Francisca Fanggidaej: A Decolonial Perspective on Colonial Elites and the Indonesian Revolution (McGregor, 2025)

=== [PDF page 1] === Francisca Fanggidaej: A decolonial perspective on colonial elites and the Indonesian revolution Katharine McGregor1 Introduction Growing up in the late colonial era as the daughter of a colonial official cocooned in an environment in which she was allowed to speak only Dutch, Francisca Fanggidaej (1925–2013) became increasingly critical of the hierarchies she observed both in the colony of the Netherlands East Indies and in global politics as the Indonesian revolution of 1945–49 unfolded. Her memoir, written in 2006, offers unique insights into this period of colonial history, stretching from the late 1930s to 1949, due to her Eastern Indonesian background, her upbringing in Java, her political orientation as a revolutionary and her gender—all of which gave her a marginal position in Indonesian society. 1 I would like to thank Rika Theo and Willy Alfarius for their research assistance in preparation for the writing of this chapter. I would also like to thank Vannessa Hearman for her detailed comments on an earlier draft of this paper and all the workshop participants and reviewers for additional comments, particularly Ken M.P. Setiawan, Sadiah Boonstra, Susie Protschky, Jim Fox, and Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones. 179 === [PDF page 2] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA Fanggidaej was born on Timor Island, but, due to her father’s work as a colonial official, the family moved to Java during her childhood, where she attended a Dutch-language school from the age of nine. Her family’s position as privileged elites changed with the onset of the Japanese occupation in 1942 due to her father’s closeness to the Dutch. It was during this period that Fanggidaej met some Indonesian nationalists who exposed her to new ideas that caused her to radically rethink her cultural and political orientation. Following the August 1945 Indonesian declaration of independence, when the British attacked Surabaya to enable a restoration of Dutch control, she joined several organisations dedicated to defending independence. In 1948, as a member of Pesindo (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia, Socialist Youth of Indonesia), she attended the infamous Southeast Asian Youth and Students Conference in Calcutta and then returned to Indonesia and became embroiled in the fallout from the Madiun Affair. The Calcutta conference, an anticolonial gathering of youths concerned with achieving independence for nations such as India and Vietnam, became the subject of intense political speculation, which lasted for decades. The Cold War theory was that instructions had been passed in Calcutta from the Soviet Union to Southeast Asian delegates to engage in revolutions once they returned home. Fanggidaej was even accused in the 1950s by the journalist Rosihan Anwar of having carried such instructions.2 In September 1948, Pesindo members joined those of the broader Front Demokrasi Rakyat (People’s Democratic Front) to oppose the republican army in the so-called Madiun Affair. This was related to the proposed rationalisation of leftist troops, but also included the proclamation of a popular sovereign state. The army and the republican government dubbed the movement a communist revolt and carried out a violent crackdown on the political left and all associated organisations, including Pesindo. Despite the Cold War theory, the link between Calcutta and Madiun has never been proven.3 After the revolution and the recovery of the political left, Fanggidaej continued to work with the communist party’s youth organisation, Pemuda Rakyat (People’s Youth), becoming a chairwoman in 1950 and then serving from 1957 as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Indonesian parliament. Her work as a political revolutionary was disrupted by the 2 On the history wars over Madiun, see Katharine McGregor, ‘A Reassessment of the Significance of the 1948 Madiun Uprising to the Cold War in Indonesia’, Kajian Malaysia 26, no. 1 (2009): 86–119. 3 Larisa Efimova, ‘Did the Soviet Union Instruct Southeast Asian Communists to Revolt? New Russian Evidence on the Calcutta Youth Conference February 1948’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 449–69, www.jstor.org/stable/27751581. 180 === [PDF page 3] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ army’s second violent attack on the political left, known as the Indonesian genocide, which began in October 1965. To avoid this repression, she was forced to seek exile—first, in China and then in the Netherlands for a total of almost four decades. Although Fanggidaej’s background as an elite nationalist woman fits with a problematic emphasis in Indonesian history to date on women who were part of the colonial pribumi,4 Fanggidaej is unique because of her highly critical attitude towards elite privilege, which was influenced in turn by the fact that she joined organisations on the political left from the mid- 1940s. Her participation in these organisations led her to critique multiple forms of domination in the colonial era, including feudal and colonial traditions and continuing inequalities in diplomatic negotiations following the declaration of independence. Her background further enabled her to critique racist colonial ideology, because it often targeted people of Eastern Indonesian heritage. Throughout this chapter, I use Walter Mignolo’s ideas about decolonial thinking to consider how Fanggidaej engaged with colonialism. Mignolo argues that: decolonial thinking and doing focus on enunciation, engaging in epistemic disobedience and delinking from the colonial matrix [of power] in order to open up decolonial options—a vision of life and society that requires decolonial subjects, decolonial knowledges and decolonial institutions.5 He uses ‘decolonial thinking’ to refer to a mode of critical action. Through close attention to Fanggidaej’s memoir, I examine how she demonstrates decolonial thinking by reflecting on the colonial categories and practices that reproduced notions of difference and hierarchy in the late colonial period and why she became attracted to a revolutionary version of Indonesian nationalism. Fanggidaej offers a rare example of the thinking of an Indonesian revolutionary. I argue that the way in which she imagined the Indonesian revolution offers a novel way of understanding the differing meanings of the 4 Pribumi (‘native of the soil’) is a term used to refer to local Indonesians and is sometimes also used to exclude those considered to be of migrant descent. Ruth Indiah Rahayu, ‘Konstrusksi Historiografi Feminisme dari Tutur Perempuan [The Construction of Feminist Historiography from Women’s Perspectives]’, Presented to Indonesia Historiografi Indonesia: di Antara Historiografi Nasional dan Alternatif, Pusat Studi Sosial Asia Tenggara [Indonesian Historiography: Between National and Alternative Historiography, Center for Southeast Asian Social Studies] and ARC, Yogyakarta, 2–4 July 2007. 5 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 9. 