Tuesday 10th September at the Indonesian embassy
By Marjolein van Pagee, Dutch Historian & Author
In 1621 Dutch VOC-leader Jan Pieterszoon Coen went to the Banda islands in the Moluccas with the aim to kill all the inhabitants and to establish a plantation colony. Four hundred years after the genocide was committed, the Netherlands commemorated this historical fact through exhibitions, talks, meetings and articles. However, all of them ignored the fact that Coen’s genocidal attempt actually failed. The truth is that before his arrival a considerable amount of the Bandanese had already left the islands, under the leadership of a ‘raja’, a king, to ensure the continuity of Islam, their family trees and their culture and history. They ended up in the Kei islands where their descendants still live until today. The latter still speak the original language and maintain rituals that also commemorate the loss of their homeland. