Mardijker
Mardijkers were freed slaves in the Dutch East Indies . "Mardijker" was a collective term for all released, mostly Christian, slaves and their descendants.
As early as the 16th century, the Portuguese used the term mardicas in their colonies , derived from the Sanskrit word maharddhika , "very rich, happy and powerful". In ancient Java this meant a free man who no longer lived in slavery or servitude. In Bahasa Indonesia the word lives on as merdeka , which means free. Both the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, adopted the name, corrupted it and used it primarily to denote Christian ex-slaves.
Emergence
Freedmen
Originally, native Spanish and Portuguese prisoners of war were called Mardijkers. These Christian soldiers were given their freedom back after serving the VOC for a number of years . They became citizens on the condition that they could be called up for military service at any time. The system had been introduced by the Portuguese and was adopted by the Spaniards. Christianized slaves were brought to East India from Western India and even from Africa, where they were a separate group of people, closely linked to the European rulers. Military service was required of the freed slaves, but they were free to settle where they wished. So the Portuguese had trustworthy domestic soldiers in the conquered areas. The freedmen always had more in common with the European conquerors (namely religion) than with the pagan Asians.
The Dutch made much less use of the converted domestic militia system than the Portuguese. Slaves of Bandanese or Moluccan origin brought with them by the Dutch, but also non-native Muslims, were often released after a few years. They were given the name Mardijkers. The Mardijkers ended up in special residential areas for “domestic Christians”. The "Kampung Banda", which still exists today, was built in Batavia . The Batavian Mardijkers differed in religion and appearance from other Asians in the city. They wore European clothing such as hats and shoes and were recognizable Christians.
Origin and status
Many Mardijkers were descendants of people of different origins. Whether a child was counted among the Mestiezen or the Mardijkern had nothing to do with rich or poor, but was determined by the legal status of its birth. Mestiezen and Mardijker were names used by the administrators of the United East India Company . Although this expression was also used by the townspeople themselves and this designation also reflected reality, there was a great diversity hidden behind the paper reality. Mestiezen and Mardijker formed a motley gathering of people of different origins.
Children of mixed Asian-European origins who were recognized were referred to as "mixties" or "mesties" in the official terminology, a term derived from the Portuguese word mestiço . Not all children of mixed Asian-European descent were counted among the mesties. If a European father did not recognize the children he had fathered with a slave, they remained under the care of the mother. If they were raised in a Christian way and were given freedom, they were counted among the Mardijk people.
The background of Mestiezen and Mardijkern was the very different origins of the slaves. Some had an Indian mother who spoke Tamil and was Hindu, others had a Macassar, Balinese, or Ambrose mother who had grown up with the language and religion of their homeland.
Cultural mixing
Even in the times of their slavery, slaves changed. Far from their homeland, they lived among other slaves of various origins and were often under pressure from their masters to accept their religion.
There was a cultural mix with Portuguese elements. A form of Portuguese was the most widely used language with which the various groups - slaves and free people - communicated with one another. Most of the first generation of slaves came from the Middle East , where the Portuguese had a strong cultural influence in the 16th century. The influence of Creole Portuguese increased with the arrival of Asian residents from areas that the VOC had conquered from the Portuguese. In 1641 part of the population of Malacca and the Ceylonese places like Galle (1640) and Colombo (1656) were brought to Batavia.
Names
The Portuguese influence can be clearly seen in the family names, such as De Fretes, Ferrera, De Mello, Gomes, Gonsalvo, De Horta, Cordero, De Dias, De Costa, Soares, Rodrigo, De Pinto, Perreira and De Silva, names those in Batavia occurred frequently. The fact that someone had a Portuguese name did not mean that they had Portuguese ancestors. Slaves and free people who had been Christianized and baptized by the Portuguese often took the name of a baptismal witness.
Some Dutch adopted this practice, so Dutch names also spread. It is not uncommon for a slave owner to act as a witness to his Christianized slaves. It could also happen that a slave was named after the Governor General Jacques Specx . As a rule, a slave took a Portuguese or Dutch first name at baptism, combined with a surname that indicated his geographical origin, e.g. B. Willem van Bengalen, Magdalena van Bali, or Antonica da Costa (from the Coromandel coast, in India). In addition to their first names, their children always received the name of their father. Pieter, a son of Willems van Bengalen, was called Pieter Willemsz. This is how family names such as Michielsz, Bastiaansz, Simonsz, Pietersz, Manuelsz, Jansz, Fransz, Davidtsz or Abrahamsz emerged in the 17th century. They were typical Mardijk family names.
Residential areas
In addition to Batavia, many Mardijkers lived in Tugu and on the Moluccas .
Tugu
After the fall of Malacca and the victory of the Dutch (1641), the Portuguese - mainly the Mestiços (Portuguese-Asian Christians), native Christians and Mardijkers - were brought to the new trading center of the VOC, in Batavia. In 1661 the VOC made a piece of land available to order as thanks for the service rendered. This land of Tugu was about 12 kilometers northeast of Batavia. The first Tugunese were 23 Mardijker families who farmed there. They were of Bengali or Coromandelic origin. Mainly male slaves married to Balinese women. You were released for renouncing your Catholic faith and becoming Calvinist. They lived in a simple settlement that initially didn't even have a cemetery, so the residents had to bury their dead in Batavia.
