Bakongan

Properties2
tagsplace, military-post, aceh, westkust, marechaussee
aliasesBakongan, Bakongan post, Bakongan (Aceh Westkust)

12 min read

Bakongan was a military post of the Korps Marechaussee van Atjeh en Onderhorigen on the Westkust of Aceh at which the author served in the dertiger jaren alongside the sergeant Thijs de Fretes and the Marechaussee 1e klas Tanamal of the 6e Divisie Marechaussee, and at which he first met Dominee Thenu on the beach at the end of 1932. It is one of the principal settings of the chapters “Thijs” and “Dominee Thenu” in Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L., and the post from which the colonne of Schmidt operated against the Tiriō Teungkoes in the early 1910s.

The 1932 meeting with Thenu

“De eerste maal, dat ik Dominee Thenu ontmoette, was eind 1932 op het strand van Bakongan.” The boot was unloaded with Atjehse vissersprauwen — Acehnese fishing canoes — and the dominee, then “vierenzestig” years old, was carried ashore on the back of a Timorese soldier who waded into the sea to meet the boot. “Speciaal ook met een Timorees, die geheel vooraan was en de dominee op zijn rug nam.” Later the author saw the two walking deep in conversation; but when the kerkdienst came, the Timorees was not there — he was Rooms-Katholiek. The author concludes: “dit gesprek buiten de kerk om was wel de ware geestelijke verzorging.”

The dertiger jaren at Bakongan

“In Bakongan hadden we in de dertiger jaren Thijs de Fretes.” The dertiger jaren at Bakongan are the setting of the chapter on Thijs: the sergeant 1e klasse of the 6e Divisie Marechaussee, the woudloper and jager whose plain-spoken Dutch, when the new dokter’s jeugdige vrouw asked him how the patrol had been, came out as “„O, verdomd best Mevrouw, alleen dat verdomde, stinkende rotwater daar, dat is toch zo beroerd, ziet U!"" — a remark only comprehensible to those who had spent days in the Troemonse moerassen at Ië Itam and Ië Merah.

Tanamal was also at Bakongan in the dertiger jaren — the Marechaussee 1e klas whose ongelooflijk lelijke snuit became één en al vrolijkheid at feestjes where he served as voorzanger. The post therefore hosted two of the book’s set-piece Ambonese soldiers.

The kolonel’s visit (1933)

“Toen in 1933 de kolonel op Bakongan was, had de zelfbestuurder van Troemon het over een solitair, die gevaarlijk was voor de bevolking en schade aanrichtte.” Thijs promised the kolonel the rogue elephant’s tanden before the beast was shot — and shot it at five metres’ distance.

The new dokter

“We hadden net een nieuwe dokter betoel aangekregen, pas afgestudeerd, getrouwd, een paar maanden Batavia en toen rechtstreeks Bakongan.” The new dokter’s wife — fresh from a few months in Batavia and unaccustomed to the post — was the addressee of Thijs’s plain-spoken Dutch about the stinkende rotwater.

Significance

Bakongan is significant in Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L. as one of the principal settings of the book’s dertiger jaren chapters. It is the post at which Dames met Dominee Thenu, at which he served with Thijs de Fretes and Tanamal, and from which the colonne of Schmidt had operated two decades earlier. The post therefore ties the book’s two great temporal layers together: the late-colonial dertiger jaren of the author’s own service, and the Aceh War counter-insurgency of the 1910s.

Account from Atjeh by H.C. Zentgraff (1938)

Zentgraff’s Atjeh gives the fullest war-era account of Bakongan. The kerkhof holds a dubbele grafzerk, van onder tot boven, en in twee rijen, bedekt met de namen der dooden van de patrouille van luit. Donner in 1905 — the mass grave of two Dutch patrols surprised on the same night in August 1905, one at kampong Rambong and one by Sibade, losing a total of twenty-three men: EUR. FUS. LENKMAN No 52420, EUR. SERGT. W. SOEST No 47563, EUR. FUS. ADETJER No 54284, INL. KORP. KASMOREDJO No 40090, and many others, overvallen en gesneuveld op 12 Augustus 1905 en hier begraven.

Bakongan belongs to the country of klewangaanvallen and the Paja Tjitcem moeras — the Vogelmoor — through which Pang Nanggroë’s bende was pursued. In July 1926 kapitein Gosenson was based at Bakongan, also functioning as controleur der Zuid-Atjehsche landschappen Kloeët en Troemon.

