The yellowed paper trembled in Sukarno’s hands as he wrote
the words that would spark a firestorm. Outside, the monsoon rain pounded
against the windows of the presidential palace like the fists of angry ghosts.
“If I am no longer capable, then I will hand over the
leadership of the revolution to someone well-versed in revolutionary movements,
Tan Malaka.”
Christ Almighty, if words could kill. In the shadowy corner
of the room, Sukarno sensed something watching him—not a person, but a
presence. The unquiet spirit of a revolution not yet finished. He folded the
testament carefully, knowing damn well what he’d just done.
D.N. Aidit found out about the testament the way secrets
always travel in Jakarta—like cancer cells, multiplying silently until they
suddenly kill you. When he read those words, his face went the color of
week-old milk.
Tan Malaka? That goddamn ghost? That revolutionary
phantom who’d spent two years rotting in Aidit’s prison cells without so much
as a trial? The betrayal hit Aidit like a brick to the teeth. The PKI had stood
shoulder-to-shoulder with Sukarno through it all. Blood brothers, they were
supposed to be. And now this—this knife in the back.
Sukarno burned the testament days later. Struck a match and
watched the flames devour his own words. Maybe some things were best left
unsaid in a republic still finding its legs. But here’s the thing about words
set down on paper—they have a way of surviving, even after the fire dies. Some
ideas won’t stay buried, no matter how deep you dig the hole.
---
Nobody knows when Tan Malaka was really born. Funny how the
man who would shape a nation’s destiny came into the world on a day that can’t
be pinned down. Some say 1896, others claim it was June 2, 1897. Hell, Wasid
Suwarto swears it was October 14, 1897. It’s as if the universe itself couldn’t
quite decide what to do with the infant who would become Indonesia’s most
brilliant, tormented revolutionary.
The history books don’t talk much about Tan Malaka. They’d
rather tell you about the men who stood in the spotlight, who gave thundering
speeches while adoring crowds chanted their names. But in the crawlspaces of
history, in the dark corners where the important shit really happens, there was
Tan. Always Tan.
In 1925, while other men were still dreaming small dreams,
Tan was already writing “Naar de Republiek Indonesia”—“Toward the
Republic of Indonesia.” Jesus, the balls on him. Nobody talked about republics
back then. Independence was a whispered word, not something you put in the
goddamn title of your book.
Imagine writing that masterpiece while in exile in Canton.
Imagine having Chinese editors who barely spoke Dutch trying to piece together
your revolutionary manifesto. Imagine being cut off from newspapers, from
information, from the very country you were trying to save. That was Tan Malaka’s
reality—writing a nation into existence while the world tried its damnedest to
write him out.
---
You want to understand Tan’s mind? Picture this: World War I
has just ended. Most folks are buying the fairy tale of eternal peace. But not
Tan. Oh no. He’s sitting there in some dingy room, cigarette smoke curling
around him like a restless cobra, seeing right through the bullshit.
France, Britain, America—broke? Don’t make him laugh.
Capitalists never go broke; they just find new pockets to pick. And the
losers—Germany, Japan—they weren’t broken either. Just biding their time,
licking their wounds.
In Tan’s mind, global capitalism was a goddamn house of horrors,
and Indonesia was one of the load-bearing pillars keeping the whole rotten
structure from collapsing. The Dutch had a special way of making sure that
pillar stayed put—what Tan called the “rubber stick and pistol” policy.
Ever seen a man beaten with a rubber truncheon? The way the
skin splits but doesn’t tear clean? The way the blood pools black beneath the
surface? That was Indonesia under colonial rule. And the pistol—well, that was
for anyone who complained too loudly about the beating.
Tan wrote about Churchill’s metaphor—the carrot and the
stick—and how Nazi Germany used it to make “the emaciated Austrian donkey pull
the cart up a steep hill.” The image haunted him. He saw Indonesia as that
donkey, and by God, he wouldn’t let his homeland suffer the same fate.
---
What made Tan dangerous wasn’t just his ideas—it was how he
packaged them. He wasn’t selling communism as some abstract European
philosophy. He was offering it as liberation, pure and simple. “The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” When Marx wrote those
words, he couldn’t have known how they’d echo through the jungle nights of a
far-off archipelago, keeping a revolutionary awake and burning with purpose.
In his fever-dream of a republic, Tan saw no bourgeoisie, no
proletariat—just Indonesians, standing together. Years later, Aidit would take
this idea and run with it, but by then, the original dreamer was long in the
ground.
Tan was nothing if not practical. He knew you couldn’t fight
imperialism with pretty words and moral outrage. You needed strategy. You
needed what he called “strategic strikes”: iron discipline within the PKI,
Indonesian masses united under communist leadership, and divide-and-conquer
tactics against the imperialists.
“Now and not later!” he wrote with the urgency of a
man who could already hear the clock ticking down. “Otherwise, a time will
come when the people lament, ‘We once let that opportunity slip away.’”
Christ, if those words don’t send a chill down your spine.
---
While Sukarno was becoming the father of Indonesia, Tan
Malaka was becoming its ghost. Always there, always watching, always moving.
From 1924 until his dying day, he lived with one eye over his shoulder, hunted
not just by the Dutch but eventually by his own countrymen.
The great irony? He never wanted power for himself. He just
wanted to light the fuse and watch the young ones carry the torch. Chaerul
Saleh, Sukarni, Adam Malik, Maruto Nitimihardjo—they were his legacy, the sons
he never had.
W.R. Supratman must have had Tan on the brain when he wrote “Indonesia,
tanah tumpah darahku” into the national anthem—those words echoing what Tan
had already written in his “Revolutionary’s Dream.”
But while Sukarno had 200,000 people cheering his name at
Ikada Square, Tan’s story ended in blood and silence. A revolutionary who loved
his country so goddamn much he was willing to be erased from its memory.
Sometimes, late at night when the wind blows in from the
Java Sea and Jakarta’s lights dim under rolling blackouts, old-timers say they
can still hear him—the whispered name of Tan Malaka, patron saint of lost
causes, the ghost of a republic that might have been.
And somewhere, in the dark heart of Indonesian politics,
Sukarno’s burned testament still sends ripples through history—like a stone
dropped into a black pond, the concentric circles spreading outward forever.
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