181 === [PDF page 4] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA revolution. She describes her path to embracing merdeka (‘independence’), for example, as ‘going home’ or ‘finding a home’. Yet, the sense of home she felt was also challenged after 1948 when she was suddenly deemed an enemy of the republic. I ask what her opposition to colonialism, within and outside Indonesia, tells us about differing versions of merdeka and related struggles against multiple forms of coloniality along the axis also of class. Her experiences offer important insights into the last decade of colonialism and alternative visions of the Indonesian revolution that are not part of mainstream nationalist recollections of this period due to the general trend that began in the New Order (1966–98) period of erasing people from the political left from Indonesian history.6 They provide an excellent starting point for rethinking the history of colonialism and paying attention to the structures of power around ethnicity and class in late colonial society through to the revolution. Yet, despite her many probing critiques of inequalities in society, Fanggidaej is sometimes silent about other forms of societal division. This includes divisions that resulted in violence against different communities, including Eastern Indonesians due to assumed histories of collaboration with the Dutch. She is also noticeably silent about gender and related structures of power. The primary sources used for my analysis are Francisca Fanggidaej’s 2006 narrated memoir7 and accounts of different parts of her life that she wrote and are held in the International Institute of Social History archive in the Netherlands. Her memoir can be contextualised alongside other memoirs written by people with complicated relationships with colonial structures of power and similarly complex identities relating to their experiences of the Dutch colony. The memoirs of Indo-European women, for example, who, like Fanggidaej, experienced privilege, discrimination and forced migration to the Netherlands (under different circumstances), provide interesting points of contrast because of their shared experiences of growing up between two cultures.8 At the time Fanggidaej’s memoir was written, 6 Katharine E. McGregor, History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007). 7 Hersri Setiawan, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner: Francisca Fanggidaej [Memoirs of a Woman Revolutionary: Francisca Fanggidaej] (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2006). 8 For an interesting discussion of two such memoirs, see Susie Protschky, ‘The Flavour of History: Food, Family and Subjectivity in Two Indo-European Women’s Memoirs’, The History of the Family 14, no. 4 (2009): 369–85, doi.org/10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.08.006. 182 === [PDF page 5] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ she was 81 years old and had lived in the Netherlands for just over 20 years after 20 years living in China, after her Indonesian passport was cancelled in 1966.9 The fact that Fanggidaej’s memoir was narrated to Indonesian and fellow political exile Hersri Setiawan influences what has been recorded on the page and the framing throughout the text. Hersri Setiawan is a famous literary writer of the political left, who has penned several memoirs about his experiences as a political prisoner of the Suharto regime.10 Because of the persecution of leftists in Indonesia, narrating her story to a friend, fellow exile and leftist would presumably have enabled Fanggidaej to more freely express her political ideas but may at the same time have led her to emphasise critiques of class and elitism. Hersri Setiawan recorded, published and disseminated the stories of several former political prisoners and exiles and created the Fanggidaej archive.11 Fanggidaej’s memoir was based on interviews collected by Setiawan with Fanggidaej in 1995 and forms part of a series called ‘In Search of Silenced Voices’ housed at the International Institute of Social History. The series title reflects the fact that the voices of people from the political left were heavily censored throughout the Suharto regime due to intense anticommunism. Fanggideaj’s memoir belongs to a genre of memoirs from the political left published after the end of the Suharto regime in 1998.12 The book is one of a smaller number of memoirs written by political exiles who were not imprisoned and one of very few by women on the political left.13 9 On the experiences of Indonesian exiles in China, see David Hill, ‘Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws’, RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 21–51, at 31–32; Hersri Setiawan, ‘Some Thoughts on Indonesian Exilic Literature’, RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 9–20; and Taomo Zhou, ‘Passports to the Post- Colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys’, in The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism, eds Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 10 Hersri Setiawan, Diburu di Pulau Buru [Hunted on Buru Island] (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2006); Hersri Setiawan, Aku Eks-Tapol [I Am an Ex-Political Prisoner] (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2003); Hersri Setiawan, Memoar Pulau Buru [Memoir of Buru Island] (Jakarta: Gramedia, 2016). 11 Hersri Setiawan, Kidung Para Korban: Dari Tutur Sepuluh Narasumber Eks-Tapol seperti Diceritakan kepada Hersri Setiawan [A Victims’ Ballad: Testimonies of 10 Ex-Political Prisoners as Told to Hersri Setiawan] (Yogyakarta: Pakorba and Pustaka Pelajar, 2006). 12 Vannessa Hearman, ‘The Uses of Memoirs and Oral History Works in Researching the 1965–1966 Political Violence in Indonesia’, International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 5, no. 2 (2009): 21–42. 13 These include Sulami, Perempuan, Kebenaran dan Penjara: Kisah Nyata Wanita Dipenjara 20 Tahun karena Tuduhan Makar dan Subversi [Women, Truth, and Prison: The True Story of a Woman Imprisoned for 20 Years because of Accusations of Treason and Subversion] (Jakarta: Cipta Lestari, 1999); Sudjinah, Terempas Gelombang Pasang [Crushed by a Tidal Wave] (Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2003); Mia Bustam, Sudjono dan Aku [Sudjono and I] (Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2006); and Mia Bustam, Dari Kamp ke Kamp: Cerita Seorang Perempuan [From Camp to Camp: A Woman’s Story] (Jakarta: Kerja Sama Spasi, VHR Book and Institut Studi Arus Informasi, 2008). 183 === [PDF page 6] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA Women revolutionaries imprisoned by the Suharto regime have focused on rehabilitating their political image.14 Women’s memoirs that deal with the pre-1965 period also seek to reclaim a place for the Indonesian left in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism, especially during the 1945–49 revolution, because their roles have largely been erased from the historical record.15 The reason for the erasure is that those on the political left were cast as traitors to the nation in standard interpretations of both the 1948 Madiun Affair and the Thirtieth of September Movement of 1965—a movement during which the top army leadership was kidnapped and killed.16 The army blamed the Thirtieth of September Movement on the hugely popular Indonesian Communist Party and used this event as a pretext for the 1965 genocide against the Indonesian left. In recent years, there has been increased attention to the histories and contributions of Indonesian women on the political left. This has included new attention to Francisca Fanggidaej, especially her experiences after the Indonesian revolution, as well as to key leaders within the left progressive Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, or Gerwani), such as Umi Sardjono.17 This has led to new understanding of some of the most critical positions held by Indonesian women on the incomplete processes of decolonisation.18 Fanggidaej’s memoir has further significance as the only memoir of a non-Javanese revolutionary woman. Thinking about the distance in time between the late colonial era and when she was interviewed, it is more difficult to trace how Fanggidaej’s experiences of living in the Netherlands as a migrant and part of a minority 14 Katharine McGregor and Vannessa Hearman, ‘Challenges of Political Rehabilitation in Post–New Order Indonesia: The Case of Gerwani (the Indonesian Women’s Movement)’, South East Asia Research 15, no. 3 (2007): 355–84, doi.org/10.5367/000000007782717759. 