Bandung (historically spelled Bandoeng) was the principal city of the Preanger Regencies of west Java in the Netherlands Indies and the site, in the early twentieth century, of the colonial state’s memorial culture for the Atjeh-oorlog — most notably the bronze statue raised in 1922 in honour of the Catholic military chaplain Pastoor H. C. Verbraak, whose long service in Atjeh had made him the most celebrated soldaten-pastoor of the colonial army. The city’s connection to the Atjeh campaigns is documented in the source DLP-84-Atjeh, which records that a statue commemorating both Verbraak and the Ambonese Protestant chaplain Ds. Thenu stood in the city, reflecting its role as a site of colonial remembrance.
Colonial Memory and the Atjeh Statues
The presence of the Verbraak statue — and the companion memorial to Ds. Thenu — at Bandoeng indicates the city’s connection to the Dutch military and religious figures active in the Aceh campaigns of 1873–1904 and the subsequent pacificatie. The bronze statue of Verbraak was unveiled on 27 January 1922 at a ceremony at which Generaal Dijkstra delivered a commemorative address and the Very Reverend Pater van Hoof, on behalf of the Bishop and the clergy, expressed their thanks. The ceremony is independently noted in the mission jubilee volume of 1934 in the context of the Pastoor Verbraak-Stichting, the foundation to which the existing military homes were transferred in the same period. The choice of Bandoeng rather than Koeta-Radja for the memorial reflects the city’s status, by the early twentieth century, as the principal seat of the colonial military establishment in Java — the place at which the memory of the Atjeh campaign was most fully institutionalised.
Bandung as Colonial Centre
Beyond its memorial function, Bandoeng was, by the 1920s, the principal city of the Preanger highlands and a major centre of colonial administration, education, and military organisation. The city housed the colonial military school (Dutch: Koninklijke Militaire Academie was at Breda in the Netherlands, but Bandoeng had the Militaire School for KNIL officers), the technical college (Dutch: Technische Hoogeschool) that became the Bandung Institute of Technology, and the headquarters of the colonial army’s west-Java command. The statue to Verbraak thus stood in a city whose daily life was structured by the institutions of the colonial state that had carried out the Atjeh campaigns. The memorial culture of Bandoeng — the statues, the military cemeteries, the officers’ clubs — was the metropolitan counterpart to the garrison culture of Koeta-Radja and the field stations of the Atjeh-tram postenlinie, and it was at Bandoeng that the memory of the war was preserved, debated, and commemorated in the decades after the formal close of the conflict in 1904.
See Also
- Pastoor Verbraak
- Ds. Thenu
- Aceh War
- Pacification of Atjeh
- Koeta-Radja
- Generaal Dijkstra
- Pater van Hoof
- Vierhonderd jaren missie in Nederlandsch Indië (1934)
- Pastoor Verbraak-Stichting
- Atjeh-tram
- Dutch East Indies
- Java
Source
DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, p. 8.