Working in the Dutch colonial archives: a follow-up to Knapen (1997). (Brief Communications).

Having recently returned from conducting archival research at the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI) in Jakarta, I would like to offer this note as a follow-up to Han Knapen's (1997) very helpful article on the subject. Unlike Knapen, I did not cover the archival materials for South and East Borneo. So, my remarks here regarding the documents themselves pertain largely to West Borneo, and I will repeat very little of the information he provided, instead referring the reader to his article directly. I would also like to present some brief information on the national archives (Algemeen Rijksarchief or ARA) in the Netherlands.

Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia in Jakarta

From the start, I would underscore Knapen's comments about the extreme urgency of archival work. The ANRI documents have not been well preserved, and the older ones are crumbling, and even those in better condition are fast deteriorating. A colleague of mine working with eastern Indonesian material estimated that most documents have another decade before they fall apart entirely.

For West Borneo, the documents available at ANRI cover most of the nineteenth century, with some late 1700s documents. They consist mainly of short reports, general reports, area reports, succession reports, contracts and correspondence with native rulers, resolutions, and dagregisters. For the upper Kapuas, there are not as many detailed letters and reports as in the ARA, but there is a good deal of information (it seemed) on the areas closer to the coast, such as Sambas and Pontianak.

Knapen (1997:113-114) notes that ANRI has "an almost complete collection" of succession reports (Memories van Overgave) on microfilm. Given time constraints, I was unable to look into these documents and thus cannot say how the ANRI collection for West Borneo compares to that at ARA. However, while on my way to the field in the upper Kapuas, I stopped at the kabupaten office at Sintang where Victor King viewed several memories back in the 1970s. (In his valuable bibliography, King lists six memories [by Blok, Bouman, Hips, Kelly, Mooijen, and Werkman] as being located there [Aye, King, and de Wit 1983:194].) However, I was unable to locate these documents. The office staff I spoke with said the building that used to house government archives had been "renovated" about a decade ago, and the documents were distributed among various departments. They did not know if these memories were among them, and all the kepala kantor were gone at the time so I could not inquire further. I also spoke with the head of the ka bupaten museum and found that all of the documents in his collection are copies of old Dutch treaties with native kingdoms. I would encourage anyone passing through Sintang to look into this further, for if these memories are not in the ANRI collection, their only known whereabouts is (or was?) Sintang.

Knapen also mentions some archives being housed in Bogor during his research, but they were moved to the ANRI in 1999. Subsequently, a new inventory list was made up (Kelompok 1999), and the earlier inventory numbers are no longer valid (Sunarti et al. 1986). The transfer of the Bogor archives did not add much to the West Borneo collection--only 12 document bundles--but there may be more for South and East Borneo. (Before I learned of this transfer, I actually visited the old Bogor archive building, which was obviously built by the Dutch, given the word "archief' above the door. It is to become an Arsip Pemerintah Daerah, but is now entirely empty.)

There are some practical matters to keep in mind, in addition to those mentioned by Knapen.

* At the ANRI, there are two different buildings of concern to researchers--one where the reading room is located and the other where the documents are housed. If it is raining, you apparently cannot get any bundles you ordered because there is no covered walkway between the two buildings. It is therefore advisable to schedule visits to the ANRI during the dry season. The wet season is usually between October and January.

* Regular office hours are Monday-Thursday 9:00 am-3 :00 pm, Friday 9:00 am-12:00 pm, 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm; Saturday 9:00 am-12:00 pm. But watch for planned and unplanned holidays. In mid-March 2000, I had taken into account the Islamic holy day of Idul Adha falling on Thursday (16 March), but what I did not anticipate was a government holiday that extended into the weekend. There was a dispute between the two largest Muslim organizations (Nahdlatul Ulama and Mohammedjyah) over which day--Thursday or Friday--the holy day should fall, and to please all sides, President Abdurrabman Wahid declared both days as holidays. This meant that all government offices, including those of the ANRI, were closed from Thursday until Sunday.

* It is also advisable to check the six-month fumigation schedule for the document storage rooms: After waiting out the long, four-day weekend, I returned to the ANRI to find that the staff had just fumigated the room where the West Borneo material is housed. This made it inaccessible for ten days.

* To head off potential frustration, expect to be able to make only two orders per day (that's ten bundles), but you can pre-order for the next day.

* Accommodations have improved since Knapen was there. Although there are still few hotels close by, there is now a clean, comfortable and affordable wisma network in South Jakarta (PT Widia Mandiri, Jl. Abuserin No. 29, Cipete; telephone [phone]). Most rentals are within a 10-15 minute taxi or microlet bus ride from the ANRI. (In general, short-term rental rates for South Jakarta have fallen since the economic crisis, and it might be worth the effort to shop around.)

Algemeen Rijksarchief in the Hague

There are a large number of collections at the ARA, and most of those pertaining to Borneo may be found in the Ministerie van Kolonien archive. These include memories van overgave; public and secret mail reports (openbare en geheime mailrapporten); public, secret and "kabinets" verbalen; political reports (politieke verslagen culled from verbalen); and an extensive collection of VOC and early colonial documents.