15 McGregor and Hearman, ‘Challenges of Political Rehabilitation in Post–New Order Indonesia’. 16 McGregor, History in Uniform. 17 This includes new research by Dr Taomo Zhou into Francisca Fanggidaej and her activism during her time in exile and her relationship with her children as an exiled mother. See Zhou, ‘Passports to the Post-Colonial World’. See also research by Ita Nadia into Francisca’s life experiences and by Widya Fitria Ningsih into her engagement with nation and state-building. On another key revolutionary Indonesian woman, see Katharine McGregor and Ruth Indiah Rahayu, ‘Umi Sardjono (1923–2011) and the Quest to Build a New Society for Indonesian Women’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists from Around the World, ed. Francisca de Haan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 377–97, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13127-1_15. 18 See also Katharine McGregor, ‘Indonesian Women, the Women’s International Democratic Federation and the Struggle for “Women’s Rights”, 1946–1965’, Indonesia and the Malay World 40, no. 117 (2012): 193–208, doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2012.683680; and Katharine McGregor, ‘The Cold War, Indonesian Women and the Global Anti-Imperialist Movement 1946–1965’, in De-Centring Cold War History, eds Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (London: Routledge, 2013), 31–51. 184 === [PDF page 7] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ influenced her feelings about the legacies of colonialism. She did not write directly about this topic and instead seemed to have focused most of her attention on developments in Indonesia. Fanggidaej was a member of the Netherlands-based Indonesia Committee whose members campaigned for the release of Indonesian political prisoners of the Suharto regime and against its authoritarian practices. Fanggidaej described the committee as ‘a place where Indonesians could work for our country and people and for the liberation from the regime’.19 The chair of the Indonesia Committee Wim Wertheim, a retired Dutch professor who had worked in the colony, was a firm critic of colonial and ongoing racism in the Netherlands.20 Noting her birth in West Timor, it is curious that Fanggidaej also critiqued forms of coloniality practised by the Suharto government particularly against the East Timorese. In 1992, for example, she signed a public letter commemorating the East Timorese who were shot by the Indonesian army in the 1991 Dili Massacre.21 This massacre took place in the context of the three-decade occupation of East Timor (now Timor-Leste) from 1975 to 1999. In her memoir, looking back at her experiences of the last decades of Dutch colonialism, she offers sharp critiques of how coloniality functioned. Reflections on the era of late colonialism: Rethinking the meanings of coloniality Francisca Fanggidaej was born on 15 August 1925. In her memoir, she reflects a strong awareness of how her life was shaped by colonialism. She explains, for example, that she ‘came from a family that was a political product of the Dutch’.22 Her father was employed in the Burgerlijke Openbare Werken (Department for Civil Public Works) in the position of hoofdopzichter (‘chief superintendent’) and also in the Department van Verkeer en Waterstaat (Department of Traffic and Water Management), 19 Francisca Fanggidaej, ‘Cisca Fanggidaej voor IFM [Speech for the 55th Indonesian Independence Anniversary, A Celebratory Event Held by the Indonesia Friendship Organization, An Organisation of Indonesian Exiles in Amsterdam, 2000]’, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, Box 12, Folder 9, Pics 74–78, ARCH04303 (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History), 5. 20 Wim F. Wertheim, ‘Netherlands-Indian Colonial Racism and Dutch Home Racism’, in Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice, eds Jan Breman, Piet de Rooy, Ann Stoler, and Wim F. Wertheim, CASA Monographs 3 (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 71–88. 21 ‘Familieberichten [Family Announcements]’, Trouw, [Meppel], 12 November 1992, resolver.kb.nl/ resolve?urn=ABCDDD:010822191:mpeg21:p008. 22 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 13. 185 === [PDF page 8] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA with an echelon three position just below that of bupati (‘regent’).23 He was part of the colonial elite civil service. The branch of the civil service staffed by locals was called the Pangreh Praja and was dominated by the sons of priyayi, elite Javanese with lineage to Javanese sultans.24 Fanggidaej’s father, Gottlieb Fanggidaej, by contrast, came from the eastern island of Rote, and her mother, Magda Mael, from the eastern island of Timor, where Francisca was born. The Rotenese were recognised as intellectual elites due to the early establishment of Malay schools on the island in 1769.25 The islands of Rote and Timor neighbour one another and form part of the Lesser Sunda Islands. Kupang, the capital of Timor, was the administrative centre of Dutch colonial power in this region.26 Eastern elites played a key role in the colony particularly because this part of the archipelago experienced the longest and most penetrating effects of Dutch influence. The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), set up harbour towns and early settlements across the central Moluccas due to the company’s monopoly production of the in-demand spices of cloves and nutmeg. This included the longest-established areas of Ambon, Makassar and the Banda Islands. After 1860, the Dutch recruited people from eastern islands, especially the central Moluccas, for positions in all levels of government and the army.27 They took up occupations as ‘clerks, teachers, ministers and soldiers’.28 Despite the different cultures and languages across this region, the people of Eastern Indonesia generally referred to themselves and were referred to by the Dutch as Moluccans. 23 Norman Joshua Soelias, Pesindo, Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia, 1945–1950 [Pesindo: Indonesian Socialist Youth, 1945–1950] (South Tangerang: Marjin Kiri, 2016), 130; and Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 15–18. 24 Heather Sutherland, The Making of the Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese Priyayi (Singapore: Heineman Educational Books, 1979). 