“The West came to us to get what they could out of us,” he says. The Christian religion, he believes, did not have a great influence upon his country. Proudly, he drew me a rough map and pointed out that the Moslems and the Hindus had influenced the Indonesians “long before the Christians ever came. It was in the southern islands, where pagans live, that Christianity has had its influence.”
Yes; the state should support religion. “The Moslem religion, unlike the Christian religion, is coherently social. We have a variety of religions; we even have a ministry of religion.”
The nations of Asia and Africa have a common colonial experience that binds them together and gives them common interests; they should consult together often. The relations obtaining today between the new Asian and African countries have been conditioned by attitudes instilled by the late imperial powers; hence, relations between these powers are very sensitive. Nations like China, Japan, and the Philippines are inclined to feel that they are the natural leaders of Asia and are prone to say: “Don’t you tell us what to do. You are a new country and without experience.” He says: “We don’t like such attitudes. They reflect the influence of the West.”
That the state should regulate marriage is something that he expects, though he and his family are in revolt against such state measures when pitched on a narrow plane. There exist customary laws in Indonesia that regulate the marriage of one blood clan with another, but this custom does not rest on racial identity in the Western sense of that term: it has religious sanction. His brother has married a Dutch girl; his father married out of the clan. He describes himself as a marginal man. “It’s up to us; we have a free choice in marrying or doing anything we want to do, if we’d only take the choice.” But he is not concerned at present about marrying a European girl. “It’s possible, but it’s in the future.”
He has no Dutch friends; he is self-conscious about it. I’d touched a complex. “I’ve no time to find Dutch friends, really. I’m busy.”
His contacts with the West have left scars. “I remember once at military school something happened. We were together there, Dutch and Indonesians. I was invited to a birthday party by one of my Dutch classmates. But the parents of my classmate did not want me to come to the house. There was a big row in my classmate’s home about it. At the last moment the boy’s parents said that I could come along. I went and pretended that I was having a good time, but I was self-conscious….
“My father is a doctor and holds a high position. But the Dutch who live next door would never call on his services unless they could not get a white doctor. The rich Dutch would never ask for his services, and the poor Dutch would call him only when there was no Dutch or German doctor to be found….
“My political awakening came one day at school when I colored the face of Queen Wilhelmina with my pencil. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was sitting in class with my book open before me and when I saw her face on the page, I made it dark, dark like mine…. When the Dutch teacher saw that, he beat me, but he didn’t tell me why…. It seemed natural to me for my queen to have a dark face. My father had to explain to me the meaning of what I had done….
“I first heard the word ‘lynch’ when I was very young; we were at lunch and my father told of a lynching in the United States. I first heard the phrase ‘White Man’s Burden’ just before the war between the Japanese and the Chinese. The word ‘nigger’ came to me from the English and the Americans. ‘Yellow Peril’?” He laughed to hide a nervous reaction. “I heard it in connection with the Western attitude toward the Chinese…. You know, it reminds me of the phrase ‘Yellow Fever’…It makes me think of disease, something that has to be stamped out, cured—something formidable, dreadful…” (He had looked at me slyly, winking his eye, and I had been shocked to realize that he had been referring to the two million Chinese who lived in his country and who were widely hated!)
He would send his children to European schools only after they had gotten their B.A. degrees. “By that time their characters will have been formed and they can resist the bad influences of the West much better.”
His people renamed many of the towns, cities, and mountains after the Dutch had been driven out. “After all, the country belonged to us.”
The United Nations cannot stop war as it is now set up. The big powers have too much influence. The United Nations can postpone war but not stop it.
Indonesians, he feels, cannot conceive of Europe. “Our people think that Europeans live more or less as we do. But, of course, European standards of living are much higher.”
European workers felt superior to the Russians and never wanted to identify themselves with the Russian Revolution. Lenin was smart to appeal to the Asians. “But one must not think that the idea of Communism is new to us. What impressed us about Communism was its technique of struggle, organization—its methods. We borrow a lot of those ideas, but we use them in our way. With us land has always been communal. For example, China has always had large collectives in terms of large families….”
In his country, he says, there is a conflict between the younger and the older generations; the older generation is more dependable than the younger. “Our youth has never known anything but war and revolution. They’ve lived in anarchy. The older people have the habit of work and they make the best administrators in our country at the present time. We made a revolution and now our revolutionists are unemployed and they turn bandit. We don’t know what to do with them.
“I want to see my country industrialized, but too much of it is bad. What I would like to save in my country’s culture? We don’t have a national culture yet; we have many cultures. We are trying to find a culture.
“There is no country in the West that I’d like to see my country resemble.
“The biggest event of the twentieth century was the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905. It was the beginning of the liberation of the Asian mind…. Social and political change comes through economic factors. The greatest impact that the West has made upon Asia was in the form of gunpowder. Trade came next.
