The thing about taxes is that they are never really about
money. Anyone who has ever lived under the boot of an occupying power knows
this in their bones, the way they know the smell of rain before it comes or the
particular silence that falls over a village when strangers arrive with guns.
The Dutch knew it too, which is perhaps why they were so good at collecting
them.
In the early years of the twentieth century, rebellions
broke out across the Indonesian archipelago like brush fires in a dry summer—West
Sumatra, West Nusa Tenggara—and if you asked the Dutch what started them, they
would have told you: a tax on sacrificial animals. As if that were the whole
story. As if a fire has no history before the match.
---
In West Sumatra, in the green-shadowed highlands of
Minangkabau, the old men remembered the Plakat Panjang. Of course they
remembered. Old men always remember the exact moment they were promised
something and the exact moment the promise was broken. It was 1833, and the
Dutch had said: cultivate your coffee, and we will leave your pockets alone.
Seventy-five years later—three generations of sons learning to walk in their
fathers’ footsteps, three generations of mothers pressing coins into their
husbands’ palms at the start of market day—the Dutch came back with their
ledger books and their polite, intractable smiles, and they taxed everything.
The land beneath your feet. The head on your shoulders. The cow in the pen who’d
been giving your children milk since spring.
Marah Roesli understood what that kind of betrayal does to
people. In 1922, he wrote it into his novel Sitti Nurbaya, turned it
into the rebellion of Datuk Maringgih, gave it the fictional distance that lets
the truth breathe. But the truth, the real truth, had already happened. It
happened in Kamang, in the Agam Regency, on a June night in 1908 when the world
was still half-dark and smelled of wet soil and fear.
---
In the nights before the fighting, the young men of Kamang
trained in the brush behind the rice fields.
Think about that for a moment. Really think about it. These
were farmers’ sons, boys who’d grown up knowing the weight of a scythe and the
patience required to coax anything worth having out of the earth. Now they were
out behind the paddies in the dark, practicing with spears and machetes and
cleavers—the tools of harvest turned toward a different kind of work. They did
it quietly. They did it carefully. The jungle held their secret the way a
grandmother holds a secret: absolutely, and without being asked.
When the training was done, when the night had gotten deep
enough, they slipped into Kamang Cave—Gua Kamang, the same dark throat of rock
that had swallowed the Padri War fighters eighty years before. The cave didn’t
care what century it was. The cave was just the cave, cool and smelling of
mineral water and old darkness, and it kept them just as faithfully as it had
kept their grandfathers.
Haji Abdul Manan gave them amulets. Small things. Perhaps
bits of cloth, perhaps inscribed verses, perhaps something older than either. A
man standing in the dark, on the eve of fighting soldiers with rifles, reaches
for what he can. The amulets said: you are not alone in this. Something
older than the Dutch is on your side.
On June 15th, Haji Abdul Manan stood before his people and
said the word that couldn’t be unsaid.
War.
Not against the government, exactly, or against the colony,
or against the great grinding machinery of empire—those were words for men with
educations and offices. He said it simpler than that. War against the belasting.
War against the tax. War against the specific and personal insult of being told
that you owe money for the right to make an offering to God.
---
The Dutch in Bukittinggi heard about it the way rulers
always hear about trouble: too late to prevent it, just in time to overreact.
One hundred and sixty soldiers. Coming from three
directions.
Under cover of twilight—which tells you something, doesn’t
it, the fact that they came at dusk, the fact that they didn’t want it seen—they
hit Kamang fast and hard. The fighting went through the night. By three in the
morning on June 16th, the Minangkabau dead had begun to accumulate.
The names survived. Names have a way of doing that,
outlasting everything else. In the 1910 report in Oetoesan Melajoe, the
paper listed them: Haji Jabang. Pado Intan. Tuanku Parit. Tuanku Pincuran.
Datuk Marajo Tapi. Datuk Marajo Kalung. Dt. Parpatih Pauh. Sutan Bandari
Kaliru. Datuk Radjo Penghulu. His wife—unnamed in the report, because women’s
names so often get swallowed by history—his wife, dead beside him.
And Siti Maryam, from Bonjol. The female warrior. She came
all the way from Bonjol because she believed in something, and she died in
Kamang for the same reason, and whatever she believed, it was worth the trip.
And Siti Aisyah.
List enough names and they start to feel like a prayer. Or a
wound that won’t close.
---
Across the water, in Bima, on the island of Sumbawa, things
had gone wrong differently.
The Dutch brought a treaty. Sixteen articles, each one more
self-serving than the last, dressed up in the formal language of mutual
cooperation and regional prosperity—the kind of language that is most dangerous
precisely because it sounds so reasonable. The Sumbawa Paruga Council read it
and said: no. These men are lying to you. The nobles who had spent their
lives watching power move between hands knew the shape of this trick. They had
seen it before, or their fathers had, or their fathers’ fathers. They warned
Sultan Ibrahim.
Sultan Ibrahim signed anyway.
He was a man with interests to protect, the kind of
interests that look like wisdom to the man who has them and like cowardice to
everyone else. The Dutch promised not to cooperate with other Western powers in
his territory. They promised to guarantee the safety of his family. In return,
his people would comply with any Dutch demand—and there would always, always be
more demands. Article 11 even specified, with the particular condescension of
an occupier who has convinced himself he is being generous, that the Dutch
government would respect the local customs around Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, and
Maulud celebrations. As if they were doing the people of Bima a favor. As if
tolerance were the same as respect.
