Malang — a city in the eastern highlands of Java in the Netherlands Indies — was, in the source DLP-84-Atjeh, a posting of the Catholic military chaplain Pastoor H. C. Verbraak after his service in Padang and his long tenure at Atjeh, and one of the cities in which he continued his work among the colonial troops of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (Dutch: *Indische Leger*) in the years before his final retirement to Magelang. The city’s connection to the Atjeh campaigns is therefore indirect — through the chaplaincy of Verbraak — but it illustrates the wider Java-based network of military stations through which the colonial army’s spiritual care was organised.
Pastoral Work of Pastoor Verbraak
Verbraak’s apostolate at Malang, recorded in the biographical literature on the soldaten-pastoor of Atjeh, involved ministering to the soldiers stationed in the colonial barracks of the city, extending his influence beyond the war-footing of Atjeh to the more routine garrison life of east Java. After leaving Atjeh in 1908, Verbraak held a less fatiguing post at Padang from 1908 to 1912, and thereafter served in central and eastern Java — including, according to the source, the posting at Malang — before retiring to Magelang in central Java, where he died in 1918. His body was buried with military honours, and a bronze statue was later raised to him at Bandoeng in 1922. The posting at Malang belongs, therefore, to the closing phase of Verbraak’s long colonial career — the phase in which the chaplain of the Atjeh war-footing became the senior Catholic figure of the Netherlands Indies military establishment, and in which his ministry was extended, through the network of Java garrisons, to the soldiers who had inherited the legacy of the Atjeh-oorlog.
Malang as a Colonial Garrison City
Beyond its connection to Verbraak, Malang was, by the early twentieth century, one of the principal cities of east Java and a major centre of colonial administration, military organisation, and the European plantation economy of the highlands. The city’s cool upland climate made it a favoured residence for European planters and colonial officials, and its military garrison was one of the principal stations of the colonial army in east Java. The chaplaincy at Malang — exercised by Verbraak and by his successors — thus belonged to the wider infrastructure of military religion that the colonial state maintained across the Netherlands Indies, from the forward posts of Atjeh-tram postenlinie to the garrison towns of Java. The city’s connection to the Atjeh campaigns, through the person of Verbraak, is a small but telling instance of the way in which the memory and the personnel of the Atjeh war were distributed across the wider colonial archipelago in the decades after 1904.
See Also
- Pastoor Verbraak
- Padang
- Magelang
- Bandung
- Aceh War
- Indische Leger
- Dutch East Indies
- Java
- Koeta-Radja
- Atjeh-tram
- Olehleh
- Pante Perak
Source
DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 6–7.