Political T-shirts with attitude: Another way to spread the message
By Agni Amorita
JAKARTA (JP): The hundreds of people who were milling about in front of the capital's Hotel Indonesia on Oct. 20 formed a human sea. The crowd was there to support their idol, Megawati Soekarnoputri, who was vying against Abdurrahman Wahid for the presidency.
Most of those people wore red or black T-shirts, the colors of their party's flag. But there were also five young men wearing white T-shirts bearing Megawati's face on the front and the words "Mama Mega, You Are A President In My Heart" on the back.
"We made these T-shirts only last night," said one of the fervent supporters, Zainudin Riyanto, 31, from Pondok Gede, Bekasi, West Java.
"A 'speaking' T-shirt is more effective to express my opinion than words written on flags or banners," he said.
At the same time, he felt it was safer to wear a political T- shirt than wave the banners or flags. "I am sure they will never arrest us because we're wearing political T-shirt."
What Riyanto called a political T-shirt is a recent new trend taken up by young people in Indonesia's big cities to express their political concern in a creative way. The government's repressive approach led those creative youths to apply a self- censorship method by revealing their messages in an indirect way, such as wearing a T-shirt with a funny inscription loaded with political overtones. This method works extremely well. Before the 1997 general election, many shirts with "naughty" words were worn by people on the streets.
"We just wanted to be noticed that we were against the government's bad attitude," said F. Gunawan, 34, co-owner of a political T-shirt producer called Kambing Hitam Designs, which were very popular among Jakarta's university students.
Each of the T-shirts had a specific political context. The background to one of the T-shirts related to former president Soeharto's issue of a controversial license to his youngest son "Tommy" Hutomo Mandala Putra. The license was to import Korean cars, which were claimed as being Indonesian-made ones and were called "Timor". Kambing Hitam Designs launched a T-shirt with the words "Tumor, 100% Bukan Mobil Nasional, Asli Penyakit" (Tumor, 100% Not a National Car, A Real Disease).
The most interesting detail of the T-shirt was the lettering for the word "tumor" which was the same as the letters used in the so-called national car. This trick would cause people to smile after they read it. The first hundred "tumor" edition T- shirts were sold out in only one day. The quick sales were made door-to-door by Gunawan and his friends -- mostly university students and young professionals -- because Kambing Hitam Design did not have an outlet to display or even sell the T-shirts which were offered for only Rp 10,000 to Rp 15,000 each.
Unfortunately, this amateur T-shirt producer closed down in 1997.
Kambing Hitam Designs and other like-minded small companies only had short life-spans because their very existence was intrinsically related to the government's attitude. The monetary crisis and then the political turmoil are the reasons behind their closing.
People are no longer timid in expressing their opinions because the winds of change can now accommodate every expression, even vulgar ones. The political T-shirt is more than a mocking medium to "attack" the government. As a medium to support political parties, party symbol and all, political T-shirts were transformed into "real" political T-shirts.