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Conferenties & Workshops

Conferentie Dekolonisatie - Abstracts

Displacements: urbanization and the physical environment

Decolonization in Asia and Africa probably had a profound impact on life in the cities. As a consequence of the long-drawn and, often violent, conflicts between the retreating colonial empires and the rising new regimes large-scale migrations took place. Many people were uprooted through mobilization and deportation, and through flight to and from the cities in search of work, food, shelter, and security. The urban migration affected the physical environment of the cities enormously and put great pressure on urban infrastructural facilities. Access to or the deprivation of these facilities were decisive for the living conditions of millions of peoples in the cities and resulted in a ‘struggle for urban space’ during the decolonization period. The way this struggle developed and its effects on city life and city structures will be central to the third theme.

Conflicts, Contestations, and Dominations of the City - The Story of Colonialization – Decolonialization of Bandung (Indonesia)

Johannes Widodo

Department of Architecture

National University of Singapore

The city’s morphology is a manifestation of politics, a stage for the history of power play, and a symbolization of ideology – in its three layers: morphologic (form, space, structure), sociologic (functions, activities, mechanisms), and spirit (meaning, philosophy, ideology).

Along its history the city has undergone various stages of development, transformation, and changes in physical and functional layers – the players have changed, the stage has undergone transformations, but the story about the cyclic-process of colonialization – decolonialization - recolonialization remains the same. Similar conflicts, contestations, and domination using architecture and urban space happen all the time in the same theater with different actors.

Bandung is one of the best examples of this kind of theatre. Started from early 19 th century as a colonial town – a town created out of jungle at the middle of Groote-postweg by Daendels – as an administrative centre of plantations in Priangan highland region; it was soon growing into a pleasure haven for the European planters, a fast growing town of opportunities for the Chinese entrepreneurs, and a increasingly marginalized native kampong enclaves. At the peak of colonial period in 1920s, the city was planned to be the capital of Nederlands Indie – the ultimate symbol of colonial authority, commerce, culture – but at the same time it became the architectural laboratory for a new breed of modernism, the “Tropical-Indies Style” which embraced local traditions and mixed it with European rationalism.

Bandung – or romantically known as “Parijs van Java” – was the best representation of Dutch colonialism in the tropics. During the transition period from the declaration of independence in 1945 until the 1960s, Bandung was caught at the middle of conflicts and uprisings, such as Westerling putsch and Darul Islam rebellion, which led the city into the state of dilapidation, illegal occupation of green spaces, densification of kampong areas, and chaotic un-planned development.

But interestingly since 1920s and peaked in 1950s Bandung was obtained a new meaning as the graveyard of colonialism, where Soekarno used it to stage his powerful decolonialization blows: his intellectual development in Bandung’s Technische Hogeschool, his defiance in the colonial court in Bandung’s Landraad, and finally his choice of venue for the Asia Africa Conference in 1955 in Concordia club at the heart of the colonial capital city of Bandung. The death of colonialism was celebrated with dancing on its own graveyard – the best artifacts of modern colonial architecture and urbanism.

The paper will use Bandung as a case study to illustrate the pattern of colonialization – decolonialization process which was taking place in the same urban context in different periods of its history – especially on the period of 1920-1960 - and how this process has affected the permanence and transformation of the morphology and community of the city.

Access to land as a key to urban development in Indonesia

Freek Colombijn

KITLV / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

Land is a key resource for almost every human activity. Many groups compete therefore for control of land, in both rural and urban settings. Tactics to control a plot of land can be registering land on a title deed, squatting, referring to customary ( adat ) rules, or employing gangs of vigilantes. These tactics can result in contradictory claims on land, which in their turn may lead to violent conflicts. State regulations mediate between competing groups in order to prevent or diminish violent conflicts over land.

