Category Archives: nationalism

by | 24 January 2010 · 2:31 pm

A Preacher, a Pilot, and POWs

Here is another memoir, this time in the form of a sermon on forgiveness, from my 85-year-old father. He’s a former missionary to Japan and now an oft retired country preacher, so everything he writes ends up sounding like a sermon, just as anything I write ends up sounding like an academic essay.

On December 7, 1941, I was a senior at Franklin High School in Southampton County, Virginia. I remember that the principal assembled us in the school auditorium to hear President Roosevelt speak to the American people by radio. He announced the infamous attack by Japanese planes on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. He also declared war on Japan. I finished high school in June 1942 and entered Richmond College that fall.

My high school ended at grade 11, so I entered college when I was 17. My military draft board granted me a ministerial deferment, which required me to attend college all 12 months of the year, so finished when I was 20 years old. In all those years, I had never met a Japanese person and, to say the least, they were not depicted in a flattering manner in the news reels I saw during the war.

On August 15, 1945, I was pastor of the Lawrenceville Baptist Church in Brunswick County, Virginia. That day we heard that World War II had ended, and that night we had a prayer meeting at the church, during which I felt my first real tug to be a missionary to Japan. I remember one deacon prayed, “Lord, we have sent soldiers to Japan to defeat them in war; now let us send missionaries to lead them to Christ. That for me was a sort of call to go as a missionary, since I had not been called to go as a soldier.

I eventually arrived in Japan as a Southern Baptist missionary in August 1950. After two years of language study in Tokyo I was assigned to be chaplain of Seinan Jo Gakuin in Kokura (now part of the city of Kitakyushu), a Southern Baptist school for Japanese girls that ran from junior high school through junior college. Sunday attendance at church was required and we held frequent chapel services, at which different faculty members spoke. As pastor of Mt. Zion Church on campus, I was quite often asked to speak. Sometimes we had an outside speaker.

On one such occasion, I shared the platform with a speaker of the day who was famous in Japan as Captain Mitsuo Fuchida. It was he who led the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reason he was speaking at a Christian school was that he had become a Christian and was by then well known in Japan as one who called the Japanese people to renew faith in themselves and in Christ. I remember well his message that day and on another occasion when I heard him give an expanded version of that same message. He was not a powerful speaker but his message was one of power. I shall attempt to give a brief version of the message he gave in Japanese, which lasted an hour and a half.

When the War in the Pacific, as the Japanese called it, ended in defeat for Japan, this came as a great shock to the Japanese people who had been told by their leaders, “We are winning the war on all fronts.” Mitsuo Fuchida was the only pilot still living who took part in that attack on Pearl Harbor. They had continued to fight an increasingly less victorious war, and one by one they had been killed in battle. Fuchida told of several very close calls he himself had experienced and said that he believed he had been spared to share the Gospel with Japan. He considered it to be their best, if not only, hope.

Mitsuo Fuchida had believed, as the Japanese people had been led to believe since childhood, that Japan had been especially chosen by the gods. Nihon or Nippon “Land of the Rising Sun”—as depicted on their national flag. They were taught to believe that one day Isanagi and Isanami (Mr. and Mrs. God) stood on the Bridge of Heaven and Isanagi dipped his sword into the ocean. When he withdrew it, the drops of water from it that fell back into the ocean coagulated and formed the Japanese Islands. Then, Mr. and Mrs. God went down to live on these islands and their children became the Japanese people. Amaterasu Omikami, the Sun Goddess, was the mother of the Japanese Imperial Family, the ancestor of Emperor Hirohito. All Japanese schools taught this as history until the end of the war. Since the meaning of kami in Japanese does not completely match that of the English word God, it is difficult to compare religious meanings, but even after the Emperor declared that he was not kami, there continued to be a sense that he remained the father of the Japanese family and the chief religious personage.

After the war ended, Fuchida returned to Japan a defeated and very depressed man. He loved Japan and wanted desperately to see her rise from the ashes of defeat and be a great nation again. One day he heard of some prisoners of war returning from America and he went to see and hear them. Of their many experiences, the one that impressed him most was the one they emphasized the most. It was their relating the story of a young American teenage girl who came to their prisoner-of-war camp every day to minister to them. She brought them small personal items they needed, and each time asked “Is there anything else I do?”

The prisoners did not trust her and believed that she was a plant sent to spy on them. But when she persisted, they did begin to ask her for toothpaste, soap, and so on, and she answered their requests faithfully. This went on for quite a while until the end of the war and they were released to come back to Japan. Out of curiosity, they asked her why she had been so kind to them, her enemies. She told them that her parents had been missionaries to Japan at the beginning of the war and had fled to the Philippines when their lives were endangered. When the Japanese conquered the Philippines, the missionaries hid in caves. When Japanese soldiers eventually found them, and discovered they spoke Japanese, they were accused of being spies and told that they would be killed. They answered, “We are prepared to die, but give us half an hour before we are killed.” They were granted this request and knelt to pray until the Japanese soldiers beheaded them with their swords.

When their daughter in the U.S. got news of this, she hated the Japanese. She said, “They went to Japan to share the love of God and were killed as spies.” Her hate began to consume her until finally she sought spiritual counsel and was led to remember the teachings and example of her parents. She read the Bible and came upon the verse in Luke 23:34 where Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” When she remembered the spirit of her parents, she was sure they repeated that prayer before they died at the hands of the Japanese soldiers.

So, she prayed and found the strength to forgive the ones who killed her parents and believed that if they had known the Christ her parents believed in, they would never had done such a thing so she began to prepare herself to go to Japan as a missionary to carry on the work her parents had done in Japan. However, she was in high school and knew that missionaries have to complete college, and usually further training, before being appointed as missionaries. She didn’t want to wait that long and asked how she could be a missionary until then. Well, there were Japanese prisoners of war very near her and she began to minister to them. The soldiers were so impressed by her story that they stressed it when they related their experiences to Fuchida and others. Fuchida thought they had made up this story, that it could not possibly be true, but he could not forget it.

Later, Fuchida was summoned to Tokyo to testify in the war crimes trials. He led the attack on Pearl Harbor so he would know the exact time of the attack. This was important to establish whether or not Japan’s representatives at the time lied in their assertions to the United States at the time that the attacks were planned and underway. As Fuchida came out of Shibuya train station in Tokyo, he passed a young American man who was handing out Christian tracts. He took one and read on the front this title, “I was a prisoner of the Japanese.” This made him remember the story of the Japanese prisoners in America.

