Prelude to the national revolution

When Abdoel Rivai began the propagation of the idea of “kemajuan” and the need to enter into “the world of progress”, the colonial war in Aceh had just been “officially” concluded (1904). The capture of Panglima Polem (the leader of the opposition after the death of Teungku Cik di Tiro) and Cut Nyak Dien, the legendary heroine, has usually been taken as the end of the longest and bloodiest colonial war in the Indonesian archipelago. With the capture of the two leaders, the colonial war in Aceh that started in 1872, after the Dutch signed the London Treaty with the British, which gave the former the exclusive right to Sumatra, had officially concluded. To the rural population of Aceh, however, the war had not really ended. Until the late 1920s, the so-called “Aceh murder” still took place here and there. Cases where suddenly an Acehnese warrior emerged from the bush or from among the crowd in the market to kill a Dutch official in sight could still occasionally occur. The long colonial war had given the Acehenese not only the heroes they could be proud of, but also a deeply entrenched tradition of resistance to the kafir government, the infidel.

The continuing opposition to the imposed power of the foreign intruders also took place in the other regions. Not long after the official termination of the “pacification campaign” in Aceh, another type of colonial expansion campaign took place in the other parts of the archipelago. In Bali, the royal families of Klungkung preferred to face death by conducting the puputan, ceremonial death, rather than letting themselves be subjugated to the wishes of the advancing power of the Netherlands Indies. These puputan affairs had from the beginning been well stored in the Balinese collective memories. The long period — almost one hundred years (1810–1907) — of the efforts of the Dutch, who had occupied Makassar since the late 17th century, to establish their authority in the small kingdoms of South Sulawesi, is also a part of the collective memories of the local population. In 1905 the Dutch troops attacked the kingdom of Bone and exiled its king. Soon after that, the colonial government managed to seize the kingdom of Gowa.