At night, close your ears

In Jakarta, the hurly burly national capital, the virtue of politeness seems to have been gradually driven to the outskirts. The humming tune of Muslims glorifying the name of God every evening during this holy month of Ramadhan is drowned out by the deafening explosions of firecrackers. The sound of the exploding fireworks, tossed up or thrown on the ground by young children, is such a nuisance that the entire community, regardless of religious affiliation, feels greatly disturbed. Many have begun to lose their tolerance. Parents, notably those who are not so well educated, are at a loss as to how they can teach their children to behave.

Isn't there anyone out there with good manners, capable of teaching these parents? Today, people jokingly say that even the devil himself has left the city to seek asylum in another, more civilized province.

Some of the fathers who frequent the mosque every Ramadhan evening have complained that the problem of children's education is not an easy issue to address in the current drive toward modernization. They once took their children to places of worship, but the youngsters would just make a lot of noise and disturb the serenity of the atmosphere. Now they ask their children to go elsewhere to play. The result? Children lighting firecrackers, closing their ears and throwing them in the air or on the ground.

This is perhaps the noisiest by-product of the emergence of ill-behaved urban children, although lately only one casualty has been reported in a firecracker-related incident.

A baby was killed when a fire gutted the home of a firecracker maker in downtown Jakarta, after his products, which he had not had time to sell, exploded in July this year. But in the provinces, in incidents not involving children, firecrackers have claimed many lives in all sorts of locations, from a traditional religious school to a boat.

Ethnic Betawi (the indigenous Jakartans) have been playing with these dangerous and disturbing toys for a long time. This small time game is of course not recorded by history but the Betawi people have been very much influenced by Chinese culture. The Chinese themselves were here long before the Dutch and their number sharply increased after Governor General Jan Pieterszoon Coen renamed Jakarta as Batavia and made it the capital of the Dutch colonial power. From the beginning, the Chinese had undergone acculturation with the local people and married into the local population, while most locals spoke the Malay dialect and later called themselves Betawi, a corruption of Batavia.

Though the Chinese influence on the indigenous people was very strong among the Betawi living on the outskirts of the city, there was also a strong Arab influence, especially among those living in other parts of the city.

The Arab influence was felt particularly strongly through Islamic teachings but the biggest Chinese festival, Tjap Go Meh, attracted Betawis as well as the Chinese themselves. Tjap Go Meh falls on the fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year, which also marks the beginning of spring. Later, the festival grew so large that it was celebrated in different parts of the city on different nights. When Glodok, in the downtown area, was given the honor of opening festivities the whole of Jl. Gajah Mada was closed to traffic from Harmonie to Kota. The Betawis were proud of saying that old women who never went out even during the Idul Fitri holidays ventured into the streets to celebrate Tjap Go Meh. Firecrackers also played an important part in the festival, although it was nothing compared to the hullabaloo we see today.

But in 1954 the Jakarta authorities banned the Betawis from taking part in the door-to-door begging dragon dances, which followed the main Tjap Go Meh festival. And tragically, in 1960, the military authority, which ruled supreme under the protection of president Sukarno, banned Tjap Go Meh for good.

In any case, given the close-knit relationship between the Chinese and Betawi communities, it would be difficult to abolish the firecracker-burning tradition. The chairman of the Indonesian Ulemas Council (MUI), Prof. Buya Hamka, has tirelessly urged people here to scrap the tradition because it represents neither Indonesian nor Islamic culture, but the people remain adamant. The problem is made far more complex by the reluctance of the police to uncover and close the firecracker home industry in rural areas and right here in town, where it operates in the full view of the public.