Sukarno: A Biography

Prologue

Child of Dawn

Sukarno once told how as a child he was sitting on his mother’s lap on the veranda of their house and watched the rising sun. His mother told him that he was born at sunrise. She called him ‘fadjar’, child of the dawn, and predicted ‘You my son will acquire glory; you will become a great leader of your people, because you were born at dawn’. Sukarno added that this applied in two ways: he was born at the start of a new day, but also at the start of a new century. What did Asia look like at the time of Sukarno’s birth and what did the future have to offer to an Indonesian child that was destined to become ‘a great leader of his people’?

Asia at the Dawn of the new century

At the start of the 20th century, Great Britain was the world’s leading nation. A few years before Sukarno’s birth, the British Empire had celebrated the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. From all corners of the world her subjects had come to London to render homage to their Queen. At 11.00 in the morning of 22 June 1897, before she viewed the parades, the Queen had pressed a button in the telegraph room of Buckingham Palace to send a message to the far corners of her empire. ‘It was the largest empire in the history of the world, comprising nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth, and a quarter of its population’, writes James Morris in his book Pax Britannica. In Asia the Pax Britannica stretched from British India, the pearl in the crown of Victoria Regina et Imperatrix, with over 300 million people, to Ceylon, Burma and Malacca, including the prosperous port of Singapore. On the other side of the Netherlands Indies archipelago the British Empire included the Australian continent and New Zealand.

Another European nation, France, had attempted to establish a colonial empire in Northern Africa and Indo-China, where it had in 1887 appointed a governor-general. However France presented itself more as a nation of culture than as a colonial power: during the World Exhibition of 1900 Paris presented itself as the cultural capital of the world.

Germany had only late in the 19th century become a unified state. During Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, it had elected to pursue status and power by industrializing rapidly. Of necessity: ‘when Germany appeared at the auctioning of colonies, the best pieces were gone’. The German nation found a few leftovers in Africa; in Asia it obtained a part of eastern New Guinea and a few islands in the Pacific Ocean, which were proudly baptized the Bismarck Archipelago. In the period leading up to the First World War the Germans in New Guinea were a quiet neighbor of the Dutch Indies.²

At the start of the 20th century, the future superpower in North America was with about 76 million people still a sleeping giant. Like Germany it sought to develop through industrialization. Barely one century had passed since the USA had freed itself from British colonial rule and nothing suggested that it intended to become a colonial power itself. At the end of the 19th century however the Spanish-American War led to a review of America’s role as a great power and of its relationships with the old, declining European powers. Two parties attempted to win public opinion for their view point: the anti-imperialists who, inspired by the ideals of the founding fathers, were entirely opposed to taking colonies and the Realpolitiker who, supported by the powerful sugar lobby, were spoiling to take over Spain’s colonial heritage.

The controversy between imperialists and anti-imperialists flared up again when a decision needed to be taken about the future of a distant Asian side-show in the Spanish-American war, the Philippines. At that time, most Americans thought that Philippines referred to a brand of canned goods. This changed however radically when on 1 May 1898 Admiral Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, and when American troops, together with Filipino freedom fighters under General Aguinaldo, landed in the Philippines to expel the Spanish troops. On 10 December 1898, at the Paris peace agreement, Philippine sovereignty was not transferred to Aguinaldo and his allies, as they had expected, but sold to the USA, which acquired the country for twenty million dollar. Thomas B. Reed, the leader of the anti-imperialists and speaker of the House, made desperate attempts to block the ratification of the peace treaty. However, reluctant senators were persuaded by the ‘realists’ with the argument that a modern colonizer was not an exploiter, as in earlier days, but a benevolent custodian of underdeveloped races. A few days before the Senate vote a leading newspaper published prominently the poetic phrases by Rudyard Kipling, which reflected these sentiments:

Take up the White Man’s burden

The savage wars of peace,

Fill the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease…

Ye dare not stoop to less ---

The other future superpower, Russia, with almost 130 million people, also had the appearance of a sleeping giant. Under the autocratic rule of the Romanovs it had stealthily added a huge Asian territory to its European core. ‘If one would consider Siberia as a colony of European Russia’, commented Dutch historian Jan Romein, ‘then Russia and not England would be the largest colonial power measured in land territory’. At the time of Sukarno’s birth, Russia had advanced until Manchuria and the Yalu River. Territorial expansion was followed by the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway, which became the backbone of Asian Russia.

China was with 400 million people the world’s most populous nation. However it was no match for the expansive Western nations. On 15 November 1908, when the empress-widow and regent Tz’u Hsi died, the hollowness of the Chinese empire was apparent to all. ‘For over forty years she had ruled the nation without succeeding in halting its decline or the penetration by barbarians’, writes the Dutch historian P.J. Bouman. The Boxer Rebellion, which had been secretly supported by the empress, had undermined the nation. Protection of missionaries, who were threatened by the Boxers, gave the Western powers a pretext to expand their sphere of influence. Germany took the lead, starting from Jiaozhou Bay on the East Coast, which it had occupied in 1897 after the murder of two German missionaries.³

In contrast to China, Japan with over 40 million people had after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 acquired a great deal of technological know-how from the West including weapons technology. Invited by England it had sent troops to the mainland to help repress the Boxer rising. Japan had occupied Manchuria and had invaded Korea as far as the Eastern Shore of the Yalu River. It now claimed both areas. Pressured by England, Russia promised to evacuate Manchuria, but was in no hurry to do so. Unwilling to tolerate the delays any longer, the Japanese attacked both in Manchuria and at the Yalu River. In the night of 8 to 9 February 1904 a Japanese flotilla destroyed the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, which led to a wave of patriotism in Japan. Russia then sent its entire Baltic fleet the long route around Cape of Good Hope to retake Port Arthur and to cut off the supply lines of the Japanese troops on the main land. In early May 1905 the Russian armada of eight battle ships, twelve cruisers and nine torpedo boats finally reached the Chinese Sea. In Tsushima Strait the Japanese fleet waited for them, lined up for battle. During the first attack most of the Russian ships were sunk, including that with Admiral Rozhesvensky. The fleeing remains of the fleet were pursued by fast Japanese torpedo boats with poetic names, which finished them off. Japan’s victory over Russia, first on land and then at sea, made a great impression around the world. ‘For the first time a great European power surrendered to an Asian state’ wrote Bouman, and added: ‘A shiver of impatience went through the Asian people’.

Netherlands-Indies

The news of the Japanese victory also reached the Netherlands-Indies, where it led to an updating of 13th century prophecies on the future of Java by Djojobojo, the Hindu ruler of Kediri. It was said that Djojobojo had predicted that yellow people with bowlegs would come from the north that would expel the Dutch rulers. They would leave again after such time had passed as was necessary for corn to ripen.⁴ Then an independent Java would emerge, as powerful as the Hindu Empire of Majapahit had once been.

The Dutch colonizers were unaware of this latest version of the prophecies of the legendary king that was whispered in the desa. They were the confident owners of a rich colony with a compliant people that were the envy of other Western nations. Java, which was the source of much of its riches, counted about 30 million people comprising ‘Natives’, Indo’s and Alien Orientals (Chinese and Arabs). A few hundred Dutch officials organised in the Interior Administration (BB: Binnenlands Bestuur) ruled it, assisted by the Pemong Pradja (PP: local government) which consisted of thousands of local officials, often of Javanese nobility. A military cum police force (KNIL: Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indische Leger) consisted of tens of thousands of low-paid local men and was commanded by fewer than a thousand European officers. Java was a colony that produced profits for its colonizers. In 1861 the Englishman J.W.B. Money wrote a book entitled Java, or how to manage a colony: showing a practical solution of the questions now affecting British India. It was the time of the cultuur stelsel, a system of forced cultivation that resulted in a surplus flowing back to Holland that amounted to 25 per cent of the Dutch Government’s annual budget. Thirty years later, the Frenchman L. Chailly-Bert, a parliamentarian and writer, also praised the manner in which Holland managed its colonies. His praise concerned the well-organized, profitable and more liberal system that had been introduced after the abolition of the cultuur stelsel. After the opening of the Suez Canal even greater opportunities opened up in the colony for private entrepreneurs.

Despite all the praise, a certain amount of discomfort had grown in Holland about the fact that it profited so much from its colony and did so little in return for the local population. This echoed the accusations of Dutch most renowned writer of the nineteenth century, Multatuli, about the ‘Robber State between East Friesland and the Schelde’⁵. An early indication of this discomfort was the Program of Principles of 1897 of a new political party, the Antirevolutionaire Partij, led by Abraham Kuyper. It stated that the ‘profit motive’ should be replaced by a ‘moral obligation’. In a time when policy changes were only possible if merchants and clerics agreed, this meant that the leading liberal party needed to be persuaded to support the policy changes advocated by Kuyper.

A famous article by C. Th. Van Deventer in De Gids of 1899 became the clarion call that awoke the nation, including the liberals, from their colonial dreams. In the article, the former lawyer from Semarang calculated that the mother country in past decennia had withdrawn 823 million Dutch guilder from the Dutch Indies of which 187 million had been improperly obtained, hence the title of the article: ‘A Debt of Honor’. Van Deventer wanted the improperly obtained millions returned to the colony to improve education and strengthen the local economy. One year later an ally of Van Deventer in the Dutch Indies, Pieter Brooshooft, editor of the newspaper De Locomotief, made a plea under the heading: ‘The ethical approach to colonial policies’. After that matters proceeded rapidly. At the opening of parliament on 17 September 1901 the new coalition of Christian and liberal parties led by Kuyper had prepared a speech for the young Queen Wilhelmina which declared that ‘our Christian nation should establish as a principle of government policy that the Netherlands has a moral calling towards the peoples of its (overseas) territories’. ‘Ethical Policy’ became government policy; a policy pervaded by what Kipling had called the white man’s burden.

Pacification

Kipling had written that the burden of the white man as custodian of colonies was associated with wars of peace. The expansion of Dutch influence in the Indonesian archipelago, which reached its climax at the time of Wilhelmina’s speech, was therefore called ‘pacification’. The pacification policy combined the interests of three groups: the merchants, who had discovered profitable areas outside Java, the missionaries who wanted to bring God’s word to the Dajaks, Bataks, Toraja’s and Papuans, and the warriors who wanted to earn a distinction for valor, wisdom and loyalty.⁶

In 1894 the Eastern island Lombok was conquered. A rebellion of the Sasak people of Lombok against their Balinese rulers had provided Batavia with an excuse to send an expedition to the turbulent region to teach the Balinese bullies some lessons. The intervention resulted in a bloody defeat for the Dutch when the Balinese punggawa (hereditary vassals) staged an unexpected –the Dutch media called it a treacherous – attack against the Netherlands’ forces and put more than hundred men, among them General Van Ham, to the sword. The massacre and humiliating retreat that followed caused a shock in the colony as well in the Netherlands. Hurriedly reinforcements were sent. The Balinese had only primitive arms and were no match for the big expeditionary force. The KNIL returned as triumphant victors to Java, carrying with them a rich booty, ‘the Lombok treasure’. These events received much publicity and convinced even the supporters of the Ethical Policy that Dutch authority should be firmly established in the provinces outside Java.

In February 1899, teuku Umar, the last remaining guerrilla leader in Aceh had been captured. This enabled J. B. van Heutsz, the governor of Aceh, to end the Aceh war that had dragged on for two decades? even though the difficult province would never be completely peaceful. Van Heutsz organised the government in the pacified territories on the basis of a Korte Verklaring (Brief Statement) which had been prepared by the Islam expert and advisor to the Government Chr. Snouck Hurgronje. The essence of the Verklaring, which the tribal chieftains had to sign, was that they submitted themselves to Dutch rule. Dutch officials were posted to the pacified territories to enforce compliance. The Aceh method of Van Heutsz, who in 1904 became governor-general of the Netherlands Indies, was followed in other outlying areas. At a rapid clip one territory after the other was pacified: in 1901 Djambi on Sumatra and in the same year Ceram on the Moluccas, followed by Lombok in 1902. The plunder of a Chinese ship that had been shipwrecked on de east coast of Bali in 1904 provided Van Heutsz with the pretext to send an expeditionary force to southern Bali, where the local radja continued to ignore Dutch authority. The one sided fight ended in a collective suicide of the radja and his followers in front of the palace.⁷

All of this meant that at the start of the century the Dutch flag flew over an archipelago that stretched across a distance similar to that from Ireland to the Caucasus. Much later, after the Republic Indonesia obtained this colonial heritage, Sukarno could with some right claim sovereignty ‘from Sabang to Merauke’? from the west point of Sumatra to the eastern border of Dutch New Guinea.