25 James J. Fox, Explorations in Semantic Parallelism (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), doi.org/10.22459/ ESP.07.2014, 318. Exemplifying this trend, Francisca’s grandfather produced the first Rotenese translation of the Bible (Fox, pp. 321–22). 26 Hans Hägerdal, ‘The Native as Exemplum: Missionary Writings and Colonial Complexities in Eastern Indonesia, 1819–1860’, Itinerario 37, no. 2 (2013): 73–99, doi.org/10.1017/S0165115313000478, at 73. For more on the history of Rote and Timor, see James J. Fox, Harvest of the Palm: Ecological Change in Eastern Indonesia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), doi.org/10.4159/harvard.​9780674331884. 27 Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being Dutch in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920, trans. Wendy Schaffer (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 144. 28 Wim Manuhutu, ‘Moluccans in the Netherlands: A Political Minority’, in L’émigration Politique en Europe aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Actes du colloque de Rome (3–5 Mars 1988) [Political Emigration in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Proceedings of the Rome Conference, 3–5 March 1988] (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1991), 498. 186 === [PDF page 9] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ The first chapter of Francisca Fanggidaej’s memoir, entitled ‘My Father Who was a Black Dutch’, offers a reflection on her family’s positionality in the colony of the Netherlands East Indies. The Dutch used the term Belanda Hitam (‘Black Dutchmen’) to refer to soldiers of African background in the colonial army whose ancestors were brought to the Indies as enslaved persons from the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana).29 These men often intermarried with Indonesian women, spoke Dutch and were considered Dutch. The term was also used, however, to refer to Moluccans to whom the Dutch similarly awarded European status. Holding ‘European’ status entailed special treatment in terms of the law and the courts to which one was subjected in civil and criminal matters as well as access to better education and jobs.30 Fanggidaej explains that her family carried Dutch status as far back as her grandfather, who was a Christian pastor and a descendent of a well-known elite family known locally as a raja, from Baubau, but also because of her father’s status as a colonial official. She offers far less information on her mother’s family, perhaps because she was less elite and because the memoir focuses on dismantling the elite privilege of her father’s family. Fanggidaej reflects critically on her father’s cooperation with the Dutch and his embrace of Dutch culture, claiming he denied his identity as a pribumi. She explained that ‘denying does not mean betraying’, but it took the form of ‘hiding his own black skin’. She remembers her father often said, ‘We are not Inlanders [‘Native’]. We are Dutch!’31 The term ‘Inlanders’ was the lowest racial categorisation in the colony. It was below ‘Foreign Orientals’, with Europeans or Dutch at the apex. Fanggidaej’s memoir was undoubtably influenced by her exposure across her lifespan to new ways of framing her experiences. Her choice to emphasise her father’s insistence on being Dutch mirrors, for example, the observations of the Martinique-born Frantz Fanon about how the colonised can internalise racial hierarchies to the extent that they try to be like the coloniser. In a scathing critique of this practice, Fanon argued in his 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks, that ‘the black man who wants to turn his race white is as miserable as he 29 Ineke van Kessel, ‘Belanda Hitam: The Indo-African Communities on Java’, African and Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (2007): 243–70, doi.org/10.1163/156920907X212222, at 258. 30 Susie Protschky, ‘The Colonial Table: Food, Culture and Dutch Identity in Colonial Indonesia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 54, no. 3 (2008): 346–57, doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8497.​2008.​ 00501.x, at 348. 31 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 17. 187 === [PDF page 10] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA who preaches hatred for the whites’.32 By the time Fanggidaej’s memoir was written, Fanon’s work had become part of a canon on decolonial thinking with which Fanggidaej was presumably familiar. In her memoir, Fanggidaej highlights the process of alienation she felt growing up in a household as the second youngest child in which she and her four siblings were forbidden to speak Malay and forced to speak Dutch. These anecdotes, combined with mentions of her parents’ preference for elite pastimes and sports such as tennis and bridge and the fact that they mostly ate Dutch food and had seven household servants,33 indicate that her parents had assimilated into elite Dutch culture. As Susie Protschky notes, the granting of European status depended on ‘performing Europeanness’ or ‘cultural affiliation and social connections’.34 This included the ability to speak Dutch and fit into Dutch social circles. Her family’s religious status as Protestants, which was also a product of Dutch influence in the central Moluccas, also made this easier.35 Fanggidaej critiques not only her father’s embrace of Dutch culture, but also his adoption of feudal Javanese customs as a way of marking out his status in colonial society. She remembers that when she accompanied her father in his jeep on inspections throughout Java, the workers would immediately ‘duduk berjongkok’ (or crouch) as her father approached.36 This feudal custom of lowering oneself to those of higher status was originally only practised by Javanese of lower birth status in greeting sultans and priyayi, but over time, Dutch officials became ‘gila hormat’ (‘crazy for respect’), requiring the same expressions of deference to be extended to them.37 Arnout van de Meer argues that, for the Dutch, these acts constituted a ‘scripted performance of power’ whereby colonialists sought to ‘affirm, uphold, and strengthen colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender’.38 Dating from 1913, however, Indonesian nationalists protested against these mandated forms of deference on the basis that they were ‘humiliating’, which led to bans on such practices.39 Indonesian nationalists critiqued the traditions of sembah 32 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Books, 2008 [1952]), 2. 33 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 24. 34 Protschky, ‘The Colonial Table’, 349. 35 Manuhutu, ‘Moluccans in the Netherlands’, 497. 36 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 19. 37 Sutherland, The Making of the Bureaucratic Elite, 36. 38 Arnout van der Meer, Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), doi.org/10.1515/9781501758607, 2. 39 ibid., 9–12. 