Black Power

by Richard Wright

  “How much does a boy make a day driving one with his feet?”

  “About ten rupiahs, or a dollar. He is required to have a license, but he pays no taxes.”

  Lubis’ words made me wonder about the over-all reality of his country.

  “Say, just how many islands are there in this archipelago?”

  “About fifteen thousand; but only about three thousand are inhabited.”

  “And how large in area is the space covered by these islands?”

  “Roughly, it is the size of the United States.”

  “What about natural resources?”

  “This nation is potentially the third richest on earth.”

  “And what language do the people speak?”

  “Indonesian,” he told me. “But we have two hundred languages.” He worked his car through a crowd of Chinese children….

  “There must be a strong central government to keep order in such far-flung islands and amid so many diverse peoples—”

  “The government is weak,” Lubis told me. “Bandits are everywhere. There are daily clashes between government troops and bandits.”

  “That’s a kind of civil war,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “The literacy rate?”

  “About 30 per cent.”

  “Is education compulsory?”

  “Well, the government wants to pass a law making education compulsory,” Lubis explained. “But what would such a law mean? We don’t have enough school buildings, enough teachers, enough school books.”

  “Is it true that the Dutch used compulsory labor here during two hundred of the three hundred and fifty years that they held these islands; is that true?”

  “Compulsory labor actually stopped here about fifteen years ago,” he said.

  Lubis’ dark facts clashed with the blindingly bright sunshine. Jakarta is a vast, sprawling city, disordered, bustling, overcrowded. Wide ornate boulevards alternate with districts called kampongs, the equivalent of the African compound. These kampongs were formerly villages and the rapidly growing city swallowed them up; now Indonesian peasants still live in them within the modern city, following the ways and the manners of their forefathers, oblivous of the rage of alien ideology that circles about them. The Chinese section was a nightmare, overflowing with shops, stores, warehouses, and restaurants.

  “How is the housing situation?” I asked Lubis.

  “Desperate,” he said. “Before the war, this city had four hundred thousand people. We now have about three million people jammed into it. People flock here for jobs, or because they are bored in their villages.”

  “What’s holding up the building of houses? I see that many houses here are made of bamboo. Why can’t people build more houses like that?”

  “It takes about fifty dollars worth of Western materials to build a house. And we have no dollars, no hard currency. We don’t even have nails; we can’t make them.”

  “Before the coming of the Dutch, I bet these people had houses, maybe not modern houses, but houses…”

  “That’s true.”

  “So the introduction of the Western way of life has not helped in the matter of housing?”

  “No,” Lubis said, smiling ruefully.

  “I’m not anti-Western,” I assured him. “But can’t a way be found to by-pass this kind of dependence upon the outside world? Can’t Indonesia make nails, pipes, etc.?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “What do you export?”

  “Copra, tin, rubber…”

  “And that does not give you enough foreign exchange?”

  “No. And production is falling day by day. Our foreign exchange is less and less.”

  “Why?”

  “We are still fighting a revolution, nationalizing; there are strikes and much government control.”

  “Why are the people doing that instead of rebuilding?”

  “Sentiment, politics…. They are trying to sweep out the last of Western influence. They have their own ideas about what they want.”

  The car edged on through narrow streets. I noticed that the Indonesians seemed a delicate people, thin, small….

  “What about health?” I asked Lubis.

  “We have much malaria and yaws. Infant mortality is high—”

  “And your population is falling?”

  “No. Rising…. We have much rice and the soil is rich.”

  “How many doctors have you?”

  “We have one doctor for about every seventy thousand people. We have fourteen hundred doctors for eighty million people.”

  “And education?”

  “It’s out of control. The Dutch kept education from us and now the people believe in education like a religion…. There is a vast thirst for learning. Universities are springing up everywhere, faster than they can be properly manned. The year the war broke out, we had two hundred and forty high school graduates. We had only ten Indonesians teaching in our high schools. Today nobody knows just what the figures are…. The Dutch left us in the lurch and we had to start from scratch.”

  It was a grim picture, yet quite typical. These conditions were the gift of three hundred and fifty years of Dutch rule.

  “Just how is the national budget divided?” I asked Lubis.

  “Well,” he said, “we have about two million people on the pay roll. Soldiers, policemen, and hordes of government functionaries. The army and the government personnel take 70 per cent of our national budget. Education takes only 7 per cent.”

  “From what you say, government is the biggest business here.”

  “That’s right,” Lubis said.

  “A country in which men make careers and fortunes out of government is a sick country.”

  “Right,” Lubis said.

  He had been in America twice and now and then an American phrase crept into his speech.

  “What about this so-called Communist menace I’ve heard so much about? Word has it in Paris that the Communists are about to pull off a Prague coup here any minute, any hour—”

  “No!” Lubis said. “That’s not true. We have Communists, and at the moment they hold the balance of power in the government. But they are not even our largest political party. The present government accepts the support of Communists. But don’t forget that this country is 90 per cent Moslem and these people are not going Communist.”

