the darker nations a people's history of the third world

© BETTMANN/CORBISīy 1955 the city had been repopulated, now largely by poor migrants who had been displaced by a rebellion led by the Darul Islam, an anticolonial force that had pledged to create an Islamic republic in Indonesia (it died out by the mid-1960s for lack of And even repopulated, south Bandung remained scarred by the fire. In March 1946, when it appeared as if the British would not allow the Indonesians their independence, half a million residents of Bandung abandoned the city en masse, as they set fire to warehouses, homes, and government This event produced an epic song:īandung, Java, Indonesia, April 1955: Bandung’s people greet the representatives to the Afro-Asian Conference. The cry of Siaaaap (Attention!) rang out in the streets of the city in opposition not only to the Japanese occupiers but also the British who had replaced them, and the Dutch who waited in the wings to reclaim the island. In the 1940s, the workers and peasants of the city and its hinterland rose in struggle alongside the pemuda, the youth activists.

Its tropical deco administrative buildings contrasted strongly with the shacks that housed its workforce, forming a cityscape of uneven hopes and aspirations.

At one end, toward the west, sits the town of Bandung, the City of Flowers. The diverse island that is the heart of the Indonesia archipelago is home to a large number of coffee, tea, and quinine plantations-the main producers of wealth for the Dutch coffers. In 1955, the island of Java bore the marks not only of its three-hundred year colonial heritage but also its recent and victorious anticolonial struggle.

The darker nations a people's history of the third world