The man described in the tract was named Jacob DeShazer, a gunner on one of the planes that took part in one of the first air raids on Tokyo under the command of General Doolittle. DeShazer’s plane was shot down and he and the rest of the crew were captured by the Japanese. They were brought to Tokyo and paraded through the streets, experiencing the hate and derision of its citizens. They were kept in a small dark prison cell, about 6 feet square, with one small window near the top. They were kept in total isolation, having interpersonal contact only with the Japanese guards, who were especially chosen for their hateful treatment of prisoners. Day after day Jacob lived in this darkness and isolation until he was about to lose his mind. In desperation he tried to think of anything from his past that could help him, and he remembered going to Sunday School as a child and hearing stories from the Bible. He asked the guards for a Bible and, after many requests, they finally brought him one, telling him he could keep it for three weeks.

Jacob awoke each morning as the light came in through the small window of his cell and he read the Bible as long as daylight allowed, and he committed to memory many verses. One impressed him especially. It was the verse telling of Jesus’ prayer asking that those who conducted his crucifixion be forgiven, Luke 23:34. So, Jacob DeShazer prayed for help and found peace and comfort there in this prison cell as he accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior. He learned from the Bible that to become a Christian one has to change, especially to change in his relationship with other people. The only persons Jacob had contact with were the hated prison guards, so he realized that he had to change in his attitude toward them. He began to respond to their hate with kindness, and they began to respond by treating him less hatefully. Jacob decided that the reason these guards treated him so hatefully was that they did not know the Christ he had come to know and that had wrought such change in his life. So, he prayed, “Lord, if you will help me to survive this I will come back to Japan as a missionary to tell the Japanese about Christ.”

Jacob lived in these conditions until the end of the war. I remember news reel scenes of the starving POWs who were released to come home to the United States. Jacob came back to America and, after he recovered his health, he went back to finish high school, attending with much younger kids who must have wondered about him. He was there to prepare for college so he could go back to Japan as a missionary. When he finished college, he still did not speak Japanese, so he wrote out his testimony under the title “I was a prisoner of the Japanese,” then had it translated into Japanese so he could take it to Japan to share with people who had once hated him and held him a prisoner. By divine providence, Jacob DeShazer was standing outside Shibuya Station handing out copies of his tract when Mitsuo Fuchida came by and took one.

Fuchida read again of the Book and of the verse in it, Luke 23:34, that he had heard made such a difference in both the young girl in America who ministered to Japanese POWs and in the life of this young man who had been a POW of the Japanese. He still found it hard to believe, but he was desperate to find a message of hope for the land that he loved. If this message were true it was just what Japan needed. So he bought a small New Testament and began reading it. He sought spiritual guidance and found Christ as his personal Savior.

At that time Eleanor Roosevelt was visiting Japan, and Fuchida heard the chant, “Americans may forgive Pearl Harbor but we will never forgive Hiroshima.” So Fuchida began to tell of his journey from being a leader in one of the most hate-filled wars in history, to being a leader in Christian love, building up a cycle of love instead of hate. In his words, “We hate, and are hated in return, and then we hate more, and we have all seen where that can lead.” But, he says, “We love, and we are likely to be loved in return, which begins the cycle of love.” He said in a message I heard him deliver one night in Okayama, Japan, “I have participated in the cycle of hate for much of my life. For the rest of my life I want to begin the cycle of love as often as I can in as many places as I can.”

During the first part of his 90-minute message, he told of how he was trained as a pilot and chosen to lead in the attack on Japan. His demeanor showed the arrogance he had felt during that part of his life. Then, he paused, leaned forward and said, “Then one day I met Jesus Christ. I learned for the first time in my life that I, Mitsuo Fuchida, am a sinner and I must repent.” He said he learned that repentance of sin means turning 180 degrees and walking in the opposite direction. He told how he had done that and it was one of the best definitions of repentance and best examples of its application I have ever experienced.

Fuchida came to America and spoke at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. He spoke in many places and always told of the testimony of a young American girl whose faith has been the first evidence he had heard of the power of the Christian faith. I don’t remember the name of the girl but her parents were American Baptist missionaries at the beginning of the War. She later appeared on the platform with Fuchida when he gave his testimony in the U.S. In Japan, Mitsuo Fuchida and Jacob DeShazer met and shared their testimony and their life together in Christian witnessing. I had the joy of meeting DeShazer at Lake Nojiri in Japan, where missionaries come to vacation in the summer. I heard Fuchida on three occasions and he visited my home for a meal in Kokura while he was at Seinan Jo Gakuin.

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, nationalism, religion, U.S., war

by | 16 January 2010 · 12:52 pm

Cracking Down on Korean Christians, 1938-45

From Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea, by Timothy S. Lee (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2010), p. 58:

On June 25, 1945, the governor-general abolished all Korean Protestant denominations and reduced the Korean Protestant churches to the Korea division of the Japanese Christian Church (Ilbon kidokkyo Chosŏn kyodan).

The period from September 1938 (the month of the twenty-seventh general assembly of the Presbyterian Church), to August 15, 1945 (Korea’s liberation from Japan), was the harshest that evangelicalism endured under the Japanese rule. During this time the government-general set about systematically perverting the religion. It abolished all holidays, including Sunday, allowing only an hour or two for worship. Hymnals were bowdlerized to remove any reference to spiritual freedom or mention of Jesus as the “king of kings,” since that would amount to lèse majesté against the emperor. It disallowed portions of the Bible, especially the prophetic books such as Daniel and Revelation. It outlawed key Christian beliefs like the final judgment and the second coming of Christ. Every church worship had to open with a Shintoistic ritual, which included singing the Japanese national anthem, giving a pledge of allegiance (kokumin seisi　国民誓詞), bowing to the emperor’s palace (kyujo yohai [宮城遥拝 J. kyūjō yōhai]), and praying to the Sun Goddess (mokto [黙祷 J. mokutō]). In this latter phase of the Japanese captivity of the church, every Christian church was compelled to install within it a small Shinto shrine (kamidana [神棚]).