Tugu developed into a bulwark of the Portuguese mestiez culture , where a mixture of Portuguese and Indian, increasingly with Malei expressions, was spoken. The Portuguese language remained in the isolated village for a long time until it was superseded by Malei in the late 19th century. Around 1930 the Tugu teacher Jacob Quiko collected the Portuguese words that the older generation still used. The list indicates that a different Portuguese was spoken than in the Portuguese colonies of Flores and Timor . The Tugu Portuguese lived only for music, like the Orkes Keroncong by Samuel Quiko. While Mardijker Portuguese continued to exist in Tugu for a long time, there was little of it to be found in Batavia by the middle of the 19th century. The typical Mardijk family names have disappeared everywhere, except in the village of Tugu, where some names still live on. Both Portuguese and Dutch names appear in the cemetery.
Moluccas
Mardicas and Mestiços were found everywhere where the Portuguese had colonial bases . In the Moluccas there were Portuguese garrisons and colonists who kept slaves on a large scale from the early 16th century. The Portuguese culture on Ambon disappeared soon after the conquest by the VOC in 1605 and was only recognizable by the family name. In the Moluccas, however, the Portuguese names have a different origin than in Batavia, where Portuguese culture was introduced by Portuguese-Indian slaves. In the Moluccas, most of the slaves came from the Indonesian archipelago. It was mostly about so-called Macassars, a group of slaves from Celebes and the surrounding area.
In a census in 1672, the administration of the VOC divided the population into two groups: the larger group, the "Green Geusen" so named after the green flags of their rifle groups, and next to them a small group of Macassars, who were probably Muslims. The Green Geusen were Mardijkers who had been deported to Ambon as slaves from Bali, Ternate , the southern Moluccas and Batavia, Batavian slaves came from much further afield from the front-Indian region.
The very mixed group of Mardijkern on the island of Ambon earned their living almost exclusively by cultivating the gardens near Fortress Victoria and by growing rice. They had their own vegetable market, still today called “Pasar Mardicas” (Mardijker market).
According to the population statistics, the number of mesties on Ambon was not very large. In 1672, only 132 Mestiezen are said to have lived in the city of Ambon: 20 men, 32 women and 80 children. The group of Mardijkers was many times larger with 557 people. The large surplus of women is striking: 222 to 151 men. It is possible that among the 184 children of these Mardijk women there were many illegitimate children of VOC employees. As in Batavia, the actual number of children of mixed origins was much larger than the official figures indicated.
Batavia
Governor General Rijckloff van Goens (1678–1681) reported that in 1679 about 3000 Mardijkers and another 16000 slaves lived in the colony. In 1679, 2227 Dutch, 760 Mestiezen and 5348 Mardijkers lived in the city center and suburbs of Batavia. In 1699 there were 1783 Europeans, 670 Mestiezen, 2407 Mardijker, 3679 Chinese and 867 others in the city of Batavia. The number of slaves probably made up around 50% of the city's population. In 1739 there were 1276 Europeans in Batavia, 421 Mestiezen, 1038 Mardijkers, 4199 Chinese, 299 others, and about 12,000 slaves.
Impoverishment and wealth
In the course of the 17th century, the Batavia slave colony continued to flourish, the number of slaves rose from around 1,000 around 1630 to 25,000 at the end of the century. Slaves made up more than half of the downtown population. This led to great social problems, because many slaves were released when they were old and sick and were of little use to the keepers. In gratitude for many years of loyal service, the owners often gave their freedom back for humanitarian reasons. However, it was above all the aging of the slave population that caused the number of freedmen to increase sharply at the end of the century. Large numbers of ex-slaves flooded the Mardijker neighborhoods. Old slaves in particular formed a disturbing group. It was difficult to get enough food and they lived in great poverty. The reformed diakonia looked after these "vrije swartinnen", cared for hundreds of homeless people and ran a poor house.
Not all Mardijkers were poor. By 1700 there were already individual wealthy families who had left slave life behind them for two or three generations. With trade and speculative business some knew how to achieve considerable prosperity and were able to acquire lands in the vicinity of Batavia. The Mardijkers were therefore loyal to the VOC, which formed many regiments from these circles and used them in numerous wars at the end of the 17th century. Various Mardijker sea traders regularly brought the VOC mail to Ternate and Ambon with their ships.
The Mardijkers in Batavia were most numerous in the second half of the 17th century. Its growth kept pace with that of the Dutch community. In the last few years of the VOC towards the end of the 18th century, “Mardijkers” and “Christians” had become almost synonymous. The Mardijker differed from the Indonesians by their darker skin color, their language, the Creole Portuguese and their names, Portuguese and later Dutch baptismal names. Even her clothes were Portuguese cut. As the number of Dutch people decreased in the 18th century and fewer Christian slaves came, the Mardijker community also dwindled. The difference between Mestiezen and Mardijkern ("Swarten") became smaller and smaller due to many mixed weddings. In the last quarter of the 18th century people finally spoke of “Indian Christians” or “Portuguese”, which was a confusing term for this group of largely Asian descent.
See also
literature
- Ulbe Bosma, Remco Raben: Being "Dutch" in the Indies. A History of Creolization and Empire, 1500-1920. Translated by Wendie Shaffer. National University of Singapore Press, Singapore 2008, ISBN 978-9971-69-373-2 .
- Jean Gelman Taylor: The Social World of Batavia. European and Asian in Dutch Asia. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1983.
Individual evidence
- ↑ R. Leirissa: Ambon and Ternate through the 19th century. In: Authority and enterprise among the people of South Sulawesi (= Bijdragen in taal land en volkenkunde 156, No. 3). Leiden University, Leiden 2000, pp. 619–633.) KITLV p. 249 on kitlv-journals.nl (access only possible via login).