In May 1927 Tjoet Ali attacked the marschbivak Mengamat at half past three in the morning — new moon, pitch dark, soft rain — breaking through the pagger with six or seven men; all were killed, leaving eight Dutch wounded. Tjoet Ali himself was killed on 25 May 1927 by Gosenson’s brigade near Aloeë, and buried at the marschbivak Kandang opposite, with his face toward Mekka, want Gosenson wist, wat een eerlijk en dapper tegenstander toekomt.

Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia.

The 1932 meeting with Thenu

“De eerste maal, dat ik Dominee Thenu ontmoette, was eind 1932 op het strand van Bakongan.” — The first time that I met Dominee Thenu was at the end of 1932 on the beach of Bakongan. The boot was unloaded with Atjehse vissersprauwen — Acehnese fishing canoes — and the dominee, then “vierenzestig” years old, was carried ashore on the back of a Timorese soldier who waded into the sea to meet the boot. “Speciaal ook met een Timorees, die geheel vooraan was en de dominee op zijn rug nam.” Later the author saw the two walking deep in conversation; but when the kerkdienst came, the Timorees was not there — he was Rooms-Katholiek. The author concludes: “dit gesprek buiten de kerk om was wel de ware geestelijke verzorging.”

The kolonel’s visit (1933)

“Toen in 1933 de kolonel op Bakongan was, had de zelfbestuurder van Troemon het over een solitair, die gevaarlijk was voor de bevolking en schade aanrichtte.” — When in 1933 the colonel was at Bakongan, the self-governing ruler of Troemon spoke of a solitary elephant that was dangerous to the population and did damage. Thijs promised the kolonel the rogue elephant’s tanden before the beast was shot — and shot it at five metres’ distance.

Account from Atjeh by H.C. Zentgraff (1938)

Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia.

Account from Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)

Bakongan appears in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) as the destination of the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen on the journey he began on 23 August 1933, when he came again to Koeta Radja and travelled thence to the West Coast.

Tijssen introduced the place with an explicit reference to its recent history: “reisde van daar door naar Bakongan, land, waarvan men zich den naam herinnert door het verzet van 1925 en ‘26” — the land whose name is remembered for the resistance of 1925 and 1926; see Bakongan uprising. The remark is the pamphlet’s acknowledgement that the district to which the doctor was sent was one of the most recently disturbed in the whole residency.

Of the administration’s practical support he recorded: “in Bakongan heeft het bestuur de reiskosten voor mijn patiënten betaald wanneer de afstand te groot was om dien te voet af te leggen.” — at Bakongan the administration paid the travelling costs for my patients when the distance was too great to cover on foot. The population there had no money; but the land was rich in produce, and from that alone Tijssen could explain the strikingly rare occurrence of avitaminosis in the district — the voedselverhoudingen, he said, were excellent.

Bakongan lay in the thinly peopled coastal strip five hundred kilometres long and scarcely five kilometres broad along which the motorable road ran, flanked on both sides by the mass graves of the Atjeh wars and the rising of 1926 — the district described at Tijssen’s journey to the West Coast of Atjeh and Simaloer (1933), and the one in which, Tijssen noted, no officer went into a kampong without a soldier behind him with a loaded carbine, and yet where he himself lived unarmed among the people for weeks without anyone harming a hair of his head.

The new Maréchaussée division at Bakongan (1927)

the 1930 jubilee number of Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië records that towards the end of 1927, the government having recognised that the safety of Atjeh did not permit economies on the Korps Maréchaussée after the Westkust action, the corps was raised again to 23 officers and 1,214 men, “er werd een nieuwe divisie opgericht met Bakongan als standplaats” — a new division was formed with Bakongan as its station.

The corps had been reduced in 1925 to 18 officers and 1,072 men, a reduction in which, the editors remarked, the policy of versobering (austerity) must have had “een hartig woord” to say.

Account from Over patchouly-olie en patchouly-blad van Atjeh (1925) — the patchouli discovery

In the early twentieth century the landschap of Bakongan became the site of one of the most consequential agricultural discoveries in the colonial Atjeh economy: the discovery, in 1924, by Van Vreeswijk — the manager of the Atjehsche Oliefabriek at Tapa Toean — that the patchouli (nilam) leaf of Bakongan, grown on the sand-and-swamp conjunction of the Bakongan coastal strip and dried with the care the Bakongan planters had begun to devote to it, was the finest patchouli-leaf of Atjeh, with an odour “veel sterker dan dat uit eenig andere streek in Atjeh” (much stronger than from any other region in Atjeh).

