Saving history hard work

Saving history hard work

Ida Indawati Khouw, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

History may be the most boring subject at school. But how many
students here realize that a building in South Jakarta preserves
an abundance of archives, totaling about 2.5 km in length,
detailing the activities of Dutch trading company VOC?

The building, officially called The National Archives of the
Republic of Indonesia (Arsip National Republik Indonesia or
ANRI), is located on Jl. Ampera, South Jakarta.

Its collections are part of 25 million pages of VOC records
worldwide. VOC stands for Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, a
trading company that ruled Indonesia from 1619 until 1799. The
records were scattered in Batavia (old Jakarta, which was the
VOC's headquarters), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Chennai (India), Cape
Town (South Africa) and The Hague (the Netherlands).

After the VOC were bankrupted in 1799, control of what is now
Indonesia was passed to the Dutch colonial government till
Independence was declared in 1945.

ANRI's collections include records of the VOC's journal of
daily activities in Batavia (dagregister), resolutions and
correspondence, including its trading activities following ship
arrivals, ship loading, reports on military expeditions and
career promotions of the company's officials.

Unfortunately, the secret treasures are threatened by the
ravages of time and climate, and are also endangered by
inappropriate storage conditions. Some have become discolored or
been subject to fungal attack, and are vulnerable even when
simply touched.

This situation is made worse by the fact that very few people
know about the VOC.

"The problem is we have no experts on the VOC so far. Even in
the Netherlands itself the number of specialists is less than 10
people," said Mona Lohanda, ANRI's researcher and archivist.

"Researchers must not only master paleography but also have
knowledge of countries where VOC conducted business. It was a
multinational company with an extensive business network," said
the woman, who is also historian of the University of Indonesia.

Reading the handwriting is another problem. The journal
writers often used expressions or loaned words from other
languages. It caused inconsistencies and bastardization as they
mixed it with Dutch. As an example, they wrote Siri instead of
Sri (honorific royal title) or put Zepoh instead of Sepuh when
referring to the sultan of Cirebon (in West Java).

"Such a state of affairs can easily trap scholars into being
misled," said Mona, who is now working on the dagregister.

"The journal could be a priceless source for those studying
the VOC era. And, apart from difficulties in reading documents,
there is also a lack of funding aid," she said.

The efforts of salvaging the heritage are in progress, such as
human resource training and the transliteration process.

"It's a gigantic project; maybe it won't have been completed
by the time I die," Mona said.

But one day in June, Dutch historian Hendrik E. Niemeijer told
The Jakarta Post about his hope that young VOC experts would
appear after joining a Leiden-based UNESCO-mandated program on
cooperative training and research, focusing on the archives of
the trading company.

"After participating in the training, I really hope scholars
will dig out the great collections of the archives, of which
Indonesia has the greatest part. As of now only a few experts can
read the handwriting. Thus, most of the heritage remains
untouched," said Niemeijer, the historian from Leiden University,
The Netherlands.

Now there are two visiting archival counselors from the
Algemeen Rijksarchief (the National Archives of the Netherlands)
in The Hague, Louisa Balk and Frans van Dijk. They are
identifying, categorizing and digital-database-processing the
archives. They are also training 13 ANRI archivists.

Still, their efforts have been challenged, as some parties
oppose such preservation, said ANRI's deputy for archive
conservation Djoko Utomo. They have referred to the Dutch
colonization as a dark era; therefore there was no need to
maintain all the archives.

But Djoko disagreed.

"Archives show everything that occurred in society. VOC
archives also say something about us. That is therefore our
common heritage," he said.

Hopefully, in the long run all the data scattered at many
countries will be saved in a digital database.

"So far we have completed 3,600 items," said Balk, who
together with van Dijk and ANRI's employees, started the work
last May.