188 === [PDF page 11] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ (the practice of making a sign of worship with one’s hands towards someone else) and jongkok, calling instead for ‘a more egalitarian national identity’ and one not based on Javanese traditions.40 Fanggidaej must have observed her father using such practices in the 1930s to early 1940s, well after these critiques. She comments on the strangeness of this mimicry of Javanese customs, yet these experiences gave her an acute awareness of social status.41 Her attention to class hierarchies in her memoir reflects her position as a leftist revolutionary who also wants to present herself to readers as highly attentive to class and critical of feudal traditions. Fanggidaej communicates an awareness that despite their legal status as ‘Europeans’, the colonial categorisation of her family as Belanda Hitam also implied inferiority. She reports that her family made two trips to the Netherlands for vacations during her childhood. On their way when they stopped in the British territory of Penang, her father chose to swim in a ‘whites only’ swimming pool. A Dutch man approached her father and patronisingly ‘patted him from his stomach to head’, sarcastically asking: ‘So Black fatso, are you having a good time?’42 She felt a temptation to attack the conceited man but was held back by her father, who remained silent. It is clear from this recounting of racial vilification that the term ‘black’ was used derogatively. Fanggidaej questioned why the term ‘dark’ was always associated with something bad.43 Ayu Saraswati argues that during the colonial era ‘the boundary of who could be considered racially white and white skinned was unclear; racial projects that were implemented in colonial Indonesia actually produced a white racial category that only partially relied on skin colour as its signifier’.44 There was, however, a hierarchy of desirability according to which being ‘black’ was undesirable. Laurie Sears argues, for example, that in colonial-era literary texts references to darker skin generally took the form of ‘racial slurs and whispers that reveal colonial aversions to racial others’.45 Further to this, people from Eastern Indonesia, including the Ambonese, Timorese and Papuans, were often characterised as ‘the darker people with frizzy hair of the East’.46 According to the racist 40 ibid., 104–6. 41 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 21, 25. 42 Original: ‘Zo, zwarte [sic] dikkertje! Heb je lekker gezwommen?’. ibid., 22. 43 Zhou, ‘Passports to the Post-Colonial World’, 312. 44 L. Ayu Saraswati, Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2013), 37. 45 Laurie Sears, ‘Racial Slurs and Whispers in Situated Testimonies in Dutch Imperial Fiction’, Positions: Asia critique 29, no. 1 (2021): 67–91, doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8722784, at 71. 46 Fenneke Sysling, Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 189 === [PDF page 12] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA social Darwinist ideas of British and Dutch explorers and scientists, these physical attributes were associated with being less advanced.47 These racist stereotypes of Papuans in particular have persisted in modern-day Indonesia. In 2019, for example, Papuan students and others protested following racial slurs made against them by civil militia and police in the city of Surabaya.48 Fanggidaej explains that the experience as a 10-year-old girl of witnessing her father be racially vilified was so transformative that it became a leidstar (‘guiding star’). This was so much so, she argues, that ‘if there had not been a revolution in Indonesia’ in which she could involve herself, this experience of racism ‘could have become a life-long trauma’.49 Reflecting on having grown up as the daughter of a colonial official, she states that her identity was almost as different as ‘the earth from the sky, to that of her father’.50 For her, the legal status of being equalised with Europeans, gelijkstelling, meant taking ‘on the character of an oppressor’.51 In her mind, the influence and effects of the gelijkstelling were that, without being aware, she and her family had joined the Dutch in ‘sucking and oppressing’ the people.52 In her memoir, she positions her experiences of elite colonial society and related social hierarchies as critical to her commitment to transformative change and hence to the Indonesian revolution.53 In this narration of her early life experiences on the cusp of the Indonesian revolution, Fanggidaej reflects on the complex dimensions of the ‘colonial matrix’ of power.54 She rejects inequality across the colonial divide between Dutch and local people, but also the inequality imposed by local elites on other Indonesians. As a daughter of a colonial official, rather than a son, she potentially had greater insights into colonial inequalities. By virtue of her gender, she had an alternative perspective on society because she faced gender-based restrictions that her brothers would not have. She could not, for example, easily imagine a career in the colonial bureaucracy for there were few Indonesian women in 47 ibid., 104–8. 48 Sophie Chao, ‘West Papua and Black Lives Matter’, Inside Indonesia, 17 June 2020, www.inside​ indonesia.org/west-papua-and-black-lives-matter. For more on this topic, see Suryawan’s Chapter 15 in this volume. 49 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 22. 50 ibid., 24. 51 ibid., 24. 52 ibid., 26. 53 ibid., 25. 54 Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 9. 190 === [PDF page 13] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ these roles. Yet, her critique of coloniality in the memoir does not go so far as to reflect on the relationship between gender and coloniality. In one chapter devoted to her mother, she acknowledges the gender divide in terms of elite access to education by expressing admiration for her mother’s adaptability given she, unlike her husband, was not given an education and had to learn Dutch and European customs.55 In the chapters dealing with her role in the revolution, Fanggidaej similarly offers little reflection on gender relations. The Indonesian revolution and decolonisation During the Japanese occupation, Fanggidaej’s family was in danger because of her father’s position. He was interrogated by the Japanese and suffered a fatal heart attack a year into the occupation.56 In this period, members of some ethnic groups, such as the Ambonese and Chinese, became the targets of violence carried out by the Japanese and other Indonesians on the basis that members of these groups had previously collaborated with or worked alongside the Dutch.57 Despite the danger, Fanggidaej claims the Japanese occupation was transformative for her. It was during this time she first met nationalists from Eastern Indonesia. She was influenced especially by her niece, who moved in with Francisca’s family after returning from the Netherlands, where she had studied to be a headteacher. Fanggidaej was impressed that her niece rejected Western dress and instead wore the traditional Javanese dress of a sarong and kebaya. This sartorial choice reflected the general direction of Indonesian nationalism according to which many Indonesian men dropped traditional Javanese clothing and donned Western dress, while women were encouraged by men to wear traditional clothing. The rationale for women wearing traditional dress was that they were supposed to preserve both 55 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 40. 56 ibid., 45. See also Fanggidaej, ‘Cisca Fanggidaej voor IFM [Speech for the 55th Indonesian Independence Anniversary]’. 