Van Vreeswijk’s Letter of 16 August 1924

Van Vreeswijk’s letter of 16 August 1924 to the Afdeeling Handelsmuseum at Amsterdam — preserved in *Bericht* No. 21 of the Afdeeling Handelsmuseum (April 1925) — recorded his discovery after a recent trip to Bakongan:

“Sedert een jaar plant men daar veel op een strook grond langs de kust, aan den anderen kant begrensd door moerasgrond. De vereeniging daarvan met zandgrond, schijnt de plant zeer ten goede te komen.” — For a year now much has been planted there on a strip of land along the coast, bounded on the other side by swamp-ground. The conjunction of that with sand-ground seems to agree very well with the plant.

The Bakongan planters, Van Vreeswijk reported, devoted “verreweg de meeste zorg” — by far the most care — to the cultivation of patchouli of any Atjehnese planters he had observed. The leaf “komt biina geheel gezuiverd aan de markt” (comes almost wholly cleaned to market). The new coastal-strip planting had already been picked twice within the year, and a third picking would follow within the year. Market price: ƒ14 per pikol — more than double the ƒ5-ƒ6 per pikol of the Labohan-Hadji leaf, the least valuable of the Tapa Toean districts.

The Bakongan Triumph of Winter 1924-1925

Van Vreeswijk made up the second shipment of the 1924 quarterly programme from Bakongan leaf, and sent it to Amsterdam at the end of October 1924. The Bakongan leaf, when distilled by the European essential-oil houses over the winter of 1924-1925, produced oil uniformly judged equal in quality to the best Singapore-Penang product:

  • Schimmel & Co. of Miltitz reported: “Die untersuchten Dilemblätter sind hiernach den Singapore-Patchouliblättern als gleichwertig zu erachten. Die Oelausbeute ist recht befriedigend und das Oel selbst nach Geruch und Konstanten von guter Qualität.”
  • A Dutch factory reported: “Het ons gezonden monster van het Koloniaal Instituut Nr 21718 ruikt heel goed en komt ons inziens in reuk overeen met goede kwaliteit Penang-olie en is in ieder geval veel beter dan de Java-olie (z.g. Dilem-olie).”

The Handelsmuseum’s conclusion was: “prima blad, prima olie; op de winning van het goede blad komt het aan! en niet op de nabehandeling te Penang of Singapore.” — Prime leaf, prime oil; it is the winning of the good leaf that matters, and not the after-treatment at Penang or Singapore. The Bakongan discovery broke the Singapore-Penang monopoly on prime patchouli oil and established the indigenous Atjeh patchouli-oil industry on a firm commercial basis.

See Also

Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu

Bivak established after the overval (attack) of 1926. 60 km south of Tapa Toean. Will not be lifted for the time being. Surroundings are unfriendly; severe malaria infection in the whole region. Life on such a post requires maximum perseverance.1925-1927 military action (Bakongan-actie). Goods and casualties were transported by Gouvernements Marine vessels between Oelèë Lheuëand the action area.Westkust place of an uprising in 1926 used by some as proof that civil administration was introduced too early; author disputes this.

Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 55, 285, 407.

Sources

Oom Ambon van het K.N.I.L., by G. W. T. Dames, Maj. Inf. K.N.I.L. b.d. (‘s-Gravenhage: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1954), chapters “Dominee Thenu” and “Thijs.”

Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad), door Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen, met een voorrede van den heer H. Wanting, redacteur Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg, uitgave van de Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934), pp. 10–11.

Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.

Het Korps Maréchaussée in Atjeh: De Atjehsche Garde, 1890 - 2 April 1930 (“The Corps of Maréchaussée in Atjeh: The Atjehnese Guard”), Extra Jubileum-nummer of Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië issued for the fortieth anniversary of the corps (1930), pp. 1-16. Offprint DLP-143, Bibliotheek KITLV, accession 621 116 794.

Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 55, 285, 407.

Over patchouly-olie en patchouly-blad van Atjeh (Noord-Sumatra). Berichten van de Afdeeling Handelsmuseum van de Kon. Vereeniging Koloniaal Instituut, No. 21. Overgedrukt uit De Indische Mercuur van 8 en 15 Mei 1925. Amsterdam: Druk De Bussy. OCR-filename: 20260801_233856_DLP-153-Over_patchouly_olie_en_patchouly_blad_van_Atjeh_Noord_Sumatra_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt, pp. 17-21.

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