De Kleine Oosterling — Iets uit de Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië. Leesboekje voor de Lagere Scholen — is a Dutch primary-school reader on the history of the Netherlands East Indies, written by J. Wijma and first published in 1901 by Laurens van Hulst in Kampen (Tweede Druk). The book is a representative artefact of Dutch colonial-pedagogical literature at the height of the Atjeh-oorlog: a child-sized, moralised history of the Netherlands Indies whose Atjeh chapters — opening with the Houtman embassy of 1599 and closing with the Van Heutsz–Toekoe Oemar consolidation around 1898 — taught Dutch schoolchildren the official narrative of the colonial project in Atjeh.
Plan and pedagogical frame
The book is organised as a numbered sequence of short lessen (lessons), each headed by a moralising title and accompanied by narrative prose. Among the Atjeh-relevant lessons are:
- Les 3 — Een gezantschap: the Houtman brothers’ first visit to Atjeh in 1599, the ambush by the Atjehneezen, the captivity of Frederik Houtman, and the later embassy to Prince Maurits bearing letters and gifts.
- Les 36 — Een tocht met tegenspoed: the eerste Atjeh-tocht of April 1873 under generaal Kaler, his death before the missigit, and the withdrawal.
- Les 37 — Een hoofdsterkte bemachtigd: the tweede Atjeh-tocht of November 1873 under generaal Van Swieten, the killing of the zeventigjarige Javaan bearing Van Swieten’s letters to the sultan, the storming of the missigit on 6 January 1874, and the occupation of the kraton on 24 January 1874.
- Les 38 — Een nieuwe stad: the founding of Kotta-Radja on the site of the kraton, the death of the young sultan (no successor appointed, Atjeh “als veroverd land met onze bezittingen vereenigd”), the brief command of kolonel Pel (later generaal), the Van der Heyden’s Samalangan campaign that won him the byname held van Samalangan, the defection of Toekoe Oemar and his march on Pedir in June 1898 under kolonel Van Heutsz, the building of the haven van Oleh-leh, and the Atjeh spoorweg from Oleh-leh to Kotta-Radja.
The text is explicitly pedagogical. The frame of Les 36 — “Atjeh en de Atjehers! Hoe dikwijls is de naam van dat land in de laatste jaren al niet gehoord!” — sets up Atjeh as the contemporary, schoolchild-known problem; and the lessons are paired with the recurrent moral that eendracht maakt macht and that Dutch volharding finally prevails over Atjehnese fanatiek resistance. The portrait of the unnamed zeventigjarige Javaan bearing Van Swieten’s letters and being put to death by the Atjehnese — set against the contrast of “gewonde vijanden werden door ons verpleegd” — is a textbook example of the colonial reader’s moral asymmetry.
Historical accuracy and omissions
Wijma is unreliable in personal nomenclature: the generaal “Kaler” of Les 36 is the eerste expeditie commander more usually rendered in Dutch staff history as Köhler (or Kohler); the kolonel “Pel” of Les 38 is more usually Pell; the kolonel “Van Heutz” of the Pedir march of June 1898 is Van Heutsz. These school-textbook spellings should be treated as popularisations, not as independent attestations.
The book is also conspicuously silent on the verraad of Toekoe Oemar of 1896 — the Wikipedia reader is told only that Toekoe Oemar “eerst als bondgenoot goede diensten bewezen, maar sloot zich later weer bij den vijand aan,” with no date and no explicit reference to the verraad van 1896 that had become a Dutch cause célèbre. The school reader thus compresses the political history into a single didactic arc.
Significance
De Kleine Oosterling is significant in the AcehWiki corpus less as a source of new facts about Atjeh than as a documentary witness to how the colonial state taught its own Atjeh history to its own children. The lesson-titles alone — “Een tocht met tegenspoed,” “Een hoofdsterkte bemachtigd,” “Een nieuwe stad” — show the moralised narrative arc by which the failure of 1873 is recuperated as the prelude to the triumph of 1874 and ultimately to the Van Heutsz–pacification of the late 1890s. The school reader is therefore a primary source for the colonial memorial history of Atjeh, even where it is a secondary or tertiary source for the events themselves.
See Also
- Houtman brothers’ visit to Atjeh (1599)
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits (1601)
- Cornelis Houtman
- Frederik Houtman
- Prince Maurits
- First Aceh Expedition (1873)
- Second Aceh Expedition (1873-1874)
- Capture of the Kraton (24 January 1874)
- General Kaler
- Generaal Van Swieten
- Kolonel Pel
- Governorship of General Van der Heyden
- Van Heutsz’s governorship
- Toekoe Oemar’s verraad (1896)
- Defection of Teuku Uma
- Building of Oleh-leh harbor
- Atjeh-tram
- Kotta-Radja
- 1901
Source
De Kleine Oosterling — Iets uit de Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië. Leesboekje voor de Lagere Scholen, door J. Wijma, Tweede Druk (Kampen: Laurens van Hulst, 1901), Voorbericht and Lessen 3, 36, 37, 38.