To the extent that a dominant group controls the state, one can expect that the state regulations protect the interests of this dominant group. If this expectation is correct, I hypothesize that a change of regime will be followed by changing state regulations pertaining to land ownership. Indonesia does not, it seems, support this hypothesis well. New agrarian laws followed the British Interregnum (early nineteenth century) and the Guided Democracy (1959), but the decolonization (from Dutch to Japanese rule, and from Japanese rule to independence) was not. The question is: Why decolonization did not change the state agrarian regulations?

This question is explored by employing data on land used for housing in Indonesian cities. Attention will, perhaps, be paid to general state laws pertaining to land, customary land rights in Padang, company land in Medan, agricultural estates in the environs of Jakarta and Surabaya, land of aristocrats in Medan and Bandung, and squatters.

Guardhouses and Boundary Creation in urban Indonesia

Abidin Kusno

Art History Department

State University of New York at Binghamton

My paper is about urban memory and symbolic struggle over identity and

place. It examines the political roles and the changing meaning of

gates and guardhouses in colonial and postcolonial cities of

Indonesia. The guardhouse, variously known as “gardu,” “pos”

or “posko,” provides a locus for socio-political expression,

territorial definition and identity formation. Its history is still

obscure but is inseparable from the indigenous sense of boundary, the

spatial politics of Dutch colonialism and Japanese occupation, and the

political communications of Indonesia during the revolution and the

postcolonial era. Paying particular attention to the urban experience

of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, I aim to examine the gates and the

guardhouses as a political medium through which identity and community

is formed and transformed across various historical moments.

Regional identity and the nation-state

Jim Masselos

History Department

The University of Sydney, Australia

The paper looks at issues of national identity in the post-colonial state by focusing on the expression of regional cultural and political formulations potentially at variance with nation-state discourses of encompassing unity.

The paper will look at Bombay province and in particular Bombay city in the period immediately before independence in 1947 and in the ensuing two decades. It will begin with a brief survey of the historical circumstances which led to the creation of the large, amorphous and multi-linguistic and multi-cultural region known as the Presidency and later the Province of Bombay. After independence, from 1947, the matter of whether the administrative divisions of the former colonial state were to continue became an issue of increasingly complex and emotional debate. Apart from considerations of national unity and the spectre of secession and separation, there was also the matter of the expression of the identity of distinctive groups of people. In western India the Bombay state encompassed several linguistic and cultural groups of which the Marathi and the Gujarati were the most prominent, and the debate was largely but not exclusively based upon their viewpoints, interests and futures. The articulation of demands for separate states for each linguistic/territorial group within the broader nation, ie for separate administrative units within the wider nation-state, was made more complex by Bombay city and by the matter of whether it should be allocated to a Gujarati or a Marathi provincial government. The city became central to the debate: into which linguistic entity should it be allocated or should it have a separate entity as a city enclave, separate administrative autonomous unit.

The paper will chart the stages of the debate and the street confrontations both with the central Indian government and between the two linguistic regional groups within Bombay Province. It will conclude with the creation of two new provinces, Maharashtra and Gujarat states, and the locating of Bombay city within Maharashtra. In doing so it will consider the implications for national identity of linguistic/cultural regional states within the wider national framework and of how and whether the idea of the nation was itself affected by such changes.

Residential Desegregation in African Cities?

A Comparative Historical Approach (1)

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

Université Paris-7 Denis Diderot

The present paper will address, in a comparative fashion, a question that is still little studied, except in a fragmentary and localized way: that of residential segregation, and the difficulty of urban desegregation when independence occurred. In effect, residential segregation was instituted in a different manner everywhere, sometimes authoritarian (in the case of East and South Africa), and sometimes indirect (in the case of both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa).

In West Africa, including British West African colonies, racial segregation was never legal. Of course social segregation was the colonial rule, but nevertheless a series of colonial cities never knew legal residential segregation (such as the Dakar Plateau, or Conakry, or Ouagadougou, or a series of other colonial metropolises). This was truer still in middle-sized cities. The phenomenon of “gated cities” is new and still unusual in Francophone cities.

