Sumatran Shadows is a family memoir that provides a personal account of a critical period in Indonesian history: the final years of Dutch colonial control. Author Peter Janssen is an experienced journalist who is also the descendent of some of the wealthiest and most important of the Dutch colonial plantation owners on the vast island of Sumatra.
Janssen, who spent the first year of his life in Sumatra, is the son of an American woman, Nancy, and a Dutchman, Herbert Janssen. Herbert was the scion of two Dutch business clans started by his great grandfathers, Peter Wilhelm Janssen I and Jacob Theodore Cremer.
Both were successful investors in the profitable tobacco plantations of Sumatra. Peter Wilhelm Janssen made the first Dutch investment in Sumatran tobacco in 1864, listed his Deli Company on the Dutch stock exchange and extracted immense profits from Indonesia without ever visiting the country. When the Deli Company manager fled charges of beating seven Chinese coolies to death, he hired Cremer to replace him. Cremer’s astute and ruthless management made Sumatran tobacco leaf the most popular wrapper leaf for cigars in Europe at a time when cigars were all the rage. Cremer pushed the enactment of the “Coolie Ordinance” that legalized company abuse of laborers in Indonesia. He later served as Dutch minister of colonies and ambassador to the United States.
Descendants of Janssen and Cremer continued to work in Sumatra. Many of them, including Peter’s father, became victims of the Japanese invasion of Indonesia in 1942. They suffered imprisonment and torture before the end of the war brought them back to power and privilege.
Within a decade, however, more than 300 years of Dutch economic dominance was brought to an abrupt end by the Indonesian revolution and the nationalistic rule of President Sukarno. Janssen’s memoir, drawing on diaries kept by his mother, father and uncle, gives a personal picture of the confusion and violence of the Indonesian struggle for independence and the expulsion of the Dutch from Indonesia in 1957. Peter, only one year old, was among the thousands of Dutch citizens forced to leave their homes and businesses. For his father, already damaged by his experience in the Japanese prison camps, the expulsion was a blow from which he never recovered.
Janssen’s mother’s writing is particularly moving for its attention to the details of life in Sumatra and its easy eloquence. Amidst the turmoil of Sukarno’s reign, she wrote:
“I am not only happy, I am actually in harmony with something here, something vital to me even if I cannot find words to describe it … It has to do with an intrinsic goodness peculiar to what I think of when I refer to the lasting Indonesia—it is a truth beyond all the surface layers of truth.”
Janssen does a good job of quoting from objective histories to provide factual background to the family’s experience. He is clear-eyed about his forebears’ culpability for the suffering of Indonesian workers, especially in the early years of the plantations.
Janssen blames the loss of the family fortune and the experience of the war for his father’s decline into alcoholism and his parents’ divorce. After the expulsion from Sumatra Herbert relocated the family to another tropical island, Grenada, but his attempt to start a construction business made little headway. Despite his own drinking and philandering Herbert was intensely jealous of Nancy. After a heated argument in 1966, she took the children and returned to the United States. Three years later Herbert died after being stabbed by his girlfriend’s brother in a drunken brawl.
This is not a story of light and happiness, either for Indonesia or the Janssen family, but it is suffused with love for Peter’s mother who bravely committed to a marriage with an odd Dutchman who brought her to a far-away country. Nancy writes movingly of her Indonesian friends and life in Sumatra and Grenada. It is gratifying that she went on to a career as a music teacher and finally found love and stability in a long and happy marriage to a fellow teacher.
Peter provides the final words to the story with his account of visits to Sumatra in 2003 and 2015 when he was a journalist for the German news agency DPA. He finds his old family home and interviews the managers who worked for his family companies after their seizure by the Indonesian government.
For those interested in Indonesia and enjoy history with a human face, this is a factually informative and emotionally fulfilling read.
Sumatran Shadows is available as a paperback on Amazon.com for $4.56.
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