  “Who puts out the story that the country is almost in the hands of Communists?” I asked him.

  “There are people who were once here and they want to come back,” he said tersely.

  It was strange, but, in this age of swift communication, one had to travel thousands of miles to get a set of straight, simple facts. One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century is that when communication has reached its zenith, when the human voice can encircle the globe in a matter of seconds, when man can project the image of his face thousands of miles, it is almost impossible to know with any degree of accuracy the truth of a political situation only a hundred miles distant! Propaganda jams the media of communication.

  I was lodged in the home of an Indonesian engineer. Mr. P. and his young wife were ardent nationalists, their home modern to the nth degree.

  “What kind of an engineer are you, Mr. P.?” I asked my host.

  “I’m an oil man,” he answered.

  “You got your training and experience in Europe?”

  “My training I got in Europe,” he told me. “But I’m getting my experience now here in my country. You see, before the revolution, they would not hire me to do what I’m now doing—”

  “You mean the Dutch?”

  “Yes. Now I’m head of my department. It took a revolution to do that. Killing, fighting…I’m a major in the Indonesian Army. By nature, I hate war. But what is one to do? The Dutch attitude was that I was not and could never be intelligent enough to do what I’m now doing. So it was with men of my generation; so it was in all of the other sections of Indonesian life. If we had not fought
the Dutch, we’d still be in slavelike conditions, not allowed to do anything.”

  Mrs. P. nodded her head affirmatively as her husband spoke. These people had been put through a hard school. Mr. P. had spent sixteen years in Europe; he loved Europe, but—

  “Your home is in a beautiful section of the city,” I told him.

  “This used to be the European quarter,” he told me with a wry smile. “The revolution gave me the right to live here.”

  “How many engineers have you in Indonesia?” I asked him.

  “About a hundred and sixty, forty of whom are in government service. The rest work for themselves, for they make about three times more than the ones who work for the government.”

  “How will your country get through this bottleneck? You need articles, skills, technicians—you need many things from the Western industrial world. How will you get them?”

  There was a silence. Mr. P. looked at me and smiled wryly.

  “I’m a technician,” he said slowly. “So I know what we need. It’s America or Russia. There’s no middle ground.”

  “Which do you choose?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You can work for either side,” I reminded him. “You are a technician.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “What about Russia?”

  “I was in Europe during the war. I met many Communists. It’s a dictatorship and it’s hard.”

  “And America?”

  Mr. P. sat staring at me silently.

  “I’ve been in America, you know,” he said softly, smiling again.

  “I didn’t know that. For how long?”

  “I was there for three months. I wanted to stay. I worked as an engineer. I lived in New York.”

  “Did you go to Harlem?”

  Mr. P. looked at me without answering. His wife nudged him and said:

  “Tell him, darling.”

  “Mr. Wright,” Mr. P. began, looking off into the corners of the room, “I never went to Harlem. Indeed, I never went out—”

  “What do you mean? You had some racial experiences?”

  “No. That’s what I avoided. I was scared,” he said simply.

  He was as dark as I was. I understood. He could not take it.

  “I came from my job and stayed in my room,” he explained. “I never went anywhere. Every night I stayed in my room. Then I left.”

  He had “had” it. Fear had kept him from exposing himself to the experience of American life; the idea of what he would encounter had immobilized him, and he had given up without even trying….

  After dinner Mr. and Mrs. P. took me for a tour of the city in their car. I noticed that the sidewalks were thronged with children who carried books under their arms. It was past ten o’clock.

  “Where are those children going this time of night?” I asked.

  “To school,” Mrs. P. told me. “We don’t have enough schools, not enough teachers. So these children are going to the night shift.”

  The suburbs of Jakarta are studded with lovely, newly built bungalows erected by the nouveaux riches from money gained in black market operations. There is no doubt that a new Indonesian middle class is rising and it is focusing attention, mostly unfavorable, upon itself.

  “It’s all wrong,” Mr. P. said wearily. “We made a revolution and the common people fought and died to drive out the Dutch. Now the common people are not getting benefits from that revolution. That’s why today we are threatened with another revolution…. Why should one part of our population get rich and the rest get poorer? We drove out the Dutch to build a good society, now we have a class of Indonesians who are acting more or less like the Dutch.”

  “When was your Republic proclaimed?”

  “In August, 1945.”

  “And when did your people actually get control of the country?”

  “In December, 1949.”

  “And between 1945 and 1949?”

  “There was much fighting, bitter fighting between us and the Dutch.”

  “Now, just what is the present government?”

  “We have a President, a Vice-President, a House of Representatives, and a Supreme Court.”

  “But you have had no elections as yet?”

  “No. Elections are pending for November, 1955.”