This paper aims to show that, specifically, the legal differentiation of residential laws played a minor role, and that the residential evolution after independence was quite similar everywhere (post-apartheid included).

We are not interested in the desegregation of the middle classes, which in a sense is self-explanatory: the national bourgeoisie rather naturally took the place of the colonizers as soon as independence drove many expatriates to return to their countries (in intertropical Africa); in cases of colonizations of settlement, the former settlers emigrated in sufficiently large numbers to free up villas and comfortable or luxurious buildings in the residential quarters that until then had been reserved for whites. This was the case almost everywhere, and notably in Maputo, which was emptied at Mozambique’s independence.

More interesting is the case of the popular African social stratum: how and to what rhythm did they retake the colonial city? In what way and how did the state intervene to attempt to regulate the process? What was the vision at the time? The results clearly bring up, in part at least, the way in which segregation was organized and controlled.

(1) A first draft of this argumentation was tried at Austin, Texas, Conference on “African Urban Spaces: History and Culture”, March 2003.

Complete paper

The African city: Decolonisation and after

Bill Freund

Department of Economic History

University of Natal in Durban

If one can generalise from the African continent as a whole, colonialism was an historic phase that tended to occur between the late nineteenth century and somewhat past the middle of the twentieth, thus well under a century and very often only the duration of an old person’s lifetime.

Urbanisation was a very significantly expanding phenomenon of the period. Nonetheless a distinction has to be made between existing cities in which elements of continuity from pre-colonial social forms were strong or even dominant (Salé, Morocco, Ilesha, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana, to name cities which have been studied in important English language monographs) and the more numerous cases where cities were formed de novo . This latter case was especially true in the southern half of the African continent. The classic colonial city was subjected to the intense gaze of modern planning ideas with colonial subjects being “permitted” to reside only on sufferance to the extent that they fulfilled an essential economic purpose. Perhaps a classic instance can be made of Le Corbusier’s famous (infamous?) plan of a giant overhead causeway linking the harbour to the new parts of Algiers, literally overpassing and isolating the ancient Casbah. In southern Africa, the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute school of anthropologists became famous for pleading simply for the recognition of black labour migrants as potentially permanent urbanites but it cannot be said that they wrote much about the concomitant need to re-plan spatially the new cities of the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt. The planned part of the city related to the settlement of Europeans, to the crucial structures of the administration and the overwhelmingly extractive economy in general.

Of course, even in the colonial heyday, this colonial impulse met very significant contradictions even in entirely new urban sites. These contradictions, exemplified in Frederick Cooper’s edited book on “struggles” for the city, were more apparent with the relatively prosperous times for colonial economies in the late 1930s and the years of World War II when urban populations expanded dramatically without the essentials for making urban life bearable. The question of how to accomodate a crucially important working class came to the fore.

The post-war years, generally to be characterised as “late colonialism”, were by contrast ones where the state attempted to enlist modernist ideas about development that did involve incorporating a growing urban population, for example with substantial plans for housing construction and the expansion of urban planning bureaucracies and mechanisms. It is certainly the case that nationalist movements found strong impulses in the cities, as well as did in places their antagonists. Thus Douala was the site of violent anti-African riots immediately after World War II on the part of settlers as was Luanda in 1960. Thus Mau Mau was so strongly implanted in the poor quarters of Nairobi that the British regime determined to expel the entire Kikuyu speaking part of the city’s population early in the Emergency. However, having said this, such struggles did not generally transform African cities which continued to bear the imprint of colonial ideology. Moreover, the typical problematic of colonial urbanisation of the 1950s was largely continued on into the early, even if deracialised, years of independence. Only in certain cases such as the ex-Belgian Congo or Algeria was independence itself marked by massive social or economic rupture.