On February 6, 1908, Sultan Ibrahim traveled to Batavia and
personally handed the treaty to Governor-General J.B. van Heutsz. A small man’s
large moment.
Behind him, the nobles who had tried to save him from
himself quietly dispersed to the Kejenelian districts—Bolo, Donggo, Belo,
Monte, Sape—and began preparing for what they already knew was coming.
---
The Dutch collected their taxes.
They forced people into corvée labor. They taxed the
livestock. They taxed the land and the men who worked it, and when the sums
couldn’t be met—because they were designed not to be met, because a debtor is
always easier to control than a free man—they took the animals. Just walked
into the pens and took them, with the particular casual brutality of people who
have decided in advance that they are in the right.
Sultan Ibrahim called a meeting. He was beginning, perhaps,
to understand what he’d done. The five Kejenelian districts convened in
Palibelo and told him clearly: if you continue to stand with the Dutch, we will
fight. This was not a threat so much as a description of what was already true,
the way a doctor tells you what your body is already doing without your
permission.
Rather than stand with his people, Sultan Ibrahim sent word
to Batavia that a conspiracy was brewing in his territory.
The Dutch responded with cannons.
---
In Syawal 1326 H—by the Western calendar, the last days of
October 1908—the takbir echoed over Ngali. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
The chants of Eid al-Fitr rolled through the streets the way they always did,
but under them, beneath the music and the prayer and the smell of festival
food, the people of Ngali were watching the hills. For three days and three
nights they patrolled without sleeping, and they chanted the same words that
were supposed to be celebration, and something happened to those words in their
mouths. Takbir becomes something different when you’re saying it with a spear
in your hand and 1,000 Dutch soldiers coming over the horizon.
The most vocal fighters, the ones who could no longer
pretend there was a peaceful solution to this, gathered around the Gelarang
Ngali fighter Salasa Ompo Kapa’a. He was joined by nobles—Abas Daeng Manasa—and
by the ulama who had decided that scholarship and prayer alone were
insufficient: Haji Yasin, Haji Said, Syekh Abdul Karim Al-Pogodadi. What
brought the religious leaders out of their mosques and into the fight was
exactly what you’d expect. The Dutch had taxed the sacrificial animals. The
animals that were offered to God. They had reached their hand into the space
between a man and his God and taken money, and the ulama had concluded that
this could not be endured.
They mobilized not just Ngali but the surrounding villages,
and they waited.
---
The first blood was drawn at Talabiu.
The Dutch set up position at Kalate Tente, up on the high
ground where the telescopes could reach, and they watched Ngali the way a man
watches something he has already decided to destroy. Below them, in the
village, Salasa Ompo Kapa’a led his fighters forward with machetes and spears
and the particular courage of people who have run out of options.
Lieutenant Vasteneur died at Talabiu. Salasa Ompo Kapa’a
died too. Then Sulaiman Ama Jawa, the local champion whose name suggests he was
the kind of man people pointed to when they needed to believe something was
possible, died in the fighting.
Haji Yasin didn’t stop to grieve. There wasn’t time. He
ordered the evacuation of Ngali, the retreat to Mount Sambori, and the fight
went on—because that is what fights do, they go on past the point where the
original leaders are gone, past the point of reason, past the point of hope,
carried forward by the momentum of injustice and grief and the particular
stubbornness of people who simply will not let the last thing they do be
surrender.
Reinforcements came from Bolo, Donggo, Kae. On the night of
December 6th, in the dark, the fighters hit Kalate Tente in a surprise attack
that threw the Dutch into genuine disarray. For a moment—one bright, terrible
moment—it seemed like it might actually work.
Then Resident Michael picked up his telegraph key and wired
Makassar.
Three warships. 1,800 personnel. They arrived on January 7,
1909, just days after the Eid al-Adha takbir had finished echoing, and with
them came another 300 men from Sultan Ibrahim—the sultan who had started all
this by signing his people away, now personally contributing to their defeat.
Lieutenant Colonel de Brouw led the final assault. He came
from the east and the north simultaneously, and his troops burned the houses
and seized the livestock and broke everything they could reach, because that is
what the end of an uprising looks like when the wrong side wins. It looks like
fire and loss and the particular silence of a place that used to be full of
people.
---
Haji Muhammad Said Abu Tolu and Haji Yasin Abu Iye were
brought before the sultan in chains.
Their punishment was specific in the way that punishments
designed to humiliate always are. Seventy adult male buffalo each—not offered
as sacrificial animals, not given to God, but handed over as the grim
arithmetic of defeat. Taken from men who had fought because their sacrifice
animals had been taxed.
The Dutch were good at that, at finding the exact shape of a
wound and pressing on it.
The takbir had fallen silent. The buffalo were gone. The
leaders who had stood in the dark and believed in something were either dead or
paying impossible fines, and the cave at Kamang kept its silence, and the
jungle kept its secrets, and the names—Haji Jabang, Pado Intan, Siti Maryam,
Siti Aisyah, Salasa Ompo Kapa’a, Sulaiman Ama Jawa, all the ones the newspaper
remembered and all the ones it didn’t—the names floated up out of history like
something that refuses to drown.
Which is perhaps the only kind of victory that was ever
really available to them. To be remembered. To have their names said out loud
by someone who understands what it cost to carry them.
Allahu Akbar.
The great machine of empire ground on. It always does. But
the people of Kamang and Ngali had thrown themselves into its gears, and for
one brief and burning moment, it had shuddered.
That moment mattered. It still does.
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