“There are no great men in the world today.
“Education should teach men to live together…. That’s why we got rid of the Dutch. They didn’t belong in our country, so we drove them out. We didn’t have any ideas or feelings beyond just getting rid of them.”
What I had read in books, what I’d seen in the daily press told me that I had touched the real, contemporary Asia…. What struck me first of all in this student’s attitude was his ready acceptance of reality, the “given” in his environment; he was quite content to work and struggle with what was at hand. To him reality was what it “seemed” to be, and he was determined to grasp hold of it and follow its processes and try to mold them in the direction that he desired. He knew that his attitude was carrying the day in Asia, and he felt that he was preparing himself to enter a world whose lines of battle had been mapped out by his revolutionary predecessors. He spoke with that nonchalant confidence that betokened a conviction that, though hostile Westerners might brand his words as mere chatter, he knew that his words were the stuff of reality for hundreds of millions of his fellow Asians….
He impressed me as having the feeling that, though his government had taken power, the fight was not over; the objective situation about him might spell freedom, but his subjective issues were still unresolved. (That was why he had said that there were “several” cultures in his country, and not a national culture.) He had escaped a world that he did not want, but he did not know what kind of a world he did want. There was in him a fund of passion which he had to spend somehow, someway…. The world was a problem to him, and he was a problem to himself. His reactions were strong but not simple, though, had he been pushed, I suspect that he would have modestly described himself as a simple man….
No missionary had tampered with his Moslem beliefs and he was, therefore, outside of the Western world, objective about it in a way that no Jew, Gypsy, or refugee could ever be; he could hate
, that is, he could reason passionately toward the aim of destroying a loathsome enemy.
He was totalitarian-minded, but without the buttress of modern Communist or Fascist ideology; he did not need any, for his totalitarian outlook was born of his religious convictions. Allah was his dictator. Hence, preachments against the separation of church and state, for the liberty of the individual, sounded like so much alien, diabolical propaganda to his ears. But he was sophisticated; he met arguments directed against his beliefs with a smile. He knew both East and West, without really believing in either of them. There was another and other world that he and his kind had to create.
Personal relations were not important factors to him; his affective identifications were with nations, movements, religions, cultures, races…. Personal insults meant nothing; only when those aims in which he fondly believed were maligned or threatened did he react with passion.
Racially, the Dutch had put him through the mill, and an element of iron was already deep in his heart. Confronting whites, he would have bent a million times, but he would never have broken. He was willing and ready to die for what he felt to be the value of himself, that is, his sense of dignity…. His people’s inferiority rankled in him, and he passionately longed to see his country industrialized. But such a longing was not related to the benefits of industrialization per se. To him industrialization was a means, the only one he knew, to hoist the West off of his back. Of Western values he wanted none.
Great men? There were no such things. How could there be, when he and his kind were suffering…? The aim of education? Ah, he was true here…. “That’s why we got rid of the Dutch,” he had told me. His eyes had shone as he had shot that bolt home. He meant that the West had been stupid and had taught him enough to make him know that the West was his enemy!
In the morning’s light I stared at the tilting olive groves on the Spanish mountainsides; the train jolted toward Madrid…. I frowned, trying to judge just what coefficient I could have given him as a representative of Asian reactions….
The next and last Asian subject had been a young journalist from Pakistan. He had been eloquent, bitter, with a fund of fire smoldering in his heart. Like all uprooted Asians, talking had seemed with him a compulsion: it had been as though he had felt that talking would have helped him to find answers to questions that were plaguing him…. He had spoken in quick, clipped, tense tones….
Born in a small town, he’d been educated by missionaries, had also attended European schools. With a wry smile, he called himself a Christian. He had grown up in a home that had a mixture of Christian and Hindu influences. “Religiously, I’m really nothing,” he confessed. “But among my people at home I can’t own to that.”
“Should the state sponsor religion? No!” he snapped. “Let religion be a private affair. The Christian religion helped the British to gain power. Christianity divided my country, sundered an already greatly sundered people. The Christian religion, as it operated among us, was a political instrument, an instrument used by the West to rule my country. I was born in the Christian faith, but I feel that that faith was used against me and my country.”
His father was educated in the United States and returned to Pakistan with a heightened political consciousness; so, as a young boy, he breathed an atmosphere of political discussions that raged in his home. He learned early that he was a member of a subject nation and race. While still in his teens, he participated in the liberation movement of his country, but he has not served any time as a political prisoner. He refused to serve in the British Army.
Now that Pakistan is free, he does not feel that his country has an enemy. He has attended international conferences. “But I won’t tell you how many and I won’t identify them. I don’t want any country to refuse me a visa. One must be careful these days, you know.