With the institutional church now reduced to an instrument of Japanese colonial policy, if Korean church leaders retained their positions, they could not escape from doing at least some amount of collaborative work with the Japanese. Many church leaders did retain their positions and were adroitly used by the government-general. They were forced, for example, to renounce their ties with the missionaries, by making statements like, “We are resolved to set ourselves free from the past principle of reliance on Europe and America and establish a purely Japanese Christianity.” They were also exploited for a variety of war efforts, such as helping to collect church bells to be melted down for scrap metal, raising funds to purchase fighter planes for the Japanese navy, and urging young Korean men and women to fight and die for the Japanese emperor.

On the other hand, even as there were collaborators, there were others—though fewer—who resisted the Japanese imposition till the end. When the Shinto shrine issue arose in the 1930s, Christians all over the country resisted the Japanese demand. These resisters came from both the leadership and the rank-and-file of the church. Though found in just about every denomination in Korea, they were especially numerous in the Presbyterian Church.

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, Korea, nationalism, religion, war

by | 14 December 2009 · 8:37 pm

Bulgarian Macedo-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Terrorism

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 247-252:

Once an autonomous Bulgarian state emerged in 1878, Macedonia became a battle-ground for insurgent bands. Secret guerrilla units, supported from Sofia, were formed by intellectuals aiming to restore the greater Bulgaria of the San Stefano Treaty. Kidnapping rich foreigners now provided a way of bringing much-needed cash into revolutionary coffers while simultaneously shining the unwelcome spotlight of international attention on the deficiencies of Ottoman administration.

In 1901 the new political brigandage made international headlines in the so-called Miss Stone affair when a redoubtable American missionary was kidnapped in a narrow valley north of Salonica. Ellen Stone was, in fact, the first American victim of twentieth-century terrorism. Her kidnappers had spoken Turkish when seizing her in order to throw the weight of suspicion on the Ottoman authorities, and to encourage Western opinion to believe that the latter could no longer guarantee law and order in their European provinces. But the ring-leader was a young Bulgarian-Macedonian activist, Yane Sandanski, and his profile in no way fitted that of the typical brigand of yesteryear: literate, a socialist, and a schoolteacher, he was a leading figure in an underground political grouping called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Violence was no longer merely a means to a livelihood; in the hands of activists, it was becoming an instrument of nationalist politics in what the world came to know as the Macedonian Question.

IN SALONICA A SMALL NUMBER of Bulgarians broke away from the Greek community and joined the Exarchate in 1871; by 1912 they numbered about six thousand. They were stonemasons, traders, shopkeepers and teachers—practical men drawn from the Macedonian hills—with no one of any great wealth to lead them and little influence in municipal affairs. They were supported, however, by the Russian consul, and once a Bulgarian state was founded, by its representatives as well. They were greatly heartened by the remarkable outcome of the 1876 uprising against Ottoman rule, and encouraged further by the territorial provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano which would—had it been allowed to stand—have handed over most of Salonica’s hinterland to Bulgaria. Schooling was one of their priorities, and in 1880 they founded a gymnasium—many of whose pupils soon found their way into the ranks of new pro-Slav political movements.

To be “Bulgarian” initially meant to support the Exarchate: it was a linguistic-religious rather than a national category. But after the creation of an autonomous Bulgarian principality in 1878, irredentist politicians in its capital, Sofia, started demanding autonomy for “the Macedonians” as well. Meanwhile, in Salonica itself, a militant new organization was incubating: in November 1893 the “Bulgarian Macedo-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Committee” was founded by a group of men reared on the ideas of Russian anarchism, and proclaimed open to any who wished to fight for liberation from the Turks and autonomy for Macedonia. Sofia-based activists regarded it with suspicion and did not trust its commitment to Bulgarian interests. Eventually the committee dropped any reference to Bulgaria from its name, and it became known simply as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) with the slogan “Macedonia for the Macedonians.”

Most of IMRO’s youthful members were not much bothered about the old disputes over dead sacred languages. What was the difference between the Greek of the liturgy and Old Church Slavonic? After all, hardly anyone understood either of them. Between these youthful secularists—whose motto was “Neither God nor Master”—and the devout supporters of the Bulgarian Exarchate a gulf emerged. Even within its own ranks, IMRO was deeply factionalized…. It might be going too far to say that IMRO was a more coherent and efficient force in the minds of its enemies than it was in reality but it certainly made little impact on the Ottoman state.

Politically IMRO was no more successful. Autonomy for Macedonia—which was the name Balkan Christians (and Europe) gave to the Ottoman vilayets of Salonica, Monastir and Uskub (Skopje)—was the goal: a “Bulgarian” governor would rule the province from Salonica, all officials would be “Bulgarian” Slavs, and Bulgarian would be an official language on an equal footing with Turkish. But faced with such a prospect, Greeks lent the support of their intelligence networks to the Ottoman authorities, and in Salonica itself Greek agents in the Hamidian police helped track IMRO sympathizers. Even more important an obstacle was the opposition of the Great Powers. Russia was now focused on central and east Asia—the conflict with Japan was only a few years away—and Britain and Austria saw the Balkans as one area where they could all work in harmony to support the status quo. They pushed—as Great Powers often will—for incremental reform rather than revolutionary change, and merely urged the Porte to take steps to improve the administration of the province.

Frustrated with the impasse which faced them, and believing that targeting the symbols of European capitalism might force the Powers to intervene, some young anarchists in Salonica took matters into their own hands, and decided to blow up the Ottoman Bank, in the European quarter. Under the influence of their beloved Russians, they called themselves the “Troublemakers,” and later adopted the term “the Boatmen”—by which they identified themselves with those “who abandon the daily routine and the limits of legal order and sail towards freedom and the wild seas beyond them.”…

The two surviving members of the plot, Shatev and Bogdanov, returned to Macedonia in the amnesty of 1908: Bogdanov died a few years later, but Pavel Shatev lived until 1952, becoming a lawyer in interwar Bulgaria and then minister of justice in the postwar Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

IMRO sputtered on, although the bombers had dealt a near-fatal blow to the organization in the city. The better-known Ilinden uprising which took place on St. Elias’s Day a few months later was the IMRO leadership’s own anxious attempt to arouse a peasant revolt against Turkish rule. But its chief consequence was that several thousand more Christian peasants were killed by Ottoman troops in reprisal. The only success IMRO could claim after this series of bloody failures was a further diplomatic intervention by the Great Powers—their last significant involvement in the tangled Macedonia question before the Balkan Wars. The Ottoman authorities were forced to swallow the appointment of European officials to supervise the policing of the province. Among the younger army officers stationed there, resentment and a sense of humiliation led to the first stirrings of conspiracy against the Porte. On the other hand, Macedonia remained part of the empire and Hilmi Pasha continued as inspector-general. The one conclusion to be drawn from the rise and fall of IMRO was that ending Ottoman power in Europe would not come that way: the use of terrorism to embroil and involve the Great Powers was futile when the Powers upheld the status quo.

