Orang toenong was the name by which the submitted (onderworpen, “friendly”) populations of the IV, VI and IX Moekims distinguished, in the telling of the Dutch official records, their hostile countrymen of the XXII Moekims — literally, in Acehnese usage recorded by the Dutch sources, the people from over there. All irregularities and enmities on the pacified territory were, so Meijer observed, invariably ascribed by heads and people alike to the orang toenong.
Usage in the records
In H. F. Meijer’s Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876 (1883) the term appears at every point at which the submitted population brushes against the war:
- The returned people of the IX Moekims fled to the mountains in April 1876 when threatened by an incursion of the orang toenong, and would not return until a Dutch fortification closed the way from the XXII to the XXV Moekims — the desire that led directly to the founding of Biloel Zuid.
- The heads of the IV Moekims, pressed by this enemy, showed a double face: they asked Dutch protection from raiding and revenge by their hostile countrymen, and often kept up — at least by neutrality — the connection with them by ancient exchanges of betel-leaf and rice.
- The populations themselves explained every irregularity and hostile act on their territory as the work of the orang toenong; as often, Meijer noted, the friendly people themselves took part.
Significance
The expression records both the fault line inside Atjehnese society during the war and the colonial use made of it: the submitted populations’ own word for their enemies made visible how thin the floor was on which the Dutch consolidation of 1876 rested.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege quotes, from the manuscript of the contrôleur Kroesen, the same judgment once more: “Het is zeer waarschijnlijk dat de bewoners der Sagie XXII, de ‘orang toenoeng’, de zoogenaamde bovenlanders, van een anderen oorsprong zijn dan de overige Atjehers. De benedenlander spreekt … van de ‘orang toenoeng’ als van een vreemd volk, geenszins als van landgenooten. Zijne gesprekken getuigen van een zeker, uit vrees geboren ontzag voor hen, en hij zal U dadelijk tal van voorbeelden vertellen van hun vechtlust en verregaande trouweloosheid. Het is zeker dat krijgsdeugd er meer wordt aangekweekt dan ergens elders; zelfs de vrouwen dragen er een klewang of een piek, wanneer zij ergens ter markt gaan.” (“It is very probable that the inhabitants of the Sagie XXII, the orang toenoeng, the so-called highlanders, are of a different origin from the other Atjehers. The lowlander speaks of the orang toenoeng as of a strange people, not at all as of countrymen. His talk betrays a certain fear-born reverence for them, and he will immediately tell you a host of examples of their combativeness and thoroughgoing faithlessness. It is certain that martial virtue is cultivated there more than anywhere else; even the women wear a klewang or a pike when they go to market.”) Verstege remarks that the same lowlander in faithlessness hardly yields to the highlander, and closes: that this was the people with whom the Dutch were closing themselves in, inside a narrow line (see Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk (Verstege, 1886)).
See Also
- XXII Moekims
- Toekoe Tjoet Bantah
- Biloel Zuid operation (13-15 May 1876)
- Guerilla warfare in Groot-Atjeh
Source
Atjeh van 26 December 1875 tot 4 September 1876, door H. F. Meijer (Breda: P. B. Nieuwenhuijs, 1883), chapter VII, pp. 78–79, 163–166, 180.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 13-14. OCR: DLP-158.