The expansion of Dutch rule to territories hitherto only nominally in its possession was very costly in terms of both money and men. For the advocates of the Ethical Policy this was the inevitable price to pay for the noble goal of pacification. A.W.F. Idenburg, Van Heutsz’ successor as governor-general and a proponent of the Ethical Policy, was not entirely wrong when he told opponents that pacification often made an end to unfair and inhuman conditions. Pacification ended the wars between native warlords in outlying areas, it ended slavery in remote parts of the archipelago and the burning of widows in Bali; it ended piracy in the Strait of Malacca and cannibalism in New Guinea. The entire archipelago was ready to receive the blessings of pacification; its peoples could now be uplifted to a higher level of civilization. One of those who would benefit from this was Sukarno.

PART ONE

DUTCH SUBJECT

1.

Early Years: 1901-1916

Sukarno attributed to his parents a very prominent ancestry. Others have embellished Sukarno’s birth with several myths. In the Javanese culture it is not unusual to give leaders a legendary ancestry. The parents of Sukarno belonged to the better classes. His mother was from Bali and his father from East Java. As a child, he grew up in a village environment and attended a local school. However, his parents had greater plans for their only son.

Sukarno’s ancestry

Sukarno’s mother, Ni Nyoman Rai Serimben, came from the port town Buleleng in northern Bali, near Singaraja the capital of the Hindu island Bali. The date of her birth is not known and she probably did not know it herself. Within the Balinese Hindu community there were two calendars in use; in addition to the Balinese calendar, which has 210 days in a year, the Western calendar was being used from around the time of his mother’s birth, probably around 1870.

Although Bali has a caste system, it is less rigid and pervasive than that in India. It is probably more accurate to refer to social classes rather than castes; Bali had the following social classes: the priests, the nobility and the warriors - the Brahman, the Ksatria and the Wesia. These constitute the elite of Balinese society. All other Balinese were referred to as Sudra, the common people.

Sukarno told his later biographer Cindy Adams that the family of his mother belonged to the Brahman and gave her the proper title Ide Ayu, ‘her exalted’. However, Sukarno’s mother did not belong to that caste but to the ‘Pasek’ who, although part of the Sudra, were a prominent clan that traditionally provided the administrators in Bali. The Pasek see themselves as superior to the other Sudra and they view the three leading classes as nouveau riche, as they only arrived in Bali after the Javanese Empire had conquered the island in 1343. The Pasek traced their origins back to the Buddhist priests who arrived in Bali in the 10th century. However, a Pasek will not easily appropriate for himself the title Ide Ayu. The radja of Giantar, Ide Anak Agung Gde Agung, himself an errant member of the Balinese Ksatria, explained to me that calling oneself ‘Ide Ayu’ without having the right to do so is like Westerncalling oneself Baron or Count without basis.

Sukarno has also embellished the ancestry of his father, while some of his admirers even gave him a different biological father. This rather complex story comes in three versions. Sukarno made Cindy Adams believe that his father descended from the warrior house of Kediri, to which also the legendary, prophetic king Djojobojo belonged. Among family and friends Sukarno attributed to his father a different ancestry, namely the Wali Suna Jaga of Demak. These are Javanese Muslim saints (sufi) from the 15th century whose lives and miracles have come to us in Javanese stories (babad) which are a mixture of legend and historical facts. The nine Walis did not live in the same place or in the same time period, yet they could come together because they had the ability to step out of their physical body as well as out of their mortal remains. Those who believe this also attribute this ability to their descendants and so to Sukarno⁸.

A persistent myth woven by others around Sukarno’s descent, the third version, was that he would have been an Indo-European. As proof of this, they point to the un-Javanese physique of the President such as his early baldness and his hairy chest. Sukarno always reacted with amusement to these stories about his Indo-European descent. He explained that Indo’s could not believe that the energetic, dynamic and fast-thinking president of Indonesia could be a simple native. It is though quite possible that there was a trickle of European blood in his ancestors

Balinese marriage of Sukarno’s parents

When Sukarno’s father died on 8 May 1945, the newspapers reported that he was 76; he was therefore born in 1869. Sukarno’s father used the name Raden Sukemi Sosrodihardjo. The title ‘raden’, also used by Sukarno’s grandfather, suggests that they belonged to the priyayi, the lower Javanese nobility. Sosro, as he was called, had an education that in the 19th century was far beyond that of the average native. He followed a teacher training program in Probolingo and found his first job as teacher outside Java in Bali around 1890 in Buleleng, where in 1875 an elementary school had been established. Sosro lived in a boarding house in a kampung behind the school.

The young teacher must have been a well-read man, with broad interests. An early biographer of Sukarno, Nasution, reports that Sukarno’s father had been an assistant of the great linguist, Neubronner van der Tuuk, who at that time worked in Bali on his Balinese-Dutch dictionary. Sosro’s house was at walking distance from the main temple of the town and a smaller neighborhood temple of the Pasek. Between the two temples, on jalan Gunung Baru 24, was the house that belonged to the Siremben family; Sukarno’s mother was one of their daughters. The Pasek class to which Sukarno’s mother belonged were masters of the temple and the Siremben family often provided temple service. According to Sukarno, his mother’s duty was to keep the temple clean. A distant cousin claimed that she was also a temple dancer. According to Sukarno, his father met his mother at the water fountain in front of the temple complex but in the family a charming story has been preserved according to which Sosro once attended a temple service while a group of dancers were performing, and that he plucked a flower from a Cambodja tree and threw it to the swinging dancers. The flower landed on the pretty Ni Niyoman, Sukarno’s future mother, and Sosro decided to court her.