The concentration of social infrastructure in the cities, the suitability of the cities as sites of individual re-invention for rural men and women, the many spin-offs that were involved in greatly increasing state expenditure and, to some extent, import-substitution industrialisation, attracted unprecedented numbers of migrants to the cities of Africa. This growth accelerated after 196 and everywhere spun out of the control of the forces at the disposal of the state for controlling the cities. Thus the planning of urban space increasingly became inoperative as forces from below started to remould African cities.

This paper will argue that typically there was a balance—of course marked by a lot of conflict-- between such disruptive forces from below and the continued élan of the state which continued to enjoy some capacity in many instances (for instance, in the heyday of Houphouet-Boigny’s Ivory Coast or in oil-boom rich Nigeria or Gabon) to pursue projects that glorified the new regimes and provided patrimonial support for a wide range of economic activities. During this period, it became clearer too that new urban cultures were emerging in Africa.

By 1980 however, the picture was beginning to be a far more negative one. Urban growth was increasingly fuelled by rural economic collapse and warfare; the post-colonial urban economies were in general in decay, often even in chaos, and a new urban literature began to write about dysfunctional cities and parasitical urbanism to a growing extent. It can be argued that for better and for worse the “neo-colonial” era marked by substantial continuities was tending to come to an end in Africa and cities, seen by some as diseased and crisis-ridden and—to a far lesser extent, it must be said-- by others as the site of new cultural and economic creativity, were entering a new stage. Making too great a distinction between old cities with a long sense of continuity and new cities emerging from the blood and sweat of colonialism begins to be less meaningful. Further development of the paper will look at examples of this sort of change in considering African cities as the start of the new millennium.

Religion and Social Boundaries in a Changing Social Order :

The Social life of A Village in Cirebon – West Java, 1925 – 1950s

Abdul Wahid

Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta

The objective of this study is to understand one aspect of the multidimensional impact of the 1930s economic depression toward the social life of a village in Trusmi Cirebon West Java. This was the period during the fall of colonial power, which then continued by the process for independence. This study is based on the assumption that the period of the 1930s up to the 1950s was a crucial transition period in Indonesia that had serious impact at many levels of social life in urban and also rural areas. This historical event shows some fundamental shiftings on economic, social structure, political and cultural aspects of rural and urban areas. To a great extent this condition had triggered long-term social, economic, and politic competitions between local and Chinese entrepreneurs, new arrival residents and local people, and among the local entrepreneurs.

This study will focus on the process of how religion and religious sentiment crystallized, then became the instrument in constructing social boundary. This border line was utilised by the people living in that area in distinguishing each other according to religious based categories. This distinction operated along with social economic interest which in turn created an image of social conflict among the different social categories. The study will address also how the social groups or categories at the village level attempted to reset their social reposition or even took some advantages from this kind of changes, moreover, how the local people build a new social order in order to define themself within the context of national political power which was heavily contested. To answer those questions, this study will be based on information and data from depth interview (oral history method) and all publications, local and regional that have been published from that period.

The village of Trusmi economically has become a centre of batik industry since before the colonial period. This batik industry was firstly dominated by the local people in producing batik to supply the demand for ritual and sacred costumes for royal interest only. In this situation batik did not have a wide spread market, but, along with the colonial economic modernization in the early 20 th century, the batik production reached a wider market. The Chinese with their capital expansion, took over the batik production from the native and produced it as a commercial good after the break out of 1930s depression when most of local businessman fell down into bankruptcy. Since then, the batik economy became an economic competition between groups in the village.

Moreover, this village has also functioned as a centre for an Islamic religious sect, the Tareqat Naqsabandiyah - one of the important Islamic sects in Indonesia, which had a strong connection to another centre all over the country. This religious faith was to a great extent utilized as an instrument to construct social boundaries to distinguish one and another at the village level. The village was also strongly linked to the Cirebon Sultanate because there is a holy graveyard ( makam keramat ) of Cirebon Sultanate’s ancestors.

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