Celebrating workers, forgetting coolies

Jakarta (ANTARA) - We have found a better word than “kuli” in “buruh”. “Buruh” sounds fairer, more humane, more suitable to print on banners, and more pleasant to utter in speeches.

However, like many other things in our lives, the word is not always sufficient to ensure that the substance behind it truly changes.

The inadequacy of the word is most felt every 1 May. On this special day, we seem to attend a solemn yet somewhat awkward celebration.

The streets in industrial areas, such as Bekasi, Karawang, and Cimahi, are filled with groups of workers setting off together, carrying banners and demands that we have mostly memorised.

For a few hours, they become the centre of attention; a rare privilege that seldom occurs on ordinary days, when they instead form part of the nearly invisible background.

The streets may be noisy, demands voiced, and convictions produced in a form neat enough to be believed collectively. Yet, behind the low rumble of the demonstration, there is a layer rarely touched upon, namely the memory of bodies that have long worked in silence. It is there that an old word glows dimly: kuli.

We may rarely utter this word now, but the traces of its mentality have not been fully left behind. “Kuli” and “buruh” remind us that changing labels does not necessarily erase the legacy of the past.

Regarding the kuli, in Max Havelaar, Multatuli wrote in a tone of near despair: “Ik wil gehoord worden!” (I want to be heard!). A simple cry, but one that took a long time to be truly heeded.

That cry, to this day, seems to come from the same space. From the time when work was not a choice, but an obligation imposed from outside the self.

In the 19th century, through the forced planting system, labour was regulated with a precision that left almost no room for negotiation. The land was planted not for one’s own needs, but for distant markets. The results flowed to places unknown to those who worked.

If that system was called efficient by some, it was perhaps because it succeeded in ensuring that those who worked did not need to bother too much thinking about where the fruits of their labour went.

In East Sumatra, that efficiency became more concrete. In the Deli plantations, contract coolies lived in a neatly organised system: contracts were signed, rules enforced, and violations handled with mechanisms that were considered normal at the time.

Johannes van den Brand—a bold Dutch advocate known for defending native coolies in East Sumatra in the early 20th century—recorded it in cold sentences. “The kuli is a number, not a human,” he wrote in his famous pamphlet De Millioenen uit Deli (Millions from Deli). A sentence that, with a slight adjustment of terms, might still be found in another form today.