One would expect that in the colonial society of Bali a school teacher would be a welcome son-in-law for a rather impoverished Pasek family, but according to Sukarno that was not the case. The family council rejected a marriage with the Javanese impostor who moreover was a Muslim. Therefore, Sosro decided to kidnap the girl. One should not take this too literally; it was common in Bali to elope with a girl if one was not from Bali.

Sukarno’s birth

After his marriage Sukarno’s father remained for some time in Buleleng, and in 1899 a daughter was born there, Sukarmini. A year later Sosro found a new job as teacher at a native primary school in Surabaya where the family found a home at Pasar Besar, now jalan Pahlawan, a reasonably prosperous kampung in the lower town along the Kali Mas, the estuary of the river Brantas.

Sukarno has told Cindy Adams that the monthly salary of his father was ‘the Dutch equivalent of 25 Rupiahs’. At an exchange rate of 45 rupiahs to the dollar, as Sukarno mentioned, this makes it look like a very low income. However, the 25 rupiahs were in fact 25 guilders, and Abu Hanifah later worked out that with an income of 25 guilder a month, when rice was only a few cents a kilo, one could live in relative prosperity. Moreover, Sosro’s income was increased with 5 guilder per month for every year of service. Of the Rp25 Sukarno mentioned, 10 were needed for the rental of the house and this must have given them a very comfortable residence. In the simple environment in which the family lived, Sukarno’s father would have been quite prominent.

In addition to his position as teacher, Sosro was also member of the Theosophic Society. Founded in 1875 in New York, the center of Theosofism was moved to Ayar in India in 1882, from where it rapidly spread around Asia. In 1903 there were already five lodges in the Netherlands Indies, of which one was in Surabaya. In 1906 the Theosophic Society in the Dutch Indies had about 200 members, mainly prominent Dutchmen, rich Chinese and Javanese nobles. Several were also Freemasons. Raden Sukemi Sosrodihardjo therefore belonged to a highly selective group, one that was generally supportive of Dutch rule in Indonesia and opposed independence.

Sukarno was born on 6 June 1901 in the house on Pasar Besar and was named Kusno. The environment in which Sukarno grew up was in many respects that of a kampung within a large city. In the beginning of the twentieth century these were not yet as densely populated as they are at present. They had narrow paths with small houses, each with their own garden with fruit trees, vegetables and chicken. Socially also it resembled village life with strong mutual ties and social control. Older girls, for example, would look after the young ones. It was a small world for a child, one in which a walk to the Kali Mas river, safely in the slendang (carrying cloth) of a neighbor’s girl, was a big adventure. In this small family of four, and in the protected environment of the village, Sukarno spent his early years. When he was six, in 1907, his father moved to Mojokerto where he became the head of a native school.

Intermezzo: with grandparents in Tulungagung

Sukarno’s first biographer Im Yang Tju has written that Sukarno’s father, before he became principal of the primary school in Mojokerto, had two short assignments as teacher, in Ploso and in Sidoardjo. In this period Sukarno and his sister lived with their grandparents in Tulungagung in southeast Java. Sukarno has told that his grandparents had a ‘batik business’, and that they were ‘well to do’.

At the age of 6 a child is quite receptive; the period that Sukarno lived with his grandparents left him with lasting impressions. He has told that his grandfather made him familiar with the ‘wayang’, the Javanese shadow play with puppets. In the wayang the ‘dalang’, the story teller and handler of puppets, is telling and playing the stories from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. The former is an elegy of court stories of the never ending fight of good against evil; the latter an epic of knightly battles between the Pandawa and their cousins the Korawa, also with the theme of an eternal conflict of righteousness against injustice. In the wayang stories the ksatria, who are knights without fear or reproach, play the main role. The wayang performance can last the whole night and is for the Javanese not a mere pastime, but akin to a worship that carries the audience away as in a dream, and makes them identify with the legendary figures that are on the stage.

A popular episode in the Mahabharata, that would inspire the later orator Sukarno, is the Bharata Yudha. It recounts the endless battle for the kingdom of Hastina between five Pandawa and hundred Korawa – all of them ksatria. Despite the superiority in numbers of the Korawa the battle never comes to an end. It is an everlasting trial of strength of opposing powers that keep each other in check in the same way as the entire cosmos is in harmony. Being the son and grandson of a priyayi Sukarno learned to identify with the noble heroes, the ksatria from the wayang, with the loyal leader of the Korawa forces, Karno, whose name would later be given to him, with Bima, the full-breasted and fearless second born of the Pandawa, whose name he would later choose as his nom de plume, and according to his youngest son above all with Gatotkaca, the son of Bima, who had the capacity to fly, which appealed very much to Sukarno’s imagination.

Sukarno’s German biographer Dahm, who has chosen the struggle between the Pandawa and the Korawa as the Leitmotiv of his biography, has portrayed the Indonesian nationalists as the Pandawa and the colonial rulers as the Korawa. I think Dahm’s interpretation is wrong. The great authority on the wayang, the Dutch anthropologist J. Kats, emphasised that the Pandawa and Korawa were all descendants of the same mythological ancestor. They were cousins, who fought each other continuously, like the Indonesian nationalists would often come in conflict with each other. The Pandawa and Korawa however formed one front as soon as the ‘Raksasa’ appeared at the scene – Kats calls them ‘the giants from opposite shores. It was for the Javanese spectators not difficult to recognize in these cold and rude personalities their colonial rulers.

While Sukarno’s grandfather made him familiar with the world of the wayang, his grandmother convinced him that he had supernatural gifts. She told him that he had the gift of clairvoyance. Sukarno said that he lost this talent when he discovered his talent as an orator. ‘In any case, I have since my seventeenth birthday never again noticed any sign of my clairvoyance gift,’ Sukarno has said.

Mojokerto

Assuming Sukarno lived for a year in Tulungagung, he must have been seven when in 1908 he joined his parents at Mojokerto. The small town is located north of Surabaya on the banks of the river Brantas, which later changes its name into Kali Mas before flowing into the Java Sea. The river and its banks became Sukarno’s beloved play ground.⁹

Sukarno has described the years at Mojokerto as years of poverty and discrimination. The strictness of his father added to his negative memories of that time. While he respected his father he portrays his mother as a gentle woman with a strong will. However, Sukarno did not depend entirely on his mother or older sister. When he needed help he turned to a young housemaid, Sarena, who lived with them. Sukarno has told that he shared his bed with her and that she taught him to love common people. To Cindy Adams he declared: ‘She has as a human being had the greatest influence in my life.’

