Madura [SEPTEMBER 21st 2007]

Thee following editorial is the follow up on a story that I never finished. You might want to read how I became interested in Madura Island and why I wanted to go there. Click here !

My uncle had seem some ugly fighting in the war between 1946 and 1949, when he was based as KNIL soldier in Surabaya. “Did they ever manage to finish that bridge from Madura to Surabaya? They were working on it for months but it never seemed to move forward… ”,  he asked me once. Apparantly they had planned that bridge some 50 years earlier already. I remembered his words when the ferry slowly approached the island of the fearfull fighters of Madura. “Masih di proces”, said an cigarette salesman while pointing at some kind of unfinished construction not far from the ferry point.  It only needs a few hundred meters of bridge , but the Javanese seem reluctant to give millions of Madurase easy access.  The Javanese don’t want that bridge to be finished. And although the Madurese women are warmly welcomed in the rest of Indonesia (I am sure this has something to do with their special powers.  Ask any Indonesian and they will shyly laugh about this), the men are feared for the use of their keris, called the clurit.  Therefore, probably,  it took us a while to find a driver who was brave enough to bring us to us destination: Sumenep, or more precisely, Kalianget.

Having read ‘The Islands’ of Aalberts, who was a controller for the Dutch Government in the late 30’s and stationed in Sumenep,  I was obsessed by his tales. The old fort from 1758, a fabulous kraton, the descendants of Willem van Duinen, a huge blonde Dutchman who shipwrecked near Sumenep and built a huge trading empire on Madura,  a small Dutch village with descendants of VOC soldiers, there were so many things he wrote about, and I wanted to see what was left of it some 65 years later.

From the ferry port to Sumenep is four hours drive. Yoko was driving fast and was obvious nervous. At a certain point he suspected that he was being followed by a small pick-up truck. The lorry had the back covered. ‘The thugs cover beneath it..’, he said. He was sweating heavily and tried to get rid of the lorry by driving as fast as he could. After an hour of road madness he became more relaxed and told us about the gangs that were apparantly still active on the island. I remembered Aalberts wrote about them as well, so it did make me feel a bit uncomfortable. But the real shock came when we stopped to fill up the tank. We were in complete shock when the lorry with the three rough looking Madurese in the front seat stopped right next to us! And we tought they were miles behind us!  Yoko abruptly stopped filling the tank, paid without even looking at the amount and jumped in the car. His eyes were full of fear. ‘Its them! Its them!’, he shouted  I looked over my shoulder while Yoko hit the gas. The suspected thugs did not even look at us but were busy  filling up their tank. The adrenaline levels slowly decreased when I became aware of an unpleasant smell. I looked at our driver. Yoko had a huge wet circle in his pants, the source of the unbearable air. We still had one hour to go. I had to go to a toilet now, but no, Yoko was not planning to stop any time soon...

When we finally arrived in Sumenep, we drove around and around until we finally heard the relieving words from a traffic police officer: ‘Yes! They DO sell beers over there! Lots of beer!’.  After the stressfull trip we were finally getting close for some refreshing Bintangs. It even looked like a bar, with colored lights blinking at the entrance and lots of mirrors inside. A karaoke system was used to entertaine four other guests. “You sell beer?” , we asked the cute waitress, who probably had never served many westerners  as her eyes were bulging out. She did not say  a thing, but kept staring at us, her mouth hanging open. She wanted to give us a menu, but we did not need that: we only wanted beer. Big bottles of ice cold beer. A few minutes later she came back with beers,  but to our disappointment (read: ‘shock’) it were big bottles of Bintang Zero (0% alchohol beers). She had never heard of Bintang ‘biasa’ (normal). ‘Ini Bintang biasa…’, she said with a less innocent look on her face. She was right. Don’t complain, just drink and shut up, was her message. And so we did. We did not want to argue on Madura. The Clurits were everywhere…

Time for some serious research. What  was left from the impressions of Aalbert when he lived in this lonely outpost  in 1939 till 1942, just before he was internent by the Japanese? Did the Kampung Belanda still exist? To be continued...
Bartele