Maloe — glossed by du Croo variously as “embarrassed, at a loss, ashamed” (embarrassed, at a loss, ashamed) — was the Acehnese and Malay concept of shame or loss of face which, in du Croo’s analysis, supplied the motive for the great majority of the Atjeh murders and of the local outbreaks of resistance in the pacified years 1913–1918.
The mechanism
During the years of the general struggle the emotional Acehnese who felt himself disappointed in his domestic or married life, in his family, his life-wishes, his social existence or his relation to his chief or fellow villagers — who had thus become maloe — found the solution close at hand: he joined a band. “Through and with that band he could avenge himself; by becoming a band member he made good again what he had done wrong, and he could moreover die as a martyr in the struggle against the unbeliever.”
When the bendewezen was rooted out, that ready solution disappeared, precisely at a time when the years of struggle in the rimba had unsettled countless Acehnese. Those unbalanced men then sought a new solution when they felt themselves maloe: “in the killing of an entirely arbitrary unbeliever and in becoming a martyr in that way after all.”
Cases
The concept appears explicitly in several of the cases du Croo records:
- In the Scheepens case, the oelèëbalang T. Béntara Titeuë told the presiding Civil Authority that he understood Acehnese adat could no longer be applied to the man who had wounded his son, “but that he, T. Béntara, if the perpetrator were not punished with at least banishment to Java, would be shamed in the eyes of his people.” The three months’ sentence produced the stabbing.
- In September 1913 a young Acehnese thwarted by his parents in his marriage plans “felt himself thereby shamed before his village, thought he could live no longer, but decided to stab an unbeliever first” — and murdered a train conductor.
- In May 1914 an Acehnese attacked the sentry at Lam Meulò from shame that his mother had squandered his paternal inheritance and taken up with her own son-in-law: “So: shame, and therefore a murder.”
In attempted resistance
The same mechanism explains the local outbreaks: “an intellectual author who felt himself shamed over some trifle, and a number of actual executants who were in the same case, or who did not dare or could not refuse (thus likewise a case of fear of being shamed).”
In the Daja and Lhong affair, Nja’ Asém had risen greatly in esteem — “not only in the eyes of the population but also in his own” — through marriage with the daughter of the principal woman of the moekim, and was thrown entirely off balance by her sudden death, “by which he fell back to the status of an ordinary village man. This threw him entirely off balance and he began to brood.”
Significance
The concept of maloe is the interpretative key to du Croo’s whole treatment of the residual violence of the pacification years, and the reason he could argue that the Atjeh-moord had, as a rule, no political significance whatever — while nevertheless requiring, for its investigation, an administrator “who needed no interpreter and who knew too much of Atjeh and the Acehnese to go astray.”
Maloe as an obstacle to medical treatment (1937)
Dr. C. E. Gomperts recorded the maloegevoel as a practical difficulty of the colonial medical service in Groot-Atjeh. Discussing whether gonorrhoeal infection could account for a share of the blindness he had found, he noted that the Gouvernements-Indisch arts charged with the general D.V.G. service was born and bred in Groot-Atjeh and spoke Atjehnese well, which gave a guarantee that patients with venereal infections would turn to him sooner than to a European physician: “Voor den Europeeschen arts hebben de Inheemschen ongetwijfeld een groot maloegevoel, zoodat zij er niet gemakkelijk toe zullen besluiten zich tot een Europeeschen arts te wenden bij ziekten van het geslachts-apparaat.”
The observation allowed Gomperts to treat the figures of the indigenous physician — eight and nine gonorrhoeal infections in 1936 and 1937 — as a more reliable measure of the disease’s frequency than European practice would have given, and so to conclude that its share among the causes of blindness “zeer gering moet zijn.”
See Also
- Atjeh-moord
- Sjahid
- Adat
- Murder of Lieutenant-Colonel Scheepens (10 October 1913)
- Resistance in Daja and Lhong (1914)
- The resistance in Atjeh 1913–1918
- Oriënteerend oogheelkundig onderzoek bij de Atjehsche bevolking van Groot-Atjeh gedurende 1937
- C. E. Gomperts
- Oogheelkundig kampongonderzoek in Groot-Atjeh (Maart-December 1937)
- Blindheid in Groot-Atjeh
- Dienst der Volksgezondheid
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), Chapter XII, pp. 120–126.
Oriënteerend oogheelkundig onderzoek bij de Atjehsche bevolking van Groot-Atjeh gedurende 1937 (“Orienting Ophthalmological Survey among the Atjehnese Population of Groot-Atjeh during 1937”), by Dr. C. E. Gomperts, offprint from the Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië, Afl. 19, Deel 80 (1940), pp. 1191-1238 (Batavia-Centrum: G. Kolff & Co.). Received by the editors 25 October 1939. Offprint DLP-157, Bibliotheek KITLV.