The first house they lived in often got flooded during the wet season, while during the dry season their street turned into a stagnant sewer. This unhealthy environment, Sukarno has told, caused him to catch typhoid at the age of eleven. He has told in detail how his father turned into a loving mystic. He would lie under the bed of his son on the floor to provide a shield against the evil spirits that would rise from the ground. Perhaps Sosro, the theosophist, believed that this was the way to fight typhoid. However, it seems to us unlikely that, as Sukarno claimed, his father did this for two and a half months, while abandoning his school. The superstitious father decided that a complete recovery of his son required a ‘rebirth’ and he therefore gave him a new name: ‘Karno’. He explained to his son who Karno was: a ksatria, a knight, a soldier, who faithfully served his king and country as a dedicated patriot. He added the prefix Su to the name Karno, which means the one who is more than, better than. After Kusno was well again and had been re-baptized as Sukarno, the family moved to another house along the present jalan Raden Pamuji.

According to Sukarno, they were so poor that they could only eat rice once a day; to save money his mother did not buy the more expensive polished rice, but the less expensive unpolished variety. The persistent claim of Sukarno that they were poor remains somewhat strange. According to the salary scales of 1913, the head of an elementary school had an income of 50 guilders per month, with an increment of 10 guilders per year of service. Therefore, Sukarno’s father must have had a yearly income of about 100 guilders – more than what a teacher of a primary school in Holland earned at that time.

The jalan Raden Pamuji was a prominent thoroughfare which ended at the alun-alun, the central square of the town. Some hundred meters further was the street, presently called jalan Pemuda, where the school of Sukarno’s father was, which Sukarno attended as a pupil. The house in which the family lived still exists. Although it has been rebuilt many times the ground plan is still recognizable, and also the small dark room of Sukarno with its attic window; fifty years later he could still remember it. Photographs of the house before it was rebuilt, which the present owner has shown me, had art deco windows which in those days were only found in prominent homes. It was a house on a corner and in Sukarno’s time it must have had a big garden. Today there are two houses and a carpenter’s shop on the premises. There was also a private well, a real luxury at the time.

Sukarno described himself as a real ‘jago’ during his primary school years, somebody who bullied his friends. His next door friend, Hermen Kartowisastro, later a prominent nationalist, has confirmed this image, and has given an example of his friend’s bullying behavior. One time they played the Dutch game of ‘hak tollen’ behind Sukarno’s house, trying to hack another top by spinning your top on it. It was played in a circle marked in the sand with tops provided with a sharp point that were thrown spinning with a string around the top. When the top stopped spinning within the circle you had to leave your top there. It was then the turn of others to try to hack your top with the pointed spike at the bottom of their top. If they succeeded you lost your top. Hermen told that he was able to hack Sukarno’s top in two pieces in accordance with the rules of the game. Sukarno took the expensive top made of tamarind wood of his friend, ran away with it and threw it in the river. ‘We then fought,’ Hermen has written. ‘Because I was bigger and stronger I easily had the upper hand. He ignored me for a whole week.’ When Kartowisastro wrote his memoirs fifty years later, he claimed to have seen in the jago of Mojokerto an early reflection of the later president.

Sukarno could not bully the Dutch boys whom he got to know when he joined their soccer club. Some of them made it clear that they did not like having a native boy in their club. ‘For me the soccer club was a traumatic experience’, Sukarno said bitterly to Cindy Adams, but he soon had to try and deal with the Dutch children of the town as his father decided that he should attend the ‘Europese Lagere School, the ELS (the Dutch primary school). A school exam showed that Sukarno’s mastery of the Dutch language, the medium of instruction at the ELS, was still insufficient. For that reason he had to start a class lower than the fourth grade he had attended at the native primary school.

Sukarno’s primary education

The ELS was a school for Dutch children in Indonesia. For such schools the so-called Concordantie Principe applied which meant that the education given should be fully consistent with that in the Netherlands. This has later been depicted as a deliberate discrimination of the native children attending Dutch schools. However from a Dutch point of view it was not unreasonable, as it would give children of Dutch parents the possibility to continue without problems their education in Holland. The consequence was of course that all children at the ELS were taught in subjects like history and geography along the same lines as at primary schools in Holland.¹⁰

Native children were only rarely accepted at the ELS. They had to be of above average intelligence and their parents had to have a certain social status. Despite his insufficient Dutch, Sukarno met the first requirement during the exam he had to take. Sukarno’s father, himself a school-principal and a former member of the prestigious Theosophic Society in Surabaya, did possess the required social status. Sukarno considered it humiliating to be in the same grade with children who were one or two year younger but his father found an easy solution. He declared that his son was a year younger than he in fact was. Because Sukarno was of small stature and looked younger than his age, the little lie obviously did not cause any suspicion. To ensure that Sukarno would be able to keep up with his fellow students at the ELS his father decided to have him tutored in the Dutch language by a Dutch teacher whom he knew in Purwokerto in Central Java. Fifty years later Sukarno could still remember her name, Miss Maria Paulina. The reason he remembered her was that ‘she was endowed with much less beauty than any woman was entitled to’.

At the ELS Sukarno experienced his first puppy love. Fifty years on he could also still remember her name, Rika Meelhuizen. ‘Rika was the first girl I have ever kissed,’ the Indonesian president confessed to Cindy Adams, his American biographer. Sukarno was afraid of the consequences if his father would find out that he ‘was seeing’ a Dutch girl, but it turned out differently. Once when he rode on his bicycle through Mojokerto with Rika on the luggage carrier behind him, he ran into his father, who had no problems with his son being with a Dutch girl. In fact, he considered it an excellent way for his son to become fluent in Dutch.

Sukarno finished the ELS in the required time. Completing the seventh grade meant that he had the ‘klein ambtenaren diploma’ (the junior civil servants’ diploma), which entitled him to start working for the Pemong Pradja, the native administration. The ambitions of the father however went higher. His dream was that his son one day would attend the university. For that purpose the next step after the ELS was the Hoogere Burgerschool, or HBS, which would prepare him for higher education. For this Sukarno had to bid farewell to his parental house in Mojokerto and move to Surabaya to attend the HBS.

