Monopoly in the Garden of Eden
Monopoly in the Garden of Eden
By Andreas Baenziger
TERNATE, Maluku: The tree is so famous that the inhabitants of Ternate gave it a special name: Afo, which translates as "the giant." It is a gigantic example of the otherwise slim and unremarkable clove tree.
The Giant has a huge twisted and knotted trunk, and sturdy overhanging branches. Afo is 35 metres high - normal clove trees usually make it to just eight to 12 metres - and is reputed to have produced 600 kilos of dried cloves in its best years. But now the 400-year-old giant is approaching death through old age.
Standing alone and off the little road that leads up the side of Gamalama volcano, the Giant can be found in a quiet, shady wood of light green clove and dark green nutmeg trees. Tall trees form an umbrella which protects the delicate spice trees underneath them from the sun's powerful rays.
A delicate aroma of cloves hangs in the humid air and all around is luxuriant greenery. This is Ternate, a roundish island which rises out of the ocean like a perfectly shaped verdant dome, just 10 kilometers from side to side.
Together with its sister-island Tidore it forms the original home of the clove in the Indonesian Maluku island group - or Spice Islands - 2,200 kilometers east of Jakarta.
Several hundred metres above Afo the tropical rain- forestceeins, continuing right up to the lip of the volcano. Its remote location and extreme age make Afo an illegal tree: when they were here, the Dutch colonialists would certainly have tortured the owner to death if they had found it.
For Afo is a rebel against the spice monopoly which the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie - the Dutch East India Company, founded by Dutch merchants in 1602 - tried to impose here.
Twenty minutes on foot below Afo, Ibu Hamadjen, 72, lives in a modest longhouse. Things do not look too bright for Ibu Hamadjen: her shirt hangs in tatters and she has no shoes. She was not even aware that her country held crucial elections on June 7: visitors must be rare indeed.
She has also never the term "reformasi," the catch-all phrase behind the process of renewal and democratization after the departure of dictator Soeharto. But Hamadjen is certainly well aware of what happened to his cloves during the Soeharto era.
In a similar fashion to the Dutch 450 years previously, Soeharto's son Hutomo Mandala Putra - or Tommy, as he is better known - attempted to create a monopoly on the clove market, in the process securing an effortless income of some US$100 million a year for his own pocket.
Indonesia produces around 80,000 tons of cloves a year, most of which literally goes up in smoke - because almost the entire production goes to the cigarette industry. Cloves are mixed in a one-to-three ratio with tobacco to give Indonesia's kretek (clove) cigarettes their distinctive aroma.
The upshot of Tommy Soeharto's monopoly was a huge price slump and catastrophe for clove farmers. "Bad prices mean we have nothing to eat," Hamadjen says. "I have only cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg here. I have to buy my rice and other food."
The people on Ternate even started chopping down the clove trees. The fall of Soeharto, though, meant the end of the monopoly, one of the crassest examples of mismanagement under the veteran dictator. Now the harvest is once again bought up by Chinese traders in Ternate Town, as it was in the days before the monopoly.
Prices quickly recovered, to twice what they were before Soeharto Junior's meddling, nutmeg even more. A confident Hamadjen says, "Our vigor has returned."
But she also knows of the suffering brought by the Dutch to Ternate and the rest of the Spice Islands. His father told him the story, and she has passed it on to her children and grandchildren.
The Dutch East India Company under its bloodthirsty governor, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, decided on a whim to move clove production to Ambon island to make it easier to exercise control over the flourishing trade in spices. The trees on the other islands were felled.
That was the first monopoly, and the reason for Afo being planted high up in the rainforest out of reach of the grasping Dutch.
Under the new colonizer-traders, Ternate quickly descended into poverty - its barter economy having been robbed of its resources. Previously the Dutch, Javanese and Chinese sailors had brought food and staples to the island and took cloves away with them in return.
The Dutch, and before them the Portuguese, however, had no intention of entering into any trading niceties: they wanted the cloves, the only things the islanders of Ternate and Tidore possessed, for themselves. And they were prepared to take it by force if they had to.
Banda
The people of Banda island, a few hundred kilometers further south, were also proud owners of nutmeg trees; but what they endured was far, far worse. The entire population was either murdered or sold into slavery - a total of 15,000 men, women and children.
Banda was repopulated by Dutch settlers and their slaves. Ternate only managed to escape this fate because at the time it was an nominally independent state with an army and a ruling sultan.
The sultan's title still exists today, and is borne by Mudaffar Syah, a distinguished gentleman in his mid-60s who sports an elegantly trimmed beard.
"We were on Ternate for so many years," the sultan recalls of his people's experiences under the Dutch and later the Indonesian colonists. "Then the Dutch turned up suddenly. They took away our rights and forced us to obey. That caused us great pain, but we could not protect ourselves - after all, we didn't have any canons or anything like that.
"And then the republic came - and that was far worse. They also took away our rights, our products, and determined how much we were paid for our spices: the Dutch, the republic, my own nation, both Presidents Soeharto and Sukarno."
Sultan Mudaffar Syah, who is standing as a candidate for Soeharto's ruling Golkar party this month, is the direct descendant of one Sultan Hairun who was treacherously murdered by the Portuguese in 1570.
"The Portuguese wanted to set up a trading monopoly and when Hairun said no they simply killed him," he says. But the Portuguese suffered on account of the murder: Hairun's successor Babullah besieged their fortress for five years until they were forced to surrender. "We beat the Portuguese and drove them out," says Mudaffar Syah.
In the beginning, the Maluku stood for what Indonesia is today. Today's Jakarta - Batavia to the Dutch - was merely a service station on the way to the Spice Islands.
But then, almost overnight, Ternate, Tidore and Banda islands slipped from memory when the Frenchman Pierre Poivre succeeded in stealing clove and nutmeg cuttings. He planted the trees on the French-held island of Mauritius, and later on Zanzibar, which is where the Europeans buy them now.
Today Ternate has reverted to what it once was: a little-known Garden of Eden somewhere in the Far East. Only Ambon, the Dutch colonists' favorite Maluku island, regularly hits the headlines - both for its struggles for independence and its sectarian violence. But that too is little more than a late consequence of its colonial past.
-- Sueddeutsche Zeitung