  “How, then, did the present government get into power?” I asked him.

  “That’s a little complicated,” he said. “On the 18th of August, 1945, after the Republic had been proclaimed, our Independence Preparatory Committee designated Sukarno as President of the Republic and Hatta as Vice-President…. This committee was composed of outstanding leaders in all fields of Indonesian life. After full sovereignty was gained, the following bodies were welded into a House of Representatives: the Senate of the United States of Indonesia; the members of the Provisional Parliament of the United States of Indonesia; the members of the High Advisory Council of the Republic of Indonesia; and the Working Committee of the Provisional Parliament of the Republic of Indonesia…. This House of Representatives has confirmed Sukarno as President and Hatta as Vice-President.”

  “It’s a little baby country,” I suggested to Mr. P. with a smile.

  He laughed and agreed:

  “Yes. We are a baby country with many little childhood diseases.”

  The next morning I got hold of a copy of the Provisional Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia and leafed through it. One could tell the past fears and sufferings of the people of Indonesia by what was emphasized in that Constitution.

  It provided that all were “entitled to equal protection against discrimination and against any incitement to such discrimination.” It stated explicitly: “Slavery, the slave trade and bondage, and any actions in whatever form giving rise thereto are prohibited.” It declared: “No one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” One could feel the fear of men who had been seized and shipped off to exile in the following: “No transgression or crime shall be made punishable by total forfeiture of the property of the offender.” One could feel the anxiety of men who had not been allowed to govern themselves in Article 15 of Section IV: “No sentence may cause civic death or the loss of all civic rights.” The vast inequalities in the population left by Dutch rule prompted: “Differences in social and legal needs of the various groups of the population shall be taken into consideration.” Then Section VI spells out in Article 38 a vague kind of socialism derived partly from ideology and partly from the tenets of the Moslem religion: “The national economy shall be organized on a co-operative basis. Branches of production of importance to the State and which vitally affect the life of the people, shall be controlled by the State. Land and water and natural riches contained therein shall be controlled by the State and used for the maximum prosperity of the people.” Article 38 says: “The family is entitled to protection by society and the State. The State shall provide for the needs of the poor and waifs.” In Article 40 one finds: “The authorities shall promote the spiritual and physical development of the people. The authorities shall in particular aim at the speediest possible abolition of illiteracy. Freedom of religion and speech are guaranteed.” It was a brave document filled with pathos.

  I hired a betja and, perched upon a rickety seat, spent an afternoon looking the city over. I noticed that each home in the bourgeois section kept huge, vicious dogs; one move on the part of a stranger created a loud snarling and barking. These dogs, I was told, defended the inhabitants against the all-too-frequent visits of bandits who infested near-by mountains and suburbs. Try as I could, I was never able to resolve the mystery of the Indonesian bandit. One person would tell me that the bandits were just lawless gangs; another would swear that they were Communists; yet another would claim that they were Moslems who did not like the Communist participation in the present government; still others said that they were youths who had fought in the revolution and had never learned to work and were living in the only manner kn
own to them. I suspected that the bandits were all of this, plus hordes of young men who were, in the daytime, respectable wage earners and who found it impossible to make ends meet in a nation where the government printing presses were grinding out a whirlwind of all-but-worthless paper money; I suspected that during the nighttime a good part of the population, resentful of the status quo, took to the byways with guns to get what they felt society owed them.

  As in most countries gripped by inflation, one saw vast numbers of bureaucrats searching for contraband and one wondered whether, if those same bureaucrats had been put to work producing commodities, the necessity for searching for contraband would have obtained…? In any case, large areas of Java and Sumatra were overrun with bandits and smugglers, and it was not safe to drive upon the highways after dark.

  Next day I called upon one of the best-known Indonesian politicians, Sutan Sjahrir, Socialist, patriot, intellectual, and one of the country’s ablest students of Western political thought. Unlike many other opportunistic Indonesian politicians, Sjahrir had absolutely refused to collaborate in any form with the Japanese invaders. He is a short man, plump, affable, and about forty-five years of age. Educated in Holland, he is the idol of a considerable section of the younger generation. He was the first premier of Indonesia, and it was he who conducted most of the delicate negotiations with the Dutch, who were hankering to regain their control over the potentially third richest nation on earth. It was this same modest, smiling Sjahrir who presented Indonesia’s case before the United Nations, and he convinced that august body of the Indonesians’ right to govern themselves.

  “What is being done to organize the energies of the people to rebuild the nation?” I asked him.

  He smiled, shot me a quick glance, and then answered in a manner that left no doubt of his courage to be truthful:

  “We have not got that far yet.”

  “What’s being done about housing?” I asked.

  He laughed and stared at me. Then he spoke in a quiet, chuckling tone:

  “The government’s building houses; they call them ‘workers’ houses.’ But they turn out to be ornate ministries. There’s practically no building of houses for poor people.”