57 In his memoir, the Ambonese doctor and nationalist Gerrit Siwabessy reflects that he donned a peci (cone-shaped hat) and his wife a head scarf to look less identifiably Ambonese during this period. Gerrit Siwabessy, Upuleru: Memoar Dr G.A. Siwabessy [Upuleru: Memoir of Dr G.A. Siwabessy] (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1979), 19. On violence against the Chinese Indonesians in this period, see Ravando and Harsono’s Chapter 8 in this volume. 191 === [PDF page 14] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA their dignity and ‘Indonesian’—but in this case, really Javanese—cultural traditions.58 Despite her Moluccan background, Fanggidaej seems to read this choice of clothing as firmly nationalist. Through her niece’s links, Fanggidaej was exposed to nationalist thinking.59 She recalls that the gatherings of her niece’s friends at their home caused her great confusion: When they sang together in Indonesian, I couldn’t understand. I felt left out, displaced. I started to wonder: where do I actually belong? I didn’t feel at home anywhere anymore. I came to realise that something was missing. But I didn’t know what.60 This sense of displacement was most likely accentuated by the ban on the use of Dutch language during the Japanese occupation.61 A Moluccan teacher offered to teach Fanggidaej Indonesian. She recollected that he told her tales from Ambon that prompted a discovery of her own culture. Previously such stories had been dismissed in her home ‘as uninteresting and common folklore’.62 Her comment reflects her awareness of the colonial privileging of certain forms of knowledge. Connecting to her niece and other Moluccans made this period ‘a very meaningful time’ because she began to feel a greater sense of belonging.63 The feelings of displacement expressed by Fanggidaej mirror the thinking that was taking place within elite Ambonese political circles dating back to the 1920s. Within the increasingly politicised organisation Sarekat Ambon, for example, there was questioning of the place of the Ambonese and whether they were really fully accepted ‘into the Dutch family’.64 The writer Kayadoe, for example, writing in Sarekat Ambon’s journal, Mena Moeria, mocked the Ambonese who had become legal Europeans and those who had tried to disown their origins.65 In 1938 a prominent doctor, Gerrit Siwabessy, who was a distant relative of Francisca’s, established the Advance Moluccan Culture organisation as one way to address the identity 58 On these patterns concerning gender and national dress, see the interesting discussion in van der Meer, Performing Power, 129–44. 59 Fanggidaej, ‘Cisca Fanggidaej voor IFM [Speech for the 55th Indonesian Independence Anniversary]’. 60 ibid. 61 Siwabessy, Upuleru, 25. 62 Fanggidaej, ‘Cisca Fanggidaej voor IFM [Speech for the 55th Indonesian Independence Anniversary]’. 63 ibid. 64 Richard Chauvel, Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists: The Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to Revolt, 1880–1950 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), doi.org/10.1163/9789004253957, 77. 65 ibid., 78. 192 === [PDF page 15] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ crisis within this community in relation to the extent to which they were Indonesian or Dutch.66 Francisca connected with Siwabessy and other Moluccan intellectuals in Surabaya when selling cakes door to door to help support her family during the Japanese occupation. Through these people, she was introduced to new political ideas and learnt new words such as ‘penjajah’ (‘colonists’) and about concepts like fascism and Nazism.67 She recalls: ‘I became aware how refined the cruel system of colonialism was. Little by little the poison was administered gradually such that people did not notice the poison running through their brains and breath.’68 If the Japanese occupation was a period of political and cultural awakening for Fanggidaej, the Indonesian revolution that followed the 1945 declaration of independence was an extension of this process. Coming from the strictures of her family’s adherence to Dutch culture and their dismissal of Eastern Indonesian culture, she notes: [F]or me the path of national independence felt like the path to my own independence. With the arrival of independence, I felt freed by it. Free from what, I did not understand. But I felt that I had come home to my own home.69 In her memoir, she makes repeated references to finding a home, finding an identity and a new ‘lingkungan’ (‘environment’) during the revolution, by which she also meant a new political community.70 The sense of transitioning from living between two worlds, quickly learning the Indonesian language and embracing Indonesian nationalism is something Fanggidaej shared with other Dutch-educated elite nationalists,71 but there were specific dimensions to this transition for her due to the complex politics within the Moluccan community. Fanggidaej refers here to her separation from the colonial world as part and parcel of her separation from her mother, who decided to leave Indonesia in 1947 for the Netherlands,72 among a cohort of Moluccan elites who chose to emigrate. Others, especially those who were attacked during the Japanese 66 ibid., 146. 67 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 51. 68 ibid., 54. 69 ibid., 44. 70 ibid., 57. 71 See the discussion in Frances Gouda with Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia: US Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism, 1920–1949 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/35075, 132–34. 72 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 57. 193 === [PDF page 16] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA occupation or in the early years of the revolution by other Indonesians, chose to stay on in Indonesia and support the Dutch. What this meant is that, for the Ambonese, the Indonesian revolution entailed ‘members of one family not infrequently fighting on opposing sides’.73 Fanggidaej was in a similar position to Ambonese elites due to her family background. In her memoir, she mentions these fractures in her own family, but not the violence that accompanied such political choices. One organisation which she joined, the Pemuda Republik Indonesia Maluku (Moluccan Youths of the Indonesian Republic), for example, led by Gerrit Siwabessy and Sam Malessy, focused on spreading news among Moluccan people in Surabaya of the values underlying the Indonesian proclamation, while at the same time protecting the Ambonese from attacks from other Indonesians due to their perceived loyalty to the Dutch.74 Fanggidaej became more politically active during the revolution. In a brief reflection on her life, she stated that ‘17 August 1945 not only changed the path of my life, but also my identity and mentality’.75 She joined a branch of Pemuda Republik Indonesia in the city of Surabaya in which there were many Moluccan youths.76 She stressed their egalitarian attitudes, exemplified by the terms of address they used such as ‘bung’ and ‘zus’ (‘brother’ and ‘sister’) to refer to comrades.77 This was a marked contrast to the hierarchies and categorisations that permeated colonial society. She does not, however, comment on the gendered hierarchies at work during the revolution and how these affected her. Gouda notes, for example, that within the circles of male nationalists, there was a new emphasis on ‘hyper-masculinity’ and a rejection of femininity.78 On this point it is interesting to reflect on how this emphasis on hyper-masculinity may have carried forward into narratives of the revolution, including this memoir.79 Years later, reflecting on why 73 Chauvel, Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists, 203. 