There is nothing new under the sun! This will have to be the last of my many excerpts from this fascinating book. I have too much else to do over the coming weeks (and months).

1 Comment

Filed under Balkans, Greece, language, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey

by | 12 December 2009 · 8:09 am

Salonica, 1800s: Religion vs. Nation

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 242-243:

TO THE OTTOMAN AUTHORITIES what had always mattered were religious rather than national or linguistic differences: Balkan Christians were either under the authority of the Patriarch in Constantinople or they were—more rarely—Catholic or Protestant. The Patriarchate shared the same outlook; it was indifferent to whether its flock spoke Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian or any other language or dialect. As for the illiterate Slav-speaking peasants tilling the fields, they rarely felt strongly about either Greece or Bulgaria and when asked which they were, many insisted on being known simply, as they had been for centuries, as “Christians.”

In Salonica itself, the growth of the Christian population had come from continual immigration over centuries from outlying villages, often as distant as the far side of the Pindos mountains, where many of the inhabitants spoke not Greek but Vlach (a Romance language akin to Romanian), Albanian or indeed various forms of Slavic. The city’s life, schools and priests gave these villagers, or their children, a new tongue, and turned them into Greeks. In fact many famous Greek figures of the past were really Vlachs by origin, including the savant Mosiodax, the revolutionary Rhigas Velestinlis, as well as the city’s first “Greek” printers, the Garbolas family, and the Manakis brothers, pioneers of Balkan cinema. “Twenty years ago there was nothing in Balkan politics so inevitable, so nearly axiomatic, as the connection of the Vlachs with the Greek cause,” wrote Brailsford in 1905. “They had no national consciousness and no national ambition … With some of them Hellenism was a passion and an enthusiasm. They believed themselves to be Greek. They baptized their children ‘Themistocles’ and ‘Penelope.’ They studied in Athens and they left their fortunes to Greek schools and Greek hospitals.” So many Vlachs settled in Salonica that in 1880 a Romanian paper claimed, to the fury of the Greek community, that there were no genuine Greeks there at all. Changing—or rather, acquiring—nationality was often simply a matter of upward mobility and a French consul once notoriously boasted that with a million pounds he could make Macedonians into Frenchmen.

Money affected nationality in other ways as well. In the Ottoman system, the Orthodox Church was not merely a focus of spiritual life; it was also a gatherer of taxes. Peasants in the countryside, just like wealthy magnates in Salonica itself, chafed at the power and corruption that accompanied these privileges. But while most bishops and the higher ecclesiastical hierarchy spoke Greek—the traditional language of the church and religious learning—and looked down on the use of Slavic, most Christian peasants around Salonica spoke Bulgarian—or if not Bulgarian then a Slavic tongue close to it. This started to matter to the peasants themselves once they identified Greek with the language not merely of holy scripture but of excessive taxation and corruption. In 1860, the Bishop of Cassandra’s extortions actually drove some villagers under his jurisdiction to threaten to convert to Catholicism—French priests from Salonica contacted the families concerned, promising them complete freedom of worship and a “Bishop of your own creed who will not take a single piastre from you.” Other villagers from near Kilkis demanded a bishop who would provide the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic and got one after they too started to declare themselves for Rome.

Yet what these peasants were talking was about shifting their religious not their national allegiance and it took decades for the discontent of the village tax-payer to be further transformed into nationalism. Greek continued to be the language of upward mobility through the nineteenth century. As for Bulgarian self-consciousness, this was slow to develop. Sir Henry Layard visited Salonica in 1842 to enquire into the movement which was alleged to be in progress amongst the Bulgarians but he did not find very much. “The Bulgarians, being of the Greek faith” he wrote later, “were then included by the Porte in classifying the Christian subjects of the Sultan, among the Greeks. It was not until many years afterwards that the Christians to the south of the Balkans speaking the Bulgarian language, were recognized as a distinct nation. At the time of my visit to Salonica no part of its Christian population, which was considerable, was known as Bulgarian.”

What led Slavic speakers to see their mother tongue in a new light was the influence of political ideologies coming from central and eastern Europe. German-inspired romantic nationalism glorified and ennobled the language of the peasantry and insisted it was as worthy of study and propagation as any other. Pan-Slavism—helped along perhaps by Russian agents—gave them pride in their unwritten family tongue and identified the enemy, for the first time, as Greek cultural arrogance. “I feel a great sorrow,” wrote Kiryak/Kyriakos Durzhiovich/Darlovitsi, the printer, “that although I am a Bulgarian I do not know how to write in the Bulgarian language.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Balkans, Bulgaria, education, Greece, language, nationalism, religion, Romania, Turkey

by | 10 December 2009 · 6:30 am

Secularizing Religious Education in Salonica

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 220-221:

The struggle for communal authority was fought out over many areas—care for the poor and sick, the upkeep of cemeteries, the administration of religious foundations themselves—but the key battleground was education. For religious learning alone was no longer enough. Ties with the West meant also that local merchants needed employees to be familiar with modern languages, mathematics and geography. The notable Jewish families pushed hard for the use of Italian and French books in the old Talmud Torah in the 1840s. When they got nowhere, they obtained a firman to found their own pilot school, run by a German rabbi whom the local rabbis regarded as an impious foreigner. But the real educational revolution among Salonican Jewry only came in 1873 when the same notables opened a branch of the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle—the very embodiment of French Enlightenment liberalism—in the teeth of fierce opposition from the elderly chief rabbi. It was an extraordinary success: by 1912 the Alliance was responsible for educating more than four thousand pupils, over half the total number of children in Jewish schools. “I was once invited to an annual gathering of the Israelite Alliance,” wrote a British journalist during the First World War. “There were many hundreds of Jews there, male and female, and a great many of them were once removed only from the street porter class. But they rattled off French as if they had been born to it.” Not only were the majority of the city’s Jewish children receiving an education outside the control of the religious authorities, but they were receiving it on the basis of the principles of contemporary French republicanism. Such a trend had a corrosive effect on the authority of the chief rabbi, and helped turn him slowly into more and more of a purely religious and spiritual figurehead.

