Eduard Douwes Dekker
Dutch courage: Simon Webb on Eduard Douwes Dekker
‘Dekker had found life as a coloniser insupportable.’
As far as I can tell, the bicentenary of the birth of Eduard Douwes Dekker, in March 2020, was quite unmarked in Britain. This may have been because we were occupied with Covid, but it is more likely that we neglected it because few of us know who Dekker actually was, or what he did.
What he did was write what many believe to be the most significant work of literature in the Dutch language. The painters of the Low Countries are generally well-known to us, but few people in the English-speaking world could name a single Dutch author beyond Anne Frank. Yes, Erasmus was Dutch, but he wrote in Latin and Greek. In 1860, Eduard Dekker wrote a novel called Max Havelaar: The coffee auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. It’s a book that very much still speaks to our condition today.
Three months after we failed to mark Dekker’s bicentenary, protesters pulled down a statue of Edward Colston. Some asked why that notorious slavetrader had been allowed to stand there for so long. Others said that the year he was unveiled, 1895, belonged to ‘a different time’, when slavery was not an issue. But Dekker’s novel, published thirty-five years earlier, proves that not everyone in that ‘different time’ was complacent about how Europeans were exploiting people in the global south.
Max Havelaar, the eponymous hero of the novel, is that familiar figure, the author in disguise. Like Havelaar, Dekker (who wrote under the striking pen-name Multatuli, meaning ‘I have suffered much’) had been a government official in Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies. Like Havelaar, Dekker had found life as a coloniser insupportable, especially when he came to understand how his own people were wrecking Javanese lives.
In the cause of increasing the production of crops like coffee, the Dutch were forcing Javanese farmers to neglect the cultivation of rice. Like the Ukrainians under Stalin, the Javanese were starving in a land of legendary fertility. Like the British in China, the Dutch were using imports of opium to keep their colonial subjects tractable.
The book has a large ‘meta’ element – it explains how it came to be written. Havelaar’s story is supposedly derived from a bundle of papers left with one of the book’s narrators, a coffee-broker called Droogstoppel. The custodian of the papers is Dekker’s hilarious caricature of an irredeemable bourgeois. His only concern for the Javanese is that they should be induced to become Christians; but this concern is swamped by his preoccupation with his own power, wealth, status and respectability. He is also a terrible philistine, with a particular dislike for poetry.
Though largely forgotten outside Java and the Netherlands today, Max Havelaar was extremely influential in its time. In a 1999 New York Times article, re-used as the introduction to a timely English edition, the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer stated that the novel, which provoked a change of Dutch policy on Java, was ‘the book that killed colonialism’.
Comments
It is true I have never heard oh him BUT what is that Friends thing about all days are special - is that not so with anniversaries?
It is just as well to be reminded today as several years ago.
Who else has not been commemorated on their anniversary I wonder - I read something the other day - pssibly online, possibly in the Morning Star about Quaker Eric Baker - buried in Maldon, Essex Burial ground - what I read prompted me to wonder about his wife - he was occasionally mentioned in the period I was attending worship at Maldon but not her - maybe there was a testimony completed for her and him for the London Yearly Meeting?
Might The Friend occasionally reference past estominies of Britain Yearly Meeting?
By Tolkny on 31st August 2023 - 12:25
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