2.

Dutch Education: 1916-1926

Between 1916 and 1921 Sukarno attended the HBS in Surabaya. During these years he lived in the house of the nationalist leader Umar Said Tjokroaminoto. The HBS moulded him into a Dutch-thinking student. The nascent nationalism that he became acquainted with in his boarding house accorded well with Marxism, which in those days looked like an ideology of liberation. From 1921 till 1926, Sukarno studied at the technical university in Bandung, which further shaped him into a Western-oriented intellectual. Sukarno’s HBS and university years coincided with a period of evolving nationalist consciousness in Indonesia. The nationalist movement mobilized the native elite and this resulted in a multitude of organizations. The colonial government tried to come up with a suitable response to the emerging nationalism. Sukarno became politically active during his studies and had to establish his own position in the rapidly changing political environment.

Nascent Indonesian nationalism

Compared with other Asian nations such as China, India and the Philippines, where nationalist movements emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism in Indonesia awoke rather late. The main reason for this was that in Indonesia the priaji acted as a break on the nationalist movement. They were happy to work with a colonial regime that used them as the recruiting ground for the Pemong Praja. In this way they became a buffer between the colonial regime and the native population.

Indonesia’s nationalist movement traced its beginnings to the launching of Budi Utomo (‘Nobel Endeavour’) on 12 May 1908. Budi Utomo did not advocate independence and was not a mass movement, but aimed at a harmonious development of country and people. It was an emancipatory rather than a nationalist movement, and was dominated by Javanese nobility who based their emancipatory views on pre-Islamic Javanese traditions, which in their view were much richer than what Islam could offer. The young Sukarno shared this affinity with pre-Islamic traditions. As a schoolboy he was active in the youth organization of Budi Utomo, Tri Dharmo – later renamed ‘Jong Java’, Young Java.

The first nationalist mass movement in Indonesia was the Sarekat Islam (SI), which would become Sukano’s training school. The SI originated from Sarekat Dagang Islam (Islamic Traders Association) and was founded on 27 March 1909 in Buitenzorg (Bogor). This grouping wanted to protect the native trade and small industry, such as the batik businesses, against Chinese traders who controlled the purchase prices. The founder of the association and its chairman, the Javanese noble man Tirto Adhi Suryo, was discredited by the government and accused of libel; without any form of process he was exiled to Ambon¹¹. Before his exile Tirto had written new bylaws for the association which emphasized nationalism and independence instead of economic objectives. Tirto re-christened his brain-child as ‘Sarekat Islam’. In 1914 Tjokroaminoto became its chairman.

‘Tjokro’ as he was usually called had just turned thirty and was a devoted Moslim and haji. He became a charismatic leader and succeeded in giving the organization national appeal. After some years the SI claimed a following of no less than two million members. Those joining were motivated above all by a messianic expectation of the coming of a ‘Ratu Adil’, the prophesized righteous king who would establish a utopian kingdom in Java. In its early days SI had adopted a cooperative attitude towards the Netherlands Indies government, which on its part was not unsympathetic towards the Muslim mass movement, but that would gradually change. Meanwhile local branches were established all over Java and also in Sumatra and in this way the SI became the first nationalist movement that penetrated deeply into the villages and beyond the boundaries of Java.

Besides the SI many other movements and associations with an emancipatory and sometimes a nationalist character were being established. Together they formed a mosaic of organizations in which the nascent political and social consciousness of the native population was gradually channeled.¹² In 1912 the modern Islamic organization Muhammadiyah was founded. It was devoted to spreading the teachings of Islam and to general native education, in an attempt to counter the influence of Catholic and Protestant missions. The Muhammadiyah would become one of the biggest Indonesian organizations and an important factor in the life of Sukarno. The Indische Partij was also founded in 1912. At its cradle stood three spiritual fathers: E.F.E. Douwes Dekker, the great-nephew of the earlier mentioned 19th century writer Multatuli, the Javanese physician Tjipto Mangunkusomo, a ‘bare-foot doctor’ or ‘dokter Jawa’ who had been a co-founder of Budi Utomo, and Suwardi Suryanningrat, whom we will meet again as the founder of the Javanese education organization Taman Siswo, under his newly adopted name Ki Ajar Dewantoro. The Indische Partij was the first native organization which advocated an independent Indonesia, encompassing the whole archipelago, and can therefore be considered as the first political party of Indonesia. The party was not given a long life, but its founders would have great influence on Sukarno’s political development.

One Indonesian party associated with Dutch Marxists deserves some attention. In 1914 the Dutch Marxist Henk Sneevliet, who was working as secretary of a trading association in Semarang, founded the Indisch Sociaal-Democratische Vereniging or ISDV. The party consisted of about sixty Dutch Marxists but Sneevliet also succeeded in bringing several young Indonesians under his influence. He encouraged them to become member of the still obscure ISDV, and at the same time of the successful SI. These young Indonesians started to pressure the leadership of the SI, which vaguely professed some Marxist doctrines, to declare more firmly that they were not only against Western capitalism, but also against the nascent small capitalism in native circles. Their efforts caused embarrassment among SI members, some of whom had successfully built up small enterprises and industries of their own. As a result, in 1917 several moderates left Sneevliet’s ISDV and founded the Indies Social Democratic Party, ISDP. This would become and remain a small but influential political party of mainly Dutch residents in the Netherlands Indies. The remaining members of the ISDV formed a new party that they named ‘Partij Kommunist Indonesië’. It is this party, the PKI, which would play a dramatic role in the history of Indonesia, as well as in the life of Sukarno. While in the ISDV the Dutch social-democrats had the upper hand, the PKI became a predominantly domestic political party.¹³

The People’s Council

The First World War hardly touched the Netherlands Indies. Communication between the colony and the motherland became more difficult and this resulted for the Netherlands Indies government in a greater freedom of action. In 1909 A.W.F Idenburg, a supporter of the Ethical Policy, had become governor-general. He viewed the emerging nationalism as an emancipation of the natives, and applauded this and gave it much freedom. In 1916, in the midst of war, Idenburg announced the establishment of the Volksraad (People’s Council), the legal foundation of which had been provided by the Dutch legislature shortly before the war. The Council was to form the apex of democratic representation in the archipelago and included representatives of the natives and ‘Alien Orientals’ (Chinese and Arabs), in addition to representatives of Dutch residents. Together with the earlier established local and provincial representative bodies this provided a first limited form of self-government in the Netherlands Indies.

