Katjau — the Malay-Indies term for stirring, muddling, gossiping and intriguing, with its derivatives katjauen, gekatjaud and katjauers — was the standing vice of the Dutch colonial community of Atjeh, and one of the two categories, with the vergissers (those who erred), into which du Croo grouped H. N. A. Swart’s detractors in the chapter he entitled Van Militair naar Civiel Bestuur en van katjauers en vergissers.
The atmosphere
Throughout his ten years in Atjeh Swart “he felt and knew opposition and obstruction against him. And that is doubly felt in a country like Atjeh — in a hotbed of gossip and intrigue, where even good workers begrudged one another the light in their eyes.”
Its principal vehicle was the chabar angin — “literally, news of the wind” — the rumour by which, for instance, H. J. Schmidt learned in 1908 that he was to be made Civil Authority at Padang Tidji.
The charges against Swart
“People — and those “people” are to be sought chiefly among the eager servants of the chabar angin — have reproached Swart (or rather “said of Swart”) that he let himself be influenced by gossip-mongers, that he was susceptible to flattery and fine talk, and that he pursued a policy of outward show.”
Du Croo answered that anyone who spoke with the seventy-nine-year-old, as he had, “would find it hard to suppress a smile at such people on hearing Swart’s uncommonly accurate and telling characterisation of his collaborators, whom he saw through man by man.” Swart was warm-hearted and to many a fatherly friend; it pained him to be hard towards valued collaborators, “but the clarity of his notes on the journals left little to be desired.”
The katjau over the pacification
The charge that the resistance had been bought to rest and the whole pacification purchased “katjaude men” heavily in 1923–1925, in Atjeh as elsewhere: “There was heavy blundering then.” Du Croo’s own investigation of the budget entries at Meulaboh in 1925 convinced him that each had its own justification.
The military-civil controversy
The most serious opposition, however, du Croo explicitly distinguished from mere katjau: the officers who held that Atjeh could not be governed by B.B. officials “so thought a good many in Atjeh — not young fools, not gossip-mongers, but serious, hard workers in the Acehnese wilderness.”
Dijkstra’s testimony
In the foreword to du Croo’s book, G. K. Dijkstra recorded of the Swart years that “the spirit, influenced from above, was one of dedication and good mutual understanding. Of the “katjau” so well known in Atjeh little was experienced.”
See Also
- Van Militair naar Civiel Bestuur
- H. N. A. Swart
- G. K. Dijkstra
- Chabar angin
- Maurice Henri du Croo
- Meulaboh
Source
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Foreword, p. IX; Chapter XIII, p. 130; Chapter XIV, pp. 138–139, 142; Chapter XV, p. 143.