FROM THE EDITOR

Would Kampung Belanda on Madura Island still exist? When writer Alberts lived in Sumenep in 1938, he wrote about houses with curtains in front of the windows and name plates like Van Buren, Smit and De Boer.  A real Dutch drawbridge would connect this community with the other side of the river. We went into an old chinese temple from where the 90 year old gatekeeper directed us in the right way.  The bridge had sadly been demolished a few years earlier. The houses in front of the river still showed their Dutch heritage but, not surprisingly, they were poorly maintained. More and more people were grouping in the street to see where this little convoy of white men had to go. We approached an older man and asked him if he knew of any Kampung Belanda. His chin was leaning on a stick, while sitting on an chair in front of a warung that had Sate Madura for sale. He looked at us in surprise. “Belanda udah pergi! Udah lama!” (‘the Dutch have gone! Long time ago!’). The crowd around us started laughing. The old man shook his head. He probably thought we were pretty stupid, but we were not giving up that easily. I tried to find white faces in the crowd, but couldn’t. When the RT finally understood what we came for, he sent his son out  to ‘go and get mas Prans’. Mas Prans!? My heart started beating faster. Could Prans (Frans) be a direct descendent of the old VOC employees that had stranded here hundreds of years earlier? Prans was exceptionally tall for an Indonesian. He did not know much details, but his father was on his way. The crowd moved aside when a little old man in his fifties arrived at the scene. He introduced himself as Piet Jacobus Frans, direct descendant of a VOC soldier who had decided to stay with his mates in Marengan (later nicknamed Kampung Belanda) after they shipwrecked on the coast of East Madura in the 1700’s. “You can call me Om Piet”, he said with a friendly smile. “Come, I want to show you something...”. 

Accross the river, a few hundred meters along the road, we followed him into some bushes.  An overgrowing  path was hardly visible but with the help of some locals with culprits, we managed to get through it. Suddenly we were in a scary field of overgrown tombs. It looked like an old graveyard from a horror movie. Huge family graves, many from before 1900, and others, smaller, covering lonely Dutch colonials who had died far away from where they should have died.  Om Piet wanted to show us one particular grave: the one of Willem van Duinen Sr. He had been the huge blond shipwrecked sailor who later become known as the King of Sumenep, after establishing a trading empire that lasted for 4 or 5  generations.  Apparantly two years earlier, there had been an elderly Dutch woman. According to Om Piet she was a descendant from the Van Duyne family.  She had given some money to keep the graves clean but that was 2 years ago. Om Piet hoped she would come back again soon... He wanted Frans to study and he needed the money. ‘Prans is a clever boy’, he said with a sad look on his face. 

We followed Om Piet to the  impressive trading house where The King of Sumenep used to live. The Indonesian government had turned it into an SMA school. I remembered that next to this house, van Duine exploited a small hotel. Aalberts lived here for a while, after he almost went crazy from lonelyness in the region he was stationed. It was quit common for Dutch administrators in far and lonely outposts to become an alcoholic or commit suicide. In one room of that hotel, some strange things happened.  Almost anybody who slept in that room, had the most terrible nightmares. Some left screaming of fear in the middle of the night! They all swore they had seen the ghost of a little girl that was crying at the end of their bed. Aalberts wrote that, on occasion, he had heard the screaming of the girl himself a couple of times. Apparantly many years earlier a young girl had been found murdered, hanging on a rope in this room.  We walked over to the house. I had read a few of Alberts his books, and to see the place where lived and wrote about was an exciting experience. The old colonial house was in desrepair, as they all were. It was now occupied by a number of families. A crowd of young children followed us when we walked around it. These locals could possibly not have known of the ghost that that had freigthened people some 65 years earlier, but when I asked them if they had ever heard strange noises, they all shouted : “YES! YES! THERE!” They pointed at a seperate old squatter not far behind the house. “Kadang kadang ada suara cewek yang nanggis!” (sometimes there is the sound of a girl crying!). We were motionless. I felt the hairs raising in my neck. The kids wanted to bring us to the old shed, but I preferred to stay at a distance.

We continued our search for the past and went on to an old VOC fort, halfway from Sumenep to Kalianget. The fort is situated at about 3 kilometers from the sea. The fort was built in 1785, and measured 50 x 50 meters, with walls of 3 meters high. It had a garrison of 25 - 30 soldiers. According to an English source from 1811, the location was not well chosen, so the English only used it for storage. The walls were 5 meters thick.  At the entrance of the fort there was another Dutch cementary. Through the overgrown green, Lens and I tried to have a closer look at the small prison that was inside the fort. ‘Be carefull!’, shouted Om Piet. ‘Lots of snakeholes here!’.  When we reached the small bunker-like construction in the middle of the bush, we paralysed when from the ceiling entrance, rats fell on our heads and shoulders!  They were swarming around us,  trying to get out  and away from us. With snakes and rats all around us, we decided we had seen enough. You just wondered how life must have been for the soldiers staying here some 250 years earlier...

From the nearby harbour of Kalianget we took the ferry to Situbondo. On this boat I told the captain about our adventures. He was surprised we had not visited the old VOC ballroom. What!? ‘Yes’, he said,’ it still has a real antique teak bar in it!’ I felt an instant mission to save this bar, if it did exist. Being a bar owner, I had to... But Madura was slowly disappearing behind me...

Footnotes: In the 1930s, Alberts (1911-1998) served as a colonial civil servant in the Netherlands East Indies and then spent the war in a Japanese concentration camp.  More info on Alberts can be found here.

Sumenep has more to see than the things I wrote about. Tourism objects are the Great Mosque, Adipura Park, Museum, the Kraton of Sumenep and the Asta Tinggi Cemetery. In Kalianget, pay a visit to the old Dutch salt factory.

To find out if there is really still an old VOC teak bar out there, I decided to ask the help of writer Jeremy Allan, who is on an Indonesia overland bicycle tour. His findings in the next newsletter. He also says he knows of the real origin of Kampung Glenmore in East Java. Keep posted. Bartele