Some material like that for the VOC is microfilmed, some is microfiched (e.g. the mafirapporten and politieke verslagen), and others are not (e.g. the verbalen). A good number of maps are on microfiche.

There is some limited cataloguing of nineteenth-century mailrapporten, but none for the twentieth-century mailrapporten, except for time-consuming inventory lists. Many twentieth-century mailrapporten have been moved to the verbalen and/or to the politieke verslagen. The index (klapper) for the verbalen is a cumbersome but essential cross-reference making use of keywords, and the agenda verbalen provide lists of letters received by year with some minimal description. These are valuable though time-consuming tools.

The archive building is equipped with a large reading room, and there are outlets for laptop computers. The microfilm/microfiche area is more crowded with more competition for plugs. You must order documents on the easy-to-use computer terminals, while the microfilm and microfiche are self-served. Archive hours are Tuesday, 9:00 am-9:00 pm; Wednesday-Friday, 9:00 am-5:00 pm; and Saturday, 9:00 am-1:00 pm. The building is very accessible, being located immediately between the central train station and the Koninklijk Biblioteek (Royal Library).

It is also worth mentioning the Department of Historical Documentation at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV) in Leiden. The documents there are well worth looking into. For example, they have a copy of Hartmann's dagregister that includes his 1823 trip up the Kapuas, which is otherwise only available at the ANRI. The KITLV also has an excellent library with many hard-to-find books and articles pertaining to Borneo. They also have a collection of photographs that is now accessible through their web site. (Other photographs can be found at the State Museum for Anthropology [Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde] in Leiden and the Royal Tropical Institute [Koninklijk Instituut voor den Tropen] in Amsterdam.) There is also the Henrik Kramer Instituut in Oegstgeest (next to Leiden) which houses some material on mission work in Borneo. Other mission archives such as those belonging to the Capuchin Order of the Roman Catholic Church are located elsewhere in the country, with Catholic mission ar chives mainly around Tilburg in the southern Netherlands.

Possible Research Projects for West Borneo

Finally I would like to suggest some possible research projects for West Borneo, using these exciting but largely untapped sources. (The Chinese areas have received some recent attention by Yuan [1999], and the Iban in my own work [e.g., Wadley 2000a, 2000b].)

* The native kingdoms along the Kapuas and elsewhere in West Borneo have been largely ignored by scholars, and there is abundant material on their relations with the Dutch, with each other, and with subject and non-subject Dayaks (see Djuweng 1999; Sellato 1999).

* Histories of important river systems like the Melawi, Landak, Sambas, and Simpang remain to be researched and written.

* The development of the long Sarawak-West Borneo border is an important topic, and my own recent work has focused almost exclusively on the Iban-inhabited border area.

* Ethno- and colonial histories need to be written of the various and numerous Dayaks, such as the "Ibanic" peoples in the Ketungau river system, who have been neglected historically and ethnographically.

* Though not as sexy as headhunting and tribal peoples, the development of urban centers such as Pontianak and Sintang is a topic that needs attention.

* Colonial economic policy and practice, such as the development of plantations and of gold and coal mining, would provide important comparative material for current national policy and practice.

* Given that the archival documents were originally written by particular people with particular aims, studies of Dutch colonial perceptions of all the above topics (and about internal colonial politics) would prove most illuminating.

References Cited

Ave, Jan B., Victor T. King, and Joke de Wit

1983 West Kalimantan: A Bibliography. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

Djuweng, Stephanus

1999

Dayak Kings among Malay Sultans. Borneo Research Bulletin 30:105-109.

Kelompok Kerja Inventaris Arsip Konvensional

1999

Inventaris Arsip Kalimantan Barat (Borneo Westerafdeeling). Jakarta: Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia.

Knapen, Han

1997

Archival Sources for the Colonial History of Kalimantan in Jakarta. Borneo Research Bulletin 28:109-116.

Sellato, Bernard

1999

The Kingdom of Ulu Are in Borneo's History: A Comment. Borneo Research Bulletin 30:110-112.

Sunarti, Syarif Usman Sabaroedin, and J. L. Parani

1986

Inventaris Arsip Borneo Westerafdeeling (1609-1890) dan Borneo Zuid en Oosterafdeeling (1664-1890). Jakarta: Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia.

Wadley, Reed L.

2000a

Trouble on the Frontier: Dutch-Brooke Relations and Iban Rebellion in the West Borneo Borderlands (1841-1886). Modern Asian Studies, in press.

2000b

Population Dynamics in the West Borneo Borderlands: Warfare, Pacification, and Environment (1823-1934). Moussons: Social Science Research on Southeast Asia, in press.

Yuan Bingling

1999

Chinese Democracies: A Study of the Kongsis of West Borneo (1776-1884). Leiden: CNWS Publications.