I’ve been knocking around S.E..Asia one way or another since 1969 and by and large it’s been both interesting and fun. When it wasn’t fun, it was at least interesting. Seldom, if ever, was it dull. Most of this time was spent North of the Equator in an arc from Singapore to Tokyo, with Hong Kong as the pivot. Until, that is, the early 90’s when I first came to Bali. Apart from the intentionally briefest of forays to Jakarta, I really wasn’t up to speed on Indonesia. I had quite enough enthusiasms on my plate as it was without adding another. Couple this ignorance with an Anglo slant on colonial history and you get the picture. That’s why I’m now having so much fun digging into the past 350 years of these here Indies.
Us French and Brits tend to have a fairly patronising historical attitude toward the Dutch and their colonial history. As for the Belgians,…, less said the better. Yes, we know they did quite well there for a while, fighting off the Spaniards but from the mid-18th Century on we tend to think of them as marginalised in strictly European terms, saddled with a difficult geography, sandwiched between a hegemonic France and a rising Prussia. That is not of course how the Dutch saw things. We tend to overlook the sheer wealth of the nation and the importance of the East Indies to the national identity and prosperity. The British may be dimly aware that the Dutch sailed on punitive and humiliating sallies up the Thames on occasion, trouncing English sailors once in a while in sea fights whose names we like to forget, but that’s about as far as it goes until British seapower swept all before it (Tromp’s broom, anyone?). Again the Dutch don’t quite see it like that, and history would show them to be right, at least some of the time. We British tend to think we’ve never been successfully invaded since Billy the Conqueror in 1066. We overlook what we call the Glorious Revolution of 1688, preferring to see it as a national consensus by invitation to Mary Stuart to come over for tea and be Queen in place of her nasty papist uncle James. “Oh, and if you insist Dear Lady, do bring your nice Dutch husband too. Wants to be King, does he? Well since it’s you Ma’am, I guess we might stretch a point”. Fact is, William of Orange landed in Lyme Bay in Dorset 150 miles away from London at the head of an army of 40,000 men prepared to fight his way to the capital if necessary. If William and Mary had have kids we’d have a Dutch King & Queen now instead of the Germans we’ve ended up with. It may indeed have been a Whig conspiracy, but it was an invasion too. Some of us didn’t know that....
All of which brings me to my new hero, “Ponke” Princen.
Poncy who? I hear some of you ask. Well, while you may never have heard of the man, and nor had I until a month or so back, he sure arouses strong feelings among many Nederlanders as my Dutch friend Henk (not his real name) was to find out.
Princen was one of those splendid fellows who upsets absolutely everyone set in power over us. He did this consistently and without fear or favour throughout his entire life. He simply could not stand to see ordinary people being oppressed and it didn’t matter a witch’s whatnot to him who was doing the oppressing. It was just wrong. And that was that in his book. He upset his anarchist parents by wanting to be a priest, he resisted the Nazi occupiers of Holland, he refused to be conscripted, and deserted whenever he was, he defected from the Dutch forces in Indonesia and fought on the other side, became a Hero of the Nation, then fought Sukarno and Suharto tooth and nail for labour and human rights, was sentenced to death in absentia by the Dutch and was put in prison by them all at one time or another.
Naturally, as soon as I found out a bit about this splendid individual I just had to write about him (upcoming YAK June issue). It makes for a fascinating story, but as we all know pictures are worth a 1,000 words and the YAK does rather tend to leave my poor prose in great indigestible slabs, as much through by inability to adhere to deadlines as their lack of a photo editor. So I was hunting around for useable photos of “Poncke” and any other related material I could lay my hands on. I couldn’t come up with much and turned for help to my Dutch pal Henk, a fellow 60’s type with a healthy subversive streak.
“You’re from Tulipland”, I says “ever heard of Ponke Princen?”
Sure ‘nuff, right on cue he says, “Poncy who?” and we take it from there.
I explain who Princen was and wonder if he can’t ask around his Dutch friends to see if they‘ve got any books or articles with useable pix.
“Sounds a good bloke” says Henk, “I’ll ask around”.
A few days later he calls me, audibly in a state of shock,
“Do me a favour, OK? Don’t ask me no more favours”.
Why, what happened? I ask.
“They all started yelling at me! My best friend. It was unreal. That effing traitor, don’t talk to me about.... and so on. I was shocked. You’re on your own, pal and by the way, Thanks!”
Henk and I sometimes start the day setting the world to rights or tearing it apart of a morning in our favourite café over a start-up coffee or three.
“Blimey”, I say, “who’d a thought it?”
“I know, I’m amazed. It’s almost 60 years ago and they still want him dead!”, says Henk and we fall to talking of tribalism, the bigger context and the suchness of things....
Ong Resurgens....
A couple of issues back I shared that Singaporean tycoon B.S. Ong and his hotelier wife had been ousted from one of the original Bawa houses in the Batujimbar Estate in Sanur, which they thought they owned. Turns out that the original owner, an Indonesian entrepreneur with a colourful history, had passed on the house to Hyatt’s Brian Bryce somewhat informally, who had in turn passed it on in similar fashion to the Ong’s. Apparently certain formalities regarding the transfer of the property seem to have been neglected and last month another tycoon type, a Mr Paul Handoko, claimed to have purchased the property and put a sign up to this effect. Now I hear that the Ong’s have “repurchased” the property on a basis unknown and are back in the saddle. One assumes everyone is now happy and all is right with the world. It’s a nice house. It would be nice too, if someone actually stayed in the place once in a while....
More on Dengue…
Glory be & Hallelujah! The property (read mosquito farm) next door to ours now the dry season is upon us is finally cutting back the undergrowth. It only took 3 months. I’d like to think it had something to do with my bitching in this column a month or so back, coupled with pitiful ‘plaints to the local authorities that did the trick. Alas! Fond thought! I reckon the person who runs the business services company responsible is much too hard-boiled and altogether impervious to anything not directly in their self interest for that. No, I’d say it’s simply the mosquito farm is about to transform itself into a building site. So there goes our serenity for the foreseeable future aand no sign of a spraying….
Funny thing is, a man came round the other day asking us to sign off on whatever it is they’re going to build there. Of course they couldn’t say what they were going to build and wanted us to sign off on. Naturally I said I’d be delighted to pass this on to the owners of our land once I knew what it was they wanted us to agree to. One mustn’t stand in the way of progress, must one…..?