Within the Greek community similar shifts were taking place. In the old days, children learned reading and writing from the occasional literate priest or from the so-called didaskaloi who gave lessons as they passed through the city. But in 1828 the junior high school was reestablished, and a girls’ school was set up in 1845. The primary school population climbed from 1500 in 1874 to nearly 2000 in 1900 and 3900 by the time the Greek army arrived in 1912. An Educational Society was set up in 1872 with its own private library and a commitment to “useful knowledge,” and in 1876 a teacher-training college followed. Salonica’s Greek high school was recognized by the University of Athens, a development of huge significance for the rise of Greek nationalism, and the control of school standards and appointments was also handled by representatives of the Greek state. Through education in other words, the Greeks of Salonica gradually reoriented themselves towards the new national centre in Athens. The Patriarchate in Istanbul, which had once enjoyed unchallenged authority over the empire’s Orthodox believers, found itself losing ground.

Within the city’s Muslim community, pedagogical arguments were also raging. All Riza, a minor customs official, quarrelled with his wife Zübeyde, over how to educate their son, Mustafa. Zübeyde, a devout woman who was nicknamed the mollah, followed the older conception or education and wanted him to attend the neighbourhood Qur’anic school. His father, on the other hand, favoured the new style of schooling pioneered by a renowned local teacher, Shemsi Effendi, who ran the first private primary school in the empire. In the end, the young Mustafa started at the first and finished at the second, before moving to the military preparatory college. Helped by his education and by Salonica’s new beer-gardens and nightlife, he became a pronounced secularist, thereby foreshadowing in his own upbringing the trajectory through which—by then better known to the world as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—he would later lead post-Ottoman Turkey.

Mustafa Kemal’s experiences were not unusual, for the spirit of Western education was transforming local Muslim cultures of learning. The Ma’min were setting up private schools like Shemsi’s, and state officials like Mustafa Kemal’s father shared their vision of a modernizing Islam. Investment in education had been a priority of the reformers in Istanbul, and m 1869 a new imperial Ordinance of General Education outlined a school system, based partly on the French lycée model that would promote knowledge of science, technology and commerce among both boys and girls. Reaction from the long-established medreses was fierce but under Sultan Abdul Hamid this was overcome, in part by emphasizing the Islamic character of the new schools. A state schooling sector emerged in Salonica and the city’s first vocational college the Ecole des Arts et Métiers, trained orphans in typography, lithography, tailoring and music. Later came a teacher-training college, a junior high school, a commercial school and a preparatory school for civil servants—the Idadié—housed in an imposing neo-classical building standing just beyond the eastern walls. (Today it contains the chief administrative offices of the University of Thessaloniki.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Balkans, education, France, Greece, language, Mediterranean, nationalism, Turkey

by | 6 December 2009 · 1:31 pm

Mutiny & Tragedy Aboard the Hōkūle‘a, 1976-78

From “Playing with Canoes,” by Ben Finney, in Pacific Places, Pacific Histories, ed. by Brij Lal (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 294-296:

Hōkūle‘a was launched in 1975, and after a year of testing, training, and making modifications we sailed her to Tahiti and returned as promised. That demonstration blew a big hole in [Andrew] Sharp’s claim that Polynesians could not have intentionally made long, navigated voyages. Furthermore, Hōkūle‘a emerged as a cultural icon credited with helping to spark a general cultural renaissance among the Hawaiians, as well as with stiffening the resolve of the Tahitians to secure more autonomy from the French. These triumphal aspects of the story have often been told. Less well known are the politics of the voyaging revival.

During fund-raising and construction and those first heady days when we sailed Hōkūle‘a around the Hawaiian chain, all went well except for a few mishaps and disagreements. However, by early 1976, just a few months before the voyage, serious troubles began while the canoe was being refitted. A number of Hawaiians, many of whom had not played any role in the project, began to claim Hōkūle‘a as their own and to use her locally for various purposes other than the stated mission. These ranged from the political to the personal—from invading the island of Kaho‘olawe to protest its use as a naval bombing range to cruising around the Hawaiian chain for the romantic benefit of male crewmembers. More chilling were the demands of a spiritual leader who claimed that Hōkūle‘a was ritually “dirty” and would sink with all hands unless he was paid an enormous sum of money to purify her.

All this might have been shrugged off as so much craziness but for the very real incongruity of having a haole professor run a project that had been so hyped as a Polynesian venture. That made me consider resigning as president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and handing the job over to our vice president, Herb Kane, in hopes that he might be more effective in dealing with these demands. But then Herb himself abruptly left the project, saying that he was thoroughly burned out and financially impoverished from supervising the construction of the canoe and making the first test sails around the islands. As Tommy Holmes preferred to stay in the background, that left me, the haole who wasn’t even from Hawai‘i, to fend off all those who in the name of Hawaiian nationalism were attempting to take over the canoe.

Had those clamoring for control of the canoe been skilled seamen dedicated to carrying out the voyage as planned, I could have gone ahead and resigned the presidency and then concentrated on the research side of the voyage. But they were not real sailors, nor did they have any intention of conducting the experimental voyage. In fact, they had come to believe that using a canoe for research would desecrate the spiritual nature of Hōkūle‘a.

Given this situation I realized that if I did resign I would betray the hundreds of contributors and supporters, many of them Hawaiians whom I had promised to sail the canoe to Tahiti and back. Furthermore I would also have let down those expert sailors whom I had personally recruited for the voyage: Kawika Kapahulehua, the veteran catamaran sailor from the remote island of Ni‘ihau who was our captain; Mau Piailug, the master navigator from the Micronesian atoll of Satawal who would guide the canoe to Tahiti and back; and my longtime Tahitian friend Rodo Williams, a professional fisherman and copra boat skipper whose job was to pilot us safely past the atolls that lay just to the north-northeast of Tahiti.