However, the People’s Council was only given advisory powers while legislative and executive powers remained with the government of the colony, represented by the powerful Binnenlands Bestuur (BB). Also, the representative nature of these bodies was still weak, as their members were only partly elected, and for the most part appointed.¹⁴ While obviously the natives constituted a large majority of the total population, they were only a minority in the representative bodies. The decentralization of government functions towards municipalities and provinces and the establishment of the People’s Council were nevertheless a start on the road towards self-government of the colony. Matters of policy would henceforth be discussed openly and the People‘s Council received the right to approve the colonial budget. For many Indonesian nationalists membership of the People’s Council, and of the provincial and municipal councils gave them their first experience with day-to-day politics.

The question whether to accept membership of the People’s Council became a test case for the SI. There were differences of opinion between party executives, who wanted to join, and Sneevliet’s Marxist infiltrators, who were opposed. The issue introduced a fundamental divide within the nationalist movement between cooperation and non-cooperation. Sukarno was one of the nationalists who had to choose between the ‘Ko’s-’ and the ‘non-Ko’s’. The issue created a tense atmosphere at the SI congress of 1917 and only a small majority decided to join the Council. Tjokro and another board member, Abdul Muis, took the SI seats in the People’s Council in Batavia – the former as an appointed, the latter as an elected member.

The People’s Council was inaugurated on 18 May 1918 by the new governor-general J.P. van Limburg Stirum. In 1916 he had succeeded Idenburg, who returned to Holland to become Minister of the Colonies. The new governor-general was like his predecessor a supporter of the Ethical Policy. In his inaugural address Van Limburg Stirum provided a vision of a gradual shift of the centre of gravity of colonial rule from The Hague to Batavia.

Within the People’s Council a progressive majority emerged. It took the form of a parliamentarian grouping named ‘Radicale Concentratie’ (Radical Grouping). At its core stood the Nederlands-Indische Vrijzinnige Bond (NIVB: Netherlands Indies Liberal Confederation). The two representatives of the SI, Tjokro and Muis, joined the Radical Concentration. Around that time news of major political developments in Europe reached the distant archipelago: the Russian revolution, the socialists taking over power in Germany, and a would-be revolution by the Dutch socialist leader Jelle Troelstra in Holland. This prompted the Radical Concentration to openly demand self-government for Indonesia. Without consultation with The Hague, without even consulting his constitutional advisory body the Raad van Indië, Van Limburg Stirum instructed his representative in the People’s Council to agree on 18 November 1918 with the reforms that were demanded. He established a reform committee to prepare proposals; we will see the results of their work in the next chapter.

Surabaya

In June 1916 Sukarno returned as a fifteen year old boy to his birthplace Surabaya to attend the HBS. He described it to Cindy Adams as ‘a bustling noisy port town that looked very much like New York’. During the first decades of the twentieth century Surabaya was indeed a booming city. It was one of the first cities to receive the status of municipality as a result of the territorial decentralization policy. Surabaya’s administrators were dynamic and progressive. They started a full scale program of kampung-improvement for the poor. ‘Real estate developers’- as we would call them today – were obliged to set aside a part of new housing projects as residences for native people. It is significant that Sukarno spent the impressionable years of his puberty in a modern city of Western allures with an assertive native population. White and brown lived their own social life but dealt with each other in a businesslike manner. In this way Surabaya presented a stimulating environment to an intelligent boy whose interests went beyond his own native culture.

When Sukarno came to board with them in 1916 Tjokroaminoto and his wife had four children: Utari, a girl of ten, Anwar and Harsono, boys of five and three, and a baby boy of a few months old. The family occupied a spacious house in jalan Peneleh 29 and 31, in the Peneleh neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Kali Mas. The house consisted of two dwellings with in between a courtyard. The family of Tjokro lived in the front part of the house around a spacious veranda. In the rear part of the buildings was the headquarters of the SI. Small rooms had been built in the attics of the two dwellings to accommodate boarders, who were mostly school-going boys like Sukarno. Among them was the later communist leader Muso, who was three years older than Sukarno, and also the four years older other future communist leader Alimin, who Sukarno said initiated him into Marxism. The earlier mentioned Hermen Kartowisastro was also one of the boarders. Sukarno was assigned a small room of not even two by two meters, without windows or electricity, in which he had to read and study by the light of an oil lamp. Board and lodging was eleven guilders a month and Sukemi kept his son on a tight allowance. Sukarno has told that he received only twelve and a half guilders a month, which was increased to fourteen guilders when his father became lecturer at the teacher’s training college in Blitar.

Sukarno spent his vacations with his parents in Blitar, a couple of hours by train from Surabaya. There he found an additional source of income. This came from Puguh, his older sister’s husband, who was department head at Burgerlijke Openbare Werken (public works). The generous brother-in-law often slipped some pocket money in the hand of the schoolboy. Witnesses of that time have told that Sukarno was always rather better dressed than the other boarders of Tjokroaminoto. He himself boasted that he could even afford the luxury of a quality bicycle of the Dutch brand Fongers. Tjokro, who had his hands full with the chairmanship of SI and his membership of the People’s Council, was not a man with whom you could easily talk about personal matters, Sukarno has told. Ibu Tjokro was also too busy to confide in. Therefore, while in Mojokerto the housemaid Sarinah had been his confidant, in the boarding house in Surabaya it was the servant Bok Tambeng who would give the always hungry school boy delicious morsels.