“The Asian-African Conference will be a great thing. In the past, the West always took the lead; now it is time for Asia and Africa to lead mankind. We have been objects; now we can be subjects.”
He has traveled and read widely; he does not feel that there are any hard and fast racial lines in the world and he is not in favor of any geographical limitations upon where people should dwell, despite the fact that he has felt racial hostility from whites. He has many white friends but he feels that they hold toward him patronizing attitudes which imply: “We are white and we showed you the way.” He feels that such attitudes are traditional with whites. “The impact of the West was to awaken me, to make me feel the ways and values and manners of both worlds, the East and the West. We Easterners are more conscious of these things than the Westerners,” he says. The West has made the Easterner feel a sense of shame, and this shame is very widespread and is really an inferiority feeling that finds expression in such books as Mother India. Such cultural expressions seem to him an attempt on the part of his people to defend themselves against the shame-engendering impact of the West.
He encountered the word “lynch” in reading British and American periodicals; he met “Yellow Peril,” “nigger,” and “White Man’s Burden” in a like manner. When he was a child in India the British called him nigger. (He is as dark as a Negro.) “The only way to eliminate racism is to eliminate imperialism. The structure of imperialism means racism; the two are one thing. Racism is an instrument of the West, an instrument used to control Asia and Africa.”
He feels that the only way for his country to become free of the West is to industrialize, but he is afraid of too much industrialization. “The one item I value most in my culture is religion for the masses; we can keep religion for the people if we don’t industrialize too much.”
There is no comparison, in his mind, between the living standards of his country and the Western countries. “We are far, far behind,” he says sadly, shaking his head.
In the past the racial purity of his family blood was very important to him, but he has changed his mind about all of that now. “I’ve seen too many alien lands and alien people. And the West has used that idea about blood to divide us. Definitely, I’d not support any legislation to regulate marriage between the races. I look at any idea that seeks, for whatever reason, to divide us with distrust.”
Would he ever marry a European woman? “No!” he exploded bitterly. “Why should I do that, after the way they regard me?”
He was ambivalent about the value of a Western education; he felt that it was necessary for him and his generation to learn Western values and methods to aid them in liberating their country, but, now that his country was free, he’d want the next generation to learn more about their own values. He would want his children to learn about the West, but from an entirely different point of view than the one that was taught him.
He feels strongly that the new Asian and African nations should act, for the time being, as a racial and political bloc. “This should happen until a balance has been achieved,” he says.
Because he feels that the West has striven to erect an elite as an instrument of rule in subject countries, he has deliberately kept close contact with the common people of his land. He speaks his native tongue fluently. During British rule, there was a “native” and European quarter in the city in which he lived; his father was a civil servant and it enabled him to move and live in both worlds.
He is sensitive about the West’s description of the high rate of illiteracy in his country; he feels that these European standards are unfair to the quick intelligence of his people. “We are judged entirely in terms of British standards,” he complains.
His people quickly renamed many towns, mountains, etc., when the British left.
He feels that the relations between the new countries of Asia and Africa are very good, except for those countries dominated by Western capital. He cites Siam as an example of such a country. He admits that religious tensions exist between the new countries, but he has no idea about how these tensions could be lessened. “All intelligent Asians now know that the Western white man is praying for us to fight among oursel
ves, and that we’ll never do,” he declares. “Fighting among ourselves is the white man’s only chance of getting back. We’re closing ranks. The white man will be disappointed.”
To him the colonial problem is the most urgent and important thing on the international scene. “I agree with Nehru,” he says. “Colonialism and not Communism is the main danger. Get rid of colonies and you’ll not have a trend toward Communism. Russia was in effect a colony when she went Communist. The American thesis is shortsighted and unhistorical. The next explosion of Communism will come out of some colony…. I distrust anybody’s policy that is based on Communism as the main danger; it is a dishonest policy; if it is not, then it’s worse, because it’s stupid.”
To him the United Nations is an instrument of United States foreign policy; it won’t succeed, he thinks, in preventing war. The Asian and African nations have not enough authority and influence in that body. He is convinced that the white nations of the West act as a racial and political bloc even in and through the United Nations….
Russia pretends to belong to Asia in order to win the sympathy of the Asian people. Lenin’s call to Asia was realistic. “But we would have risen without the Communists.”
The West calls some nations “colored” in order to impose a separation between the dominator and the dominated. A Leftist is someone with Russian Communist sympathies; a Rightist is a propagator of imperialism.
He does not feel that any nation is ever justified in using the atom or hydrogen bomb as a military weapon.
His country urgently needs factory and farm equipment from the West. “But we won’t take these needed items in exchange for granting political concessions. We are alert that the West tries to gain influence by such means. We must get what we need from the West in the course of normal trade. We’d rather suffer than let the West steal back in that way.”
Black Power Page 45
