I was to repay this debt when I returned to Indonesia.
After I had been in the Netherlands for a while, it turned out that for Rp 30 a month I could secure slightly better accommodation in a house.15 This was arranged through a friend of mine after I had spent a year in the hostel. I was reprimanded by the director of the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem for taking the initiative in leaving the hostel. However, I made the move because my health had deteriorated to such a degree that I preferred to avoid even looking at hostel meals. That sort of food only roused my stomach to reject it; the ingredients were good enough and contained nourishment, but they were cooked in the worst institutional manner.
[22] My health had already deteriorated greatly. Before leaving Indonesia I had to get a doctor’s certificate for insurance purposes. I got it easily enough and, after examining me, the doctor said with a smile: “You are as strong as teak.” But even teak can be eaten up by time and the climate. And as my desire to eat waned, my desire to play sports continued to rage. As a member of a soccer club in Haarlem, I dutifully played in the matches every week both in the city and in neighboring villages.16 But I didn’t know how to look after myself in winter, and what I did know I didn’t pay attention to.
[23] Several years before, when I was still young and undeveloped in strength and stamina, my sporting friends dared me to swim across the Ombilin River.17 Tossed around by the swift current, I lost my breath; and, as my arms and legs went limp, I lost consciousness. Fortunately, a strong friend was close by and quickly gave me help. When I came to, I was in front of my mother, whose cane was poised to teach me a lesson. My father, who apparently knew well that my mother’s beatings really smarted, urged that I be given a lesson that he deemed more appropriate. With a horse’s bit in my mouth, I was tied to the fence by the side of the road, a spectacle for the Engku children, who weren’t allowed to play with the village children like me. But my mother thought that this was only a stratagem of my father’s to take me away from her. When she saw me with the bit in my mouth, even though my father was standing by on guard and children were swarming around, my mother was not satisfied. She believed in a higher authority, the guru gadang (head teacher).18 On my mother’s urging, the head teacher gave me the punishment we children knew by the name of pilin pusat (navel twisting). I still wonder why I was the only one to be the target for this punishment. I copped it another time too, again after almost being washed away while diving under the boat carrying the Engku children across the Ombilin River. And there was another time, when we were playing, splashing each other in the face until one gave in. Although I saw most of the other children run away, I continued splashing my opponent. Finally when even my opponent ran away I thought that the struggle was over, victory was mine, and I had the full right to savor my success. Only I was a bit surprised that there was nobody left but me. When I got to the river bank to put on my clothes, awaiting me were the five fingers of the head teacher, ready to twist my navel. Apparently the other children had seen him waiting on the bank, but I was too involved in the game and had my back to him. After that, if anyone said that I had taken the Engku children to see a tiger captured in the mountains, for instance, I was the only one who would be punished. And if an orange war—where one line of children threw oranges at the other line—ended up in a stone war between the local children and those from the school in Tanjung Ampalu, it was I, of course, who had to endure punishment as a war criminal. This time, I was first put into a chicken coop. However, this didn’t seem to satisfy my mother’s sense of justice and so, at her instigation, the head teacher quickly imposed his usual punishment, smoothly and deftly twisting my navel.
Around the playing fields of Velsen or Ijmuiden in winter there was lots of snow, but there were no fingers ready to pounce on my navel. I paid no heed when my friends advised me to wear a thick sweater during half time. It was only bitter experience that could teach me. I do not know whether it stemmed from insufficient food, unregulated sports, or a combination of both, but three months before my teacher’s exams I fell ill with pleurisy. Only when I could no longer walk did I tell my landlady, and only then was the doctor called.19
Payment for the doctor was a major problem. Outside of my allowance of Rp 8.50 a month I had no money at all. The only doctor we could call was one who helped poor people without asking for pay, known in Haarlem as the busdokter.20 His name was Doctor Jansen. Naturally enough, his examinations weren’t as thorough as those done in hospitals by first-class doctors, and his medicines were only cheap powders. My tiny attic with its close and stifling atmosphere did not hasten my recovery from pleurisy. My temperature remained high, but since I wanted to return to Indonesia I was very anxious to take my teacher’s examinations; my agreement with the Engkufonds was for only two years. But while my temperature remained high, the doctor would certainly not allow me to take the exams. So I began to bring down my temperature. Fortunately it was I who had to take the readings, three times a day.
Believing that I was seriously ill, the director of the Rijkskweekschool came to see me, several days before the examinations. He commented on my not having taken the tests during the three months that I had been absent from school. However, in spite of my absence, he still had faith in my ability and would let me take the exams as long as I had a certificate from the doctor. With great difficulty I got the doctor’s certificate, on the condition that I went to and returned from the exam by horse carriage. My temperature was normal . . . on the chart that I myself had filled in.
[24] And so at the appointed times I took the official written and oral examinations, and I passed them both. But when I returned home I suffered the effects of having so expended my energy when I was still seriously ill.
In point of fact it had not been really necessary for me to go through some two years at the Rijkskweekschool to get my hulp-acte.21 In my opinion two or three months of supplementary courses would have been sufficient. However, under Dutch imperialist policy at that time, the process of obtaining a teacher’s Europeescheacte was so complicated that it would take too long for me to go into it here.22 However, one incident illustrates the whole situation quite clearly. After the Silungkang insurrection of 1927,23 the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi, which in my time was the sole teaching academy for the whole of Sumatra, was closed altogether.24 Even the Kweekschool was too advanced for the ten million Sumatran people, and for the Minangkabau people in particular.
Here I have not the time, space, or inclination to relate the whole story of my education, useful as it might be for our youth today. But in order to explain more clearly how the climate and food of the Netherlands disagreed with me, particularly in my early years there, it will help if I explain in some detail the conflict between the knowledge I had at the time and my desire to study on the one hand, and between this desire and the possibilities for me to realize it on the other.
The Dutch government paid the cost of education for the pupils at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem, just as it did at the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi. But other similarities between the two schools were hard to find. The Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem taught its students to become teachers of Dutch children in the Dutch language and in the interests of the Dutch nation. The Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi trained its students to teach Indonesian children, primarily in the Indonesian language and in the interests of the Dutch East Indies.
Competition to receive government support was so great that many of the students admitted to the Rijkskweekschool were at least graduates of the MULO level.25 The large number of candidates meant that the entrance examinations were hard enough, though not as harsh as those for the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi, particularly for students of Minangkabau-darat or Padang-darat descent.26 (In my time, of the two or three hundred candidates only three of us were accepted.)
[25] When I started at the Rijkskweekschool in Haarlem, I was bitterly disappointed to find that my education from the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi had no connection with what I would now pursue. It is true that both schools taught botany, for example. However, the plants we had to study in the Netherlands were of course different from those in Indonesia: similarly with geography, pedagogy, art, and geometry. Furthermore, there were subjects that I had to study from the very beginning, such as Dutch history, world history, algebra, stereometry, trigonometry, and mechanics. On the other hand, some of the subjects that I had studied in Bukit