’Whither do you now wish to go?’: slavery, flight and longing in and around Manado (Indonesia) in the age of abolition

ABSTRACT

The history of slavery in the age of abolition is full of contradictions. The fate of enslaved persons depended on coincidences, on bad luck and good fortune. To understand what this meant in practice, this article focuses on questions of flight and longing. It zooms in on the colonial enclave Manado, North Sulawesi (Indonesia), where slavery was both an indigenous-regional and a local-colonial phenomenon, two worlds that were never fully separated. This exploration centers around two sets of archives: a slave register and a series of interviews with runaways. These fascinating documents were produced at the same time and in the same space, but provides us markedly different perspectives. What do they tell us about motives and experiences of people who escaped slavery? To what extend can we reconstruct life in and out of slavery when we combine these two sets of sources? The critical exploration that this article presents is meant as a step towards a fuller comprehension of the history of slavery in colonial Indonesia.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• slave registers
• manado
• colonial indonesia
• age of abolition
• flight
• runaway

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This chapter is an adapted translation of Chapter 8 of my book De Vlinders van Boven-Digoel, Verborgen verhalen over kolonialisme (Amsterdam, 2021). It was first presented as paper presented on 7 december 2020 during the (online) workshop ‘Life after Slavery’ van de Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen, under the title ‘Caught in the Twilight. European Slavery and Slave Trade in Indonesia in the Age of Abolition’. I would like to thank Dries Lyna and two anonymous peer-reviewers for their helpful comments.

2. ANRI (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia), Manado, 210: ‘register der lijfeigenen uit Menado’. (register of slaves from Manado).

3. ANRI, Manado 37/1: ‘Verklaringen van ontvluchtte personen uit de handen van de zeerovers, 1845–1849’. (Statements of refugees from pirates, 1845–1849.’)

4. ANRI, Manado, 210: ‘register der lijfeigenen uit Menado’, In the context of the namen-muur (name-wall) project of the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam for their exhibition Onze Koloniale Erfenis, Pouwel van Schooten transcribed the register into a database under my supervision. This database was ready only after the first publication of this paper in Dutch, this version of the article is enriched with some of the quantitative data from the transcribed register.

5. For more information and analysis of the data in the other registers, see Schrikker, De vlinders van Boven-Digoel, chpt.7.

6. ANRI, Manado, 63–3, ‘Stukken slaven 1859’.

7. In the interpretation of his writings I follow Christine Levecq, (1997) and Reggie Baay (2020). The remark on the broader reference to the role of women in the abolitionist movement is based on Maartje Janse, (2013). The local case of the Rotterdam ‘Ladies anti-slavery committee’ is derived from Alex van Stipriaan (2020), p. 322–326.

8. See Chapter 7 of De Vlinders van Boven Digoel. The suggestion concerning trade in children is based on an observation made by Lieke Broekman in her MA thesis (2019) on the Semarang slave register and related documents from the Semarang residency archives, that people were taking options on babies born in slavery. She notes that this could have been a by-effect of the restrictions on the slave trade: ‘The slave register of Semarang: the dichotomy of slaves and slave owners.’

9. All these data are derived from the register, see.

10. ANRI Manado 210, last page.

11. Alicia Schrikker, De Vlinders van Boven-Digoel. (Hoofdstuk 7: Oude gewoontes en nieuw ideeën). The case can be found in ANRI, Ternate, 170.3: ‘Procespapieren over mishandeling van een slavin genaamd Bien’.

12. ANRI, Manado 37/1: ‘Verklaringen van ontvluchtte personen uit de handen van de zeerovers, 1845–1849’. (Statements of refugees from pirates, 1845–1849.’) I gratefully used the transcription of the 25 interviews made by Charlotte Warnders who used them for her BA thesis; The interviews are a unique set and also appear in the work of Jim Warren, who used them primarily to reconstruct the world of the Samal Balangingi. The Manadonese historian Ad Lapian also discussed the interviews in his work on piracy: Lapian, A.B., (2004) 3–16. And Lapian, A.B., (2009).