The HBS of Surabaya was according to Hermen Kartowisastro called ‘the King’s school’ and gave its students the feeling of being special. The curriculum was the same as that of a HBS in Holland and education of high quality was provided. The training program of six hours a day, from seven till one, six days a week, was very intensive. In addition to algebra, geometry, chemistry, geography and history, four different languages were taught; Dutch of course, and English, German and French – no Javanese or Malay. In the senior classes still more subjects were added: political science and economics, mechanics, cosmography, and stereo-, gonio-, and trigonometry. One of the subjects at a HBS was ‘History of the Netherlands Indies’, presented in a book with the same title by W. van Gelder. It seems likely that this book has greatly stimulated the growing nationalism of the Javanese students. In just 15 pages it dealt with the history of Java prior to the arrival of the VOC governor-general Jan Pietersz. Coen. The students would then learn how the ‘treacherous’ Javanese Prince Diponegoro had been called to order by the colonial regime, and they read about the heroism of the KNIL soldiers during the punitive expeditions to Bali and Lombok. They were told that the Aceh war was ‘rich in glorious feats of arms’ – that is by Van Heutsz and his troops, not by the evil Aceh guerrilla leader Teuku Umar.¹⁵

Sukarno convinced Cindy Adams that racial discrimination was prevalent at the HBS of Surabaya. This was a false picture as Sukarno must have known. An unsuspected witness has described the HBS as an oasis of tolerance in a colonial world. This was Joop Sutjayo, like Sukarno a student of the school, and like him son of a priyayi. In his contribution in the Jubilee book, HBS Surabaya, 1875-1958, he recalled what the popular native student Max Sunaryo once had written:

I have the most beautiful and enjoyable memories of my HBS years in Surabaya. The most important reason was that I have never experienced any form of discrimination during my entire study time, neither from the teachers nor from my fellow students.

As for Joop: ‘The HBS of Surabaya was an oasis of "fraternité et egalité" in the Netherlands Indies’. In his contribution to the Jubilee Book he also wrote about his famous fellow student, the future president Sukarno who had not been a conspicuous person. Joop described him as someone who studied hard and who ‘never took part in the merry making at the dance parties and who was averse to sports. But outside the class room he was quite a different kind of boy,’ Joop wrote. The native students of the HBS had their own club, which was a branch of the big youth organization Jong Java, Young Java. They gathered weekly in the building of the native society Panti Harsoyo. Sukarno, who played a leading role in the club, considered the Sunday gatherings as too public – the Politieke Inlichtingen Dienst (political intelligence service) might have its spies in the meetings. With some 25 confidants he founded a debating club that henceforth met in one of the class rooms of the HBS. The director of the school, who was very fond of the enterprising debating club, did not have any objection.

Although Sukarno might have avoided the dance parties, he was always eager to chase after girls, preferably attractive Dutch and Indo girls at the school. Later he gave an explanation for his behavior which throws an interesting light on the psyche of the future president. Looking back at his secondary school days fifty years later Sukarno explained to Cindy Adams: ‘Overpowering white girls and making them want me, became a matter of pride.’ Whether he succeeded in ‘overpowering’ during his HBS time he did not disclose – there are some doubts. The contributions of fellow students of Sukarno in the Jubilee Book confirm that his advances were particularly aimed at pretty girls at the HBS. Wim Vol told that Sukarno lost all interest in other girls when he fell in love with ‘Mientje’ ‘whom Sukarno always waited for when she stepped out of the tram’.

Cindy Adams quoted Sukarno’s as saying that ‘Mien Hessels’ indeed had been his great boyhood love. He even asked father Hessels for the hand of his daughter. Sukarno described the scene as a traumatic experience. When he, a small native boy, trembling and nervous, had stammered out his wish to the ‘six foot tall man’, Hessels asked him whether he was crazy. ‘You? A dirty native like you?’ he had asked beside himself with anger, Sukarno told Cindy Adams. Did it really happen that way? In 1942, according to Sukarno, Mien Hessels approached him once. ‘Good gracious! Mien Hessels! My beautiful fairy tale princess had become a hag, a slovenly old hag! He had considered himself lucky after all that her haughty father had shown him the door. In 1956 Sukarno met Mien Hessels again and he then behaved much nicer than he said he had done in 1942. According to Joop Sutjahyo, Mien had since the beginning of the fifties taken care of handicapped children in Surabaya. When in 1956 President Sukarno visited Surabaya, Mien knew that the president would pass by her house on his drive through the city. She decided to ask him financial support for her home for the handicapped. As soon as the presidential limousine came in sight Mien, now six feet tall and 160 pounds, jumped in the middle of the road. ‘But’, as Joop told, ‘President Sukarno immediately recognized Mien Hessels even after all those thirty years. He ordered the car to be stopped, stepped out and took Mien in his arms, disregarding all protocol.’

Political Education

Sukarno has confirmed the image his fellow students gave of him: that of ‘a nerd’. He described himself in those years as a sponge, absorbing all intellectual information he could lay his hands on. ‘Books became my companions,’ he told Cindy Adams, chiefly books of Western statesmen and thinkers, which he read in his small room by the light of the oil lamp. A teacher who helped satisfy Sukarno’s hunger for reading was the German language teacher C. Hartogh. He was one of the few Dutchmen from Sukarno’s youth who enjoyed his enduring sympathy. His schoolmate Hermen Kartowisastro mentioned another teacher who was fond of the young Sukarno. This was the art teacher J.W. Broekhuysen. When the class one day had to draw a doghouse, Sukarno not only drew a perfect doghouse, but added a vivid chained dog in front of the doghouse, barking at a bone beyond his reach. The drawing was put in a glass cabinet in the art room, where the better pieces of the drawing class were displayed.

Sukarno’s boarding house was not far from the entertainment centre of the town. According to him his only weekly luxury was the cinema where he could afford, he said, only the cheapest seats. That was behind the screen, where you had to read the texts of the old silent films in reverse, and where in a boxing scene a right upper-cut looked like a left one. In later years Sukarno has shown some envy of contemporaries who, in his view, had enjoyed a happier youth than he had known. That was the reason he said that his life style as president was so exuberant. He wanted to catch up with what he was deprived of in those early years. Abu Hanifah reacted to this excuse by saying: ‘Bung you behave like a permanent adolescent.’ Sukarno was not amused.

While Sukarno was older than his fellow students in the circle of Tjokro’s political acquaintances he was quite young. The list of Tjokro’s guests reads like a ‘Who is Who’ of the early nationalist movement of Indonesia. They include Dutch Marxists Sneevliet and H. Baars, the later national Muslim leader