74 Siwabessy, Upuleru, 31. 75 Francisca Fanggidaej, ‘Pernilaian terhadap Masakini atas Dasar Pengalamanku Masalampau [An Examination of the Present Based On My Past Experiences]’, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, Pics 46–49, 2005, ARCH04303 (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History), 1. 76 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 65. 77 ibid., 68. While bung is a Malay word, zus is, interestingly, a Dutch word. 78 Frances Gouda, ‘Gender and “Hyper-Masculinity” as Post-Colonial Modernity During Indonesia’s Struggle for Independence, 1945 to 1949’, in Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (London: Routledge, 1999), 163–76. 79 See, for example, my review of the strong emphasis in the 2022 Rijksmuseum exhibition entitled ‘Revolusi!’ on Indonesian men as the key agents of the revolution. Katharine McGregor, ‘Review: “Revolusi”, An Exhibition’, Inside Indonesia, 11 February 2023, www.insideindonesia.org/editions/edition- 150-oct-dec-2022/review-revolusi. 194 === [PDF page 17] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ she sought out and joined these groups and why she embraced the new revolutionary language of the revolution including terms such as merdeka, Fanggidaej suggests she was drawn to their ideas and mission.80 Fanggidaej was chosen by leading Indonesian nationalists including president Sukarno to participate in the 8–10 November 1945 Youth Congress in Yogyakarta.81 It was at this conference that Pesindo was created as an amalgamation of 40 youth organisations. Attending the conference, Fanggidaej felt united with others by the pursuit of kemerdekaan (‘independence’). She enjoyed being part of this ‘new and welcoming world’ and felt a shared sense of identity with fellow participants.82 Taomo Zhou describes Fanggidaej’s awakening at this conference, when she began to fully imagine Indonesian self-determination, as her ‘Wilsonian Moment’.83 While the conference was under way the British bombarded the city of Surabaya, which made a deep impression on her.84 In her mind and that of many other Indonesian nationalists, this was an attack on a sovereign country. In response, the congress delegates decided they should disband and instead go and fight.85 The global revolution against colonialism Fanggidaej worked in the information division of Pesindo spreading information about the revolution especially through her radio broadcasts in Dutch and English for Radio Gelora Pemuda Indonesia. When Pesindo received an invitation to two congresses in Europe in 1947, she was chosen to go, together with Suripno, who had been an underground member of the Dutch Communist Party until his return to Indonesia in 1946. Harry Poeze suggests Fanggidaej was chosen primarily because of her ability to speak the international language of English.86 The two congresses were those of the International Union of Students, in which Suripno had already participated, and the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Prague. At these congresses, Fanggidaej argued that she represented all Indonesian 80 Fanggidaej, ‘An Evaluation of the Present Based on My Experiences of the Past’, 1. 81 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 69. 82 ibid., 134–35. 83 Zhou, ‘Passports to the Post-Colonial World’, 314. 84 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 76. 85 ibid., 76. 86 Harry Poeze, ‘The Cold War in Indonesia, 1948’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 195 === [PDF page 18] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA youth, not just socialist youth. She stressed that her most important mission was to look for sources of support for the Indonesian struggle.87 She appealed at these congresses for delegates to campaign to ‘stop the war’, meaning a Dutch withdrawal.88 Fanggidaej travelled via India on her way to and from Europe and spent three months there. She used these opportunities to spread news about the Indonesian proclamation and the struggle against the Dutch.89 There she received an invitation to attend the 1948 Southeast Asian Youth and Students Conference in Calcutta and helped to organise the conference.90 She became a key speaker in the main program and in the general meeting. For many years, the Cold War conspiracy theory regarding the Calcutta conference, noted above, overshadowed its significance as a united expression of opposition by Asian peoples to imperialism at a time when several European powers, including the Dutch, British and French, were attempting to take back their former colonies. Fanggidaej offers another view of the conference, claiming the Indonesian delegation was a focus because Indonesia was the first Southeast Asian country after the war to declare independence and ‘free itself from colonialism’ and because Indonesians were continuing to defend that independence.91 In a recent study of Indian–Indonesian connections in the 1940s, Heather Goodall confirms that ‘the Indonesian Revolution seemed—for a while—to be everybody’s revolution’, noting that it ‘sent waves of hope and fear across many borders’.92 Indeed, at the Calcutta conference, delegations from Vietnam, Malaya, China, Burma and the Philippines joined with large delegation of Indians and Pakistanis as hosts.93 Reflecting on the conference, Fanggidaej says it ‘was the first time after the Second World War when the youths of Asia could gather as representatives of their respective countries who were in the midst of rising up to oppose colonialism’.94 She claims that ‘the spirit of Calcutta was the embryo for the spirit of Bandung’.95 What precisely did Fanggidaej mean by the Bandung spirit? Recent scholarship on the 1955 Bandung Conference has begun to 87 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 109. 88 ibid., 115. 89 ibid., 109. 90 ibid., 119. 91 ibid., 120. 92 Heather Goodall, Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939 to 1950 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), doi.org/10.1515/9789048531103, 1. 93 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 119. 94 ibid., 123. 95 ibid., 124. 