So I stuck it out, and thanks to the help of Kawika, Mau, Rodo and several other sailors who were also determined to make the voyage a reality, plus the moral support of Edward Kealanahele and many others on shore, we finally set sail for Tahiti. After a little over a month at sea we entered Pape‘ete Harbor to be greeted by the largest crowd ever assembled on the island. Nonetheless, although the actual sailing of the canoe had proceeded as planned, leftover resentments had festered at sea among a number of crewmembers who had been caught up in the troubles back in Hawai‘i. Halfway to Tahiti they staged a confrontation to accuse the leaders of mismanagement and to demand special treatment for themselves. After that, they quit standing watch and spent the rest of the voyage eating, sleeping, and smoking pakalōlō (crazy tobacco, i.e., marijuana) that they had smuggled on board. Bizarre as that situation was, it did allow the rest of us to sail the canoe on to Tahiti in relative peace—until the night before landing, when the mutineers staged another protest that left blood on the deck. That so incensed Mau Piailug that upon landing he quit the canoe in disgust and flew back to Micronesia vowing never to sail with Hawaiians again.

Even after Captain Kawika Kapahulehua and some fine young crewmembers who had not been directly involved in the troubles sailed Hōkūle‘a swiftly back to Hawai’i, the travail was not over. I had made so many enemies by my efforts to keep the voyage on track that I became the scapegoat blamed for causing all the troubles. Enough was enough, and I resigned and started work on a scientific report about the voyage and a book—Hōkūle‘a, the Way to Tahiti—that I owed a New York publisher whose sizable contribution had enabled us to start building the canoe.

After taking stock of the situation the new leaders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society resolved to remove the stain left from the troubles by repeating the voyage to Tahiti with a specially selected crew. Unfortunately, in their zeal to distance themselves from those who had led the 1976 voyage they totally ignored Captain Kapahulehua, the man who had just taken Hōkūle‘a so surely and safely to Tahiti and back and could have showed them how to do it again.

Overconfidence, a casual attitude toward safety, and basic errors in seamanship doomed this second attempt to reach Tahiti. Just before midnight, after less than six hours at sea, the canoe capsized while being foolishly driven hard under full sail in gale-force winds and immense seas. Not until dusk of the following day was the overturned canoe spotted by a passing aircraft just as she was drifting south of the interisland sea and air lanes. All crewmembers but one were rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter, and the following day Hōkūle‘a was towed in, severely damaged, though the hulls were still structurally sound. Missing was Eddie Aikau, a world-champion surfer who some hours before the canoe had been spotted had valiantly tried to paddle his surfboard through the breaking seas to the nearest island to get help. He was never seen again.

The waves are getting huge on O‘ahu’s North Shore and The Eddie is expected to begin any day now.

1 Comment

Filed under Hawai'i, migration, nationalism, Polynesia, science

by | 22 November 2009 · 5:44 pm

The Near Eastern Crisis of 1875-78

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 167-169:

Beginning with a peasant uprising in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the troubles spread in 1876 to Bulgaria and the Danubian provinces and ended with an invasion by the Russian army the following year. The Treaty of San Stefano, which Russia imposed on the empire early in 1878, created a vast new Bulgarian state which passed just to the north of Salonica itself and cut it off from its hinterland. Even after the other Great Powers forced Russia to back down and tore up the San Stefano agreement, there was no disguising the humiliation suffered by the Porte: at the Congress of Berlin, Serbia was declared independent, an autonomous (if smaller) Bulgaria was established under Russian control, Cyprus was occupied by British troops (as the price for supporting the Turks) and the Great Powers forced the Ottoman authorities to pledge a further programme of administrative reforms.

These events deeply affected Salonica. As always in time of war, the city was in a febrile state—filled with soldiers, requisitioning agents, tax-collectors and rumours. Muslim notables criticized the diplomacy of the Porte and feared for the first time “being driven out of Europe.” The Bulgarian insurrection actually broke out just three days before the killing of the consuls in Salonica; rumours of the rising had reached the city, together with reports of outrages on Muslim villagers and of plans to drive them from their homes. At one point the authorities feared that Salonica’s Christians too would rise to prompt a Russian advance on the city itself, and the Vali warned he would quell any insurrection in the harshest manner. “I know him to be of the party in Turkey,” wrote the British consul, “who believe the Eastern Question can only be solved by the destruction, or at least the expatriation of all Christians from the European provinces of Turkey, and replacing them by Circassians and colonists from Asia.”

The spectacle of vast forced movements of populations crisscrossing the region was no fantasy. While the eyes of Europe were fixed—thanks to Gladstone’s loud condemnation of the “Bulgarian horrors”—on the Christian victims of the war, thousands of Muslim refugees from Bosnia, Bulgaria and the Russian army were headed south. Added to those who had earlier fled the Russians in the Caucasus—somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 Circassians and Nogai Tatars had arrived in the empire between 1856 and 1864—the refugee influx which accompanied the waning of Ottoman power was well and truly under way. A Commission for the Settlement of Refugees was created, and the figures provided by this organization show that more than half a million refugees crossed into the empire between 1876 and 1879 alone.

In January 1878, the Porte ordered the governor of Salonica to find lodging for fifty thousand throughout the province. The following month it was reported that “the whole country is full of Circassian families, fleeing from the Russian army and the Servians, in long lines of carts … panic-stricken, they strive to embark for Asia Minor and Syria.” While Albanian Ghegs and uprooted Nogai Tatars settled around the town, thousands more left weekly on steamers bound for Smyrna and Beirut. Many of these refugees had been settled in the Bulgarian lands only a decade earlier; now for a second time they were being uprooted because of Russian military action. Destitute, exploited by local land-owners, many—especially Circassian—men formed robber bands, and became a byword for crime in the region. Two years after the end of hostilities, there were still more than three thousand refugees, many suffering from typhus or smallpox, receiving relief in the city, and another ten thousand in the vicinity. The Mufti of Skopje estimated that a total of seventy thousand were still in need of subsistence in the Sandjak of Pristina. By 1887, so many immigrants from the lost provinces had moved to Salonica that house rents there had risen appreciably.

The political outlook for Ottoman rule in European Turkey was grim. Only Western intervention had saved the empire from defeat at the hands of the Russian army; the consequent losses in Europe were great. The powers openly discussed the future carve-up of further territories, and Austrians, Bulgarians and Greeks fixed their eyes on Salonica. As discussions began at the Congress of Berlin on the territorial settlement, one observer underlined the need for a further sweeping reform of Ottoman institutions and the creation of an “impartial authority” to govern what was left. In view of the patchy record of the past forty years’ reform efforts, few would have given the imperial system long to live. Indeed many expected its imminent collapse, especially after the youthful Sultan Abdul Hamid suspended the new constitution barely two years after it had been unveiled. But they had to wait longer than they thought. The empire had another few decades of life left, and in that time Salonica itself prospered, grew and changed its appearance more radically than ever before.

