The children that the Netherlands did not want to help
In the book "Forgotten by the Fatherland" Wilma van der Maten speaks with Indian women, who came to the Netherlands as orphans during the colonial period. "After independence, the Dutch state suddenly no longer felt responsible for the orphans she had removed from the kampung!"
the Dutch Indies administration was quite racist during the colonial period, according to the book "Forgotten by the Fatherland" that our correspondent Wilma van der Maten wrote. She spoke with orphans from then, now very old, who were then taken away from their brown mothers and ended up in a Dutch "asylum". White Dutchmen were not allowed to marry indigenous women. Indonesia celebrates 70 years of independence on Monday. The orphans from back then still feel abandoned by the Netherlands. The Netherlands left them alone after 1945.
“When I didn't ask for it, the Dutch government was on my doorstep to take me away from my mother. The social service has done this twice. Now that I am old and in need of help, they don't give home. Where did they go? ”, Jane Hardy (79) wonders. After her father, a sailor, drowned during the Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February 1942, this government service removed the "illegitimate children" from her mother in the kampung, the hamlet. The government refused to provide her mother, a native woman, with benefits. The rejection stated that she was not officially married to a Dutchman. "He lived in the Dutch East Indies, didn't he," says Jane. Her father drowned during one of the greatest naval battles in colonial history. Was the Netherlands not responsible for his death?
The children ended up in separate orphanages separately from each other. Jane was then still a toddler. The colonial administration considered her Javanese mother without a Dutch man by her side suitable for taking care of her children. Most "native" women could not read or write. There was a danger that the brown mothers would teach the little Indo-Europeans too much of her own Indian traditions. They knew nothing about Dutch culture. Her children spoke local dialects and felt happy for a long time in the slums where these women lived. That was a dangerous development and a threat to the colonial state. “Life in the kampung did not benefit the loyalty of the children to the Dutch authority. That was soon to come to an end ”, governor-general Marshal Herman Daendels reasoned at the time. In the orphanage they received a strict, nationalistic upbringing and vocational training. It was in the best interests of the child, according to the colonial government.
