 1935, setting the type for other men’s words,
handling the physical language of the press without being permitted to add his
own to it. So he invented a mask.
“Bok Sark”—a fictional Javanese housewife. Eleven letters,
published under the heading Brieven uit Commewijne—“Letters from
Commewijne.” And those letters read, according to the Dutch writer Klass
Breunissen, almost like novels. Vividly exposing the tragic stories of the
marginalized Javanese contract workers. Exposing them the way a wound is
exposed when you peel back a bandage—not to cause pain, but because the light
is necessary.
The letters were so vivid, so precisely devastating, that
they caught the attention of the Dutch parliament itself. Imagine that. A
fictional housewife, invented by a printer, shaking the walls of The Hague.
Hardjo’s political career came to less than he hoped. His
party, the PBIS, never matched the electoral success of Soemita’s KTPI, and
when the 1949 elections ended in failure, he shifted his energy to something
more concrete: getting people home. He founded the Stichting Terug naar het
Vaderland—the Return to the Homeland Foundation—and in 1954, it worked.
About a thousand Javanese people packed their belongings, said their goodbyes
to the cane fields and the red Surinamese earth, and went home. They built a
new settlement in Desa Tongar, West Sumatra, and started again, and the grass
grew over their old paths in Suriname and the world kept spinning.
---
The story doesn’t end there, of course. Stories like this
never do.
Suriname’s political landscape is its own strange creature—ethnic
parties staking out their territories like homesteaders on some frontier map.
The VHP for the Hindustani community. The NPS drawing Afro-Surinamese support.
And for the Javanese: Pertjajah Luhur, led by Paul Slamet Somohardjo,
officially born on December 5, 1998, though its roots twist back to 1977 and a
predecessor party called Pendawa Lima that had held its own through election
after election before internal fractures broke it apart.
Internal fractures. That’s the other thing history
teaches you, if you’re paying attention. That the enemy outside the gate is
rarely as dangerous as the rot that gets started inside the walls.
By the 2025 elections, Pertjajah Luhur held just two
parliamentary seats. Two, where once there had been six.
“Javanese people today have different desires,” said Evet
Karto, a Commewijne representative from the party, and there was something in
those words that carried the particular exhaustion of a person watching
something they love slowly change into something they no longer recognize. “They’re
voting for other parties. There are many reasons. Javanese people now have
different goals and aspirations.”
The old fighting spirit—Soemita’s bone-deep fury, Hardjo’s
underground journalism, those eleven letters from a housewife who never existed—had
been metabolized by time. Diluted. Which is not quite the same as extinguished.
Because Pertjajah Luhur still holds to gotong royong—that
essentially Indonesian concept of mutual cooperation, of lifting together, of
the community as the unit that matters. Among all the parties in Suriname
today, it remains the only one that explicitly, stubbornly, defiantly
represents the Javanese community.
And somewhere in the sugar fields of Commewijne, if you
close your eyes on the right kind of evening, maybe you can still hear it—the
sound of thirty-three thousand people arriving, carrying everything they own,
pressing their thumbprints to paper they couldn’t read, and trusting that the
world would eventually make good on its promises.
It hasn’t. Not entirely. Not yet.
But they’re still here.
And they’re still counting.
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