Leave a comment

Filed under Balkans, Britain, France, Germany, migration, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey

by | 11 November 2009 · 1:23 pm

Anti-Greek Backlash in Salonica, 1821

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 126-129:

The Greeks in the city rang their church bells, rode through the streets on horseback, wore fine clothes and did not step down from the pavement when they passed a Muslim. To us this indicates the extent of non-Muslim influence there; to [mollah] Haïroullah it was shockingly bold behaviour which would not have been tolerated in Istanbul; prohibited by imperial decree, it was explicable only in terms of the corruption of local police officials.

Despite his dismay, however, at the arrogance of the infidels, Haïroullah did not regard himself as “a fighter of unbelievers”; this was a term he reserved for the high-spending deputy pasha, the notorious Yusuf Bey, whom he also described as “rough and tyrannical,” a man who so intimidated the mufti and the janissary agha that they sat quietly with crossed hands in his presence. Yusuf Bey’s father, Ismail Bey of Serres, had been described by Leake as “one of the richest and most powerful of the subjects of the sultan, if he can be called a subject who is absolute here, and obeys only such of the sultan’s orders as he sees fit, always with a great show of submission.” With wealth based on the booming cotton trade, Ismail Bey was enjoying a quiet retirement while his son exerted an almost unchecked mastery over the city. Haïroullah—according to his own account—dared to challenge him at their first meeting. When Yusuf Bey warned that the Greeks were preparing to rise up and would have to be struck a brutal blow, Haïroullah protested: “My God! Who would dare to revolt against Your just power and strength? Rather than tyrannize them better let us behave towards them as friends, so that they will feel gratitude towards us and will not complain.”

Haïroullah clearly saw storm clouds ahead. After consulting the Qur’an, he met with the Greek archbishop and advised him to keep his flock in check, “to be more faithful to the laws of the shari’a and to obey the orders of the governor.” The two men sat and drank coffee together “like old friends,” a fact which spies reported to Yusuf Bey. His suspicions about the mollah’s sentiments were strengthened on learning too that one day, sitting at a large cafe outside the Kazantzilar mosque, Haïroullah had been upset by the sight of the body of a dead Christian being carried past, and had exclaimed, “May God forgive them!” Yusuf Bey accused him of having become a giaour—only a Christian, he insisted, would thus have sympathized with the suffering of other Christians—and on 27 February 1821, just as the Greek revolt was about to begin, Haïroullah Effendi was imprisoned in the White Tower. It was from that strategic if unpleasant vantage point—life there was frightening, he wrote, “if one is not accompanied by the thought of all-powerful God”—that he watched the terrifying events of the next months unfold in Salonica.

His fellow prisoners were Christians whose only crime had been to fail to salute Yusuf Bey in the street, or to meet in the cathedral to talk about the Patriarchate, or merely to be a prominent notable in the community. Many were suffering from starvation and thirst. An emissary of the revolutionaries, Aristeidis Pappas, was brought in, badly beaten before he was handed over to the janissary agha to be executed. “Before he left,” writes Haïroullah, “forgive me for this, Your Majesty I embraced him and kissed him, because in truth, he was an honourable man and if he was to blame it was out of the goodness of his heart.

A few days later another Greek, Nikola Effendi, was brought in. He had shocking news: the Morea was in revolt, and there was intelligence that the Greeks in and around Salonica were planning to do the same. Yusuf Bey had demanded hostages, and more than four hundred Christians—of whom one hundred were monks from Athos—were under guard in his palace. All these, naturally, were being beaten and mistreated; some had been already killed.

Shortly after this the order came through from the Porte for Haïroullah’s release. Yusuf Bey’s attitude towards him now changed entirely, and he was sweetness itself; nevertheless, he would not allow him to leave the city immediately: the countryside was not safe and villagers ready to revolt. To Haïroullah’s horror, he learned that Yusuf Bey intended to put the hostages to death and was unable to dissuade him: “The same evening half of the hostages were slaughtered before the eyes of the uncouth moutesselim. I closed myself in my room and prayed for the safety of their souls.”

“And from that night began the evil. Salonica, that beautiful city, which shines like an emerald in Your honoured crown, was turned into a boundless slaughter-house.” Yusuf Bey ordered his men to kill any Christians they found in the streets and for days and nights the air was filled with “shouts, wails, screams.” They had all gone mad, killing even children and pregnant women. “What have my eyes not seen, Most Powerful Shah of Shahs?” The metropolitan himself was brought in chains, together with other leading notables, and they were tortured and executed in the square of the flour market. Some were hanged from the plane trees around the Rotonda. Others were killed in the cathedral where they had fled for refuge, and their heads were gathered together as a present for Yusuf Bey. Only the dervish tekkes—whose adepts traditionally retained close ties with Greek monks—provided sanctuary for Christians. “These things and many more, which I cannot describe because the memory alone makes me shudder, took place in the city of Salonica in May of 1821.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Balkans, Greece, Mediterranean, nationalism, religion, Turkey

by | 5 November 2009 · 10:18 am

Salonica’s Heterodox Modernizers

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 74-76:

The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their [Ma’min] heterodoxy with some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a Ma’min girl who had fallen in love with her Muslim tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize his plan. In 1859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after 1875 such official monitoring lapsed. Ma’min spearheaded the expansion of Muslim—including women’s—schooling in the city, and were prominent in its commercial and intellectual life. Merchant dynasties like the fez-makers, the Kapandjis, accumulated huge fortunes, built villas in the European style by the sea and entered the municipal administration. Others were in humbler trades—barbers, coppersmiths, town-criers and butchers.

Gradually—as with the Marranos of Portugal, from whom many were descended—their connection with their ancestral religion faded. High-class Ma’min married into mainstream Muslim society, though most resided in central quarters, between the Muslim neighbourhoods of the Upper Town and the Jewish quarters below, streets where often the two religions lived side by side. “They will be converted purely and simply into Muslims,” predicted one scholar in 1897. But like many of Salonica’s Muslims at this time, the Ma’min also embraced European learning, and identified themselves with secular knowledge, political radicalism and freemasonry. By a strange twist of fate it was thus the Muslim followers of a Jewish messiah who helped turn late-nineteenth-century Salonica into the most liberal, progressive and revolutionary city in the empire.

The juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in a fin-de-siècle Ma’min household is vividly evoked in the memoirs of Ahmed Emin Yalman. His father, Osman Tewfik Bey, was a civil servant and a teacher of calligraphy. Living in the house with him and his parents were his uncle and aunt, his seven siblings, two orphaned cousins and at least five servants. “The strife between the old and the new was ever present in our house,” he recollects. His uncle was of the old school: a devout man, he prayed five times a day, abhorred alcohol, and disliked travel or innovation. For some reason, he refused to wear white shirts; “a coloured shirt with attached collar was, for him, the extreme limit of westernization in dress to which he felt that one could go without falling into conflict with religion … He objected to the theatre, music, drinking, card playing, and photography—all new inventions which he considered part of Satan’s world.” Yalman’s father, on the other hand—Osman Tewfik Bey—was “a progressive, perhaps even a revolutionary,” who wore “the highest possible white collars,” beautiful cravats and stylish shoes in the latest fashion, loved poetry, theatre and anything that was new, taking his children on long trips and photographing them with enthusiasm. He adorned his rooms with their pictures and prayed but rarely.

Esin Eden’s memoir of the following generation shows Europeanization taken even further. Hers was a well-to-do family of tobacco merchants which combined a strong consciousness of its Jewish ancestry with pride in its contemporary achievements as part of a special Muslim community, umbilically linked to Salonica itself. The women were all highly educated—one was even a teacher at the famous new Terakki lycée—sociable, energetic and articulate. They smoked lemon-scented cigarettes in the garden of their modern villa by the sea, played cards endlessly and kept their eyes on the latest European fashions. Their servants were Greek, their furnishings French and German, and their cuisine a mix of “traditionally high Ottoman cuisine as well as traditional Sephardic cooking,” though with no concern for the dietary laws of Judaism.

When the Young Turk revolt broke out in Salonica in 1908, Ma’min economics professors, newspaper men, businessmen and lawyers were among the leading activists and there were three Ma’min ministers in the first Young Turk government. Indeed conspiracy theorists saw the Ma’min everywhere and assumed any Muslim from Salonica must be one. Today some people even argue that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk must have been a Ma’min (there is no evidence for this), and see the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the secular republic of Turkey as their handiwork—the final revenge, as it were, of Sabbatai Zevi, and the unexpected fulfilment of his dreams. In fact, many of the Ma’min themselves had mixed feelings at what was happening in nationalist Turkey: some were Kemalists, others opposed him. In 1923, however, they were all counted as Muslims in the compulsory exchange of populations and packed off to Istanbul, where a small but distinguished community of businessmen, newspaper magnates, industrialists and diplomats has since flourished. As the writer John Freely tells us, their cemetery, in the Valley of the Nightingales above Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, is still known as the Selanikliler Mezarligi—the Cemetery of Those from Salonica.

1 Comment

Filed under Balkans, economics, education, Europe, Greece, Islam, Judaism, Mediterranean, migration, nationalism, Turkey

by | 22 October 2009 · 10:06 pm

Christianity and Belanda Migrants in Indonesia’s Far East

From The Spice Islands Voyage: The Quest for Alfred Wallace, the Man Who Shared Darwin’s discovery of Evolution, by Tim Severin (Carroll & Graf, 1997), pp. 29-30:

The spread of Christianity and Islam was the greatest change to island life since [Alfred Russel] Wallace had been there. When Wallace had come to Kei, the islanders were pagans, with perhaps a few Muslims near the coast where they had met the Sulawesi traders. A century later, every village in the archipelago had become either Muslim or Christian, or both. Warbal was overwhelmingly Christian, with a small Muslim group living round a very discreet mosque near the main landing beach, and Christianity had altered Warbal’s village life even more than nationalism. The community was intensely and actively religious. A large church occupied the centre of the village, with ‘Immanuel’ spelt out in dark purple letters over its front entrance. Foundations were already dug and a first few pillars in place for a second, even more ambitious church on the outskirts. This new church would be huge. From the ground plan it seemed that it would accommodate at least twice the total congregation of Warbal, and the cost of the project must have been prodigious. Although Warbal’s Christians had pledged to give free labour, thousands of sacks of cement would have to be imported at huge cost to the community. Meanwhile the old church was thriving. It reverberated to prayer meetings and hymn singing; there were matins and evensongs, Sunday-school sessions and special thanksgiving services. And when the Warbal islanders did not go to church to pray, they met in one another’s homes; small groups of men and women could be seen entering one of the little houses, prayer books in hand, at almost any time of day.

Visitors to Warbal, if they were foreigners, were expected to be guests of Frans and Mima, who possessed the only house with an aluminium corrugated roof and had a spare room. Frans was a relic of the Dutch colonial days soon after the Pacific war with Japan. Just old enough to have been recruited for the Dutch colonial army, like thousands of other Moluccans he had gone to live in Holland when the Dutch withdrew from Indonesia, evacuating their supporters with them. For 30 years Frans had lived in Holland, working in a Phillips factory, before finally coming back home to retire in Warbal. In Holland he had divorced his first wife and married Mima, who also came from Kei and was perhaps 20 years younger than her husband. They had one young son, Tommy, who was extremely spoiled and went to the Warbal primary school. Their other children were older, and had to live in Tual to continue with their education because there was no secondary school on the island. Frans – short, friendly and losing both his hair and his memory – was the wealthiest man on the island, and a little lonely. The other islanders referred to him as the Belanda, the Hollander, and regarded him as being half-foreign and out of touch. Yet Frans’ monthly pension from Holland meant that he owned the newest and largest Johnson [outboard motor], and he could live out his retirement very comfortably in the sunshine, employing a maid and sending men out in his motorised dugout to catch fresh fish for his table. Mima, despite her frequent laugh and constant chatter, hankered after a more modern life in Holland. She admitted that, for all its warm climate and easy lifestyle, Warbal was a dull place to be a housewife after living in the suburbs of Amsterdam.

Leave a comment

Filed under Indonesia, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, religion