196 === [PDF page 19] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ unpack the multiple meanings of Bandung and to move beyond a narrow understanding of this conference as the root of the non-aligned movement.96 South African scholar Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for example, uses the concept of the Bandung spirit to refer to ‘a melange of resistance and struggles against colonial encounters, colonialism, and coloniality—going as far back as the time of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)’.97 In this conceptualisation, the Bandung spirit refers to a long global process of contesting colonialism and coloniality. This process of contesting coloniality for the political left extended to a critique of how the international order and related political inequalities continued to influence the diplomatic negotiations that took place throughout the revolution. In a recent study of some of the major agreements made during the revolution, Nila Ayu Utami argues that Indonesia was forced to contend with ‘remnants of colonial practices’ for years, as signified by the Linggadjati Agreement of 1946, within which the Republic of Indonesia was considered only one constituent of the future Dutch-created political unit of the United States of Indonesia.98 During the revolution, Fanggidaej was outraged at the apparent unequal status of the Republic of Indonesia in diplomatic negotiations and used her speaking platform at the Calcutta conference and related press interviews to critique the premises of the 1948 Renville Agreement. This agreement, brokered by the UN Security Council, recognised all territories gained by the Dutch until this stage of the revolution as Dutch controlled until the formation of the United States of Indonesia.99 Fanggidaej objected to the fact that in this agreement the republic was given the same status as what she referred to as Dutch ‘puppet states’ like the State of East Sumatra, which, for her, symbolised that ‘the Republic has fallen from the status of being a sovereign 96 See, for example, Katharine McGregor and Vannessa Hearman, ‘Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism: Reassessing Afro-Asian Solidarity and Related Activism in the Decade 1955–1965’, in Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, eds Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 161–76, doi.org/​ 10.1017/​9781316414880.012; and Carolien Stolt and Su Lin Lewis, eds, The Lives of Cold War Afro- Asianism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022). 97 Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘When Did the Masks of Coloniality Begin to Fall: Decolonial Reflections on the Bandung Spirit of Decolonisation’, Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6, no. 2 (2019): 210–32, at 210. 98 Nila Ayu Utami, ‘Revisiting the Bandung Conference: Berbeda Sejak dalam Pikiran’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2016): 140–47, doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1134045, at 142. 99 ‘Pemuda di Awal Perang Kemerdekaan kisah seperti dituturkan pada Hersri Setiawan [The Youth Movement at the Beginning of the War of Independence, a Story as Told to Hersri Setiawan]’, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, Box 3, Folder 4, Pics 33–37, ARCH04303 (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, n.d.), 3. 197 === [PDF page 20] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA state to a state that had no power whatsoever’.100 She claims that she felt betrayed by the republic for making this agreement because it did not honour the sacrifices made by the Indonesian people during the revolution. She received backlash at the time from the republic for her criticism and for highlighting the inequality of this deal. Her criticisms remind us of the highly contested political agreements negotiated throughout the revolution and the ongoing influence of coloniality and power in negotiations about its resolution—a theme that is further explored in Boonstra’s Chapter 9 and Karabinos and Theo’s Chapter 10 in this volume. Fanggidaej returned to Indonesia just four days before the outbreak of the Madiun Affair, which began on 18 September 1948.101 In her memoir, she notes that she was preparing to socialise the messages of the Calcutta conference about opposing colonialism in Indonesia. Due to the theory that the Soviets had passed on instructions at the Calcutta conference for Southeast Asians to revolt in their own countries and the timing of the Madiun Affair, her political position suddenly became dangerous. She admits in her memoir to carrying a secret letter but claims it did not contain instructions. She emphasises that all she could do was run given she was wanted for questioning by the republic about the Calcutta conference and the related conspiracy theory. She witnessed the brutal repression by republican forces of members of Pesindo, including the killing of her husband. Fanggidaej was imprisoned but released. Following the recovery of the political left, as noted above, she went on to play a major role in Indonesian politics, challenging ongoing forms of imperialism until the 1965 repression. Conclusions Fanggidaej’s life experiences as narrated in her memoir provide rare insights into the thinking of an Indonesian revolutionary. The memoir traces her transformation from being raised in Dutch cultural traditions in the colonial era through to discovering her cultural identity and her political home among Pesindo, which made her a firm critic of colonialism in its many forms. Because of Fanggidaej’s unique position as a revolutionary and an exile locked out of her country for many years, her memoir, written 100 Setiawan, Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman, 126. 101 The Madiun Affair (Peristiwa Madiun) began when factions in the Indonesian military seized control of the City of Madiun in East Java, which was declared an illegal uprising by the republican government. 198 === [PDF page 21] === 7. FRANCISCA FANGGIDAEJ many years after her experiences, offers unique insights into coloniality and marginality and efforts to dismantle and challenge different forms of coloniality in daily life, through to international relations. Her decolonial perspectives allow insights into different visions of the Indonesian nation that have been marginalised in Indonesia. Perhaps due to her status as an exile and the need to prove her nationalist credentials, her memoir is framed very much within a nationalist paradigm such that differences across the relatively fragile political community of the Indonesian nation, especially between ethnic groups and including those between men and women, are not addressed. The silences of her memoir mean that it does not fully engage with how the coloniality of power continued to negatively impact the experiences of both women and ethnic minorities from the late colonial period through to the Indonesian revolution. Yet, the work remains an important decolonial text. References Primary sources Fanggidaej, Francisca. n.d. ‘Pemuda di Awal Perang Kemerdekaan kisah seperti dituturkan pada Hersri Setiawan’ [The Youth Movement at the Beginning of the War of Independence, a Story as Told to Hersri Setiawan].’ Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, Box 3, Folder 4, Pics 33–37, ARCH04303. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History. Fanggidaej, Francisca. 2000. ‘Cisca Fanggidaej voor IFM [Speech for the 55th Indonesian Independence Anniversary, a Celebratory Event Held by the Indonesia Friendship Organization, An Organisation of Indonesian Exiles in Amsterdam].’ Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, Box 12, Folder 9, Pics 74–78, ARCH04303. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History. Fanggidaej, Francisca. 2005. ‘Pernilaian terhadap Masakini atas Dasar Pengalamanku Masalampau [An Evaluation of the Present Based on My Experiences of the Past].’ Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, Pics 46–49, ARCH04303. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History. Setiawan, Hersri. 2006. Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner: Francisca Fanggidaej [Memoir of a Revolutionary Woman: Francisca Fanggidaej]. Yogyakarta: Galang Press. 199 === [PDF page 22] === RETHINKING HISTORIES OF INDONESIA Siwabessy, Gerrit. 1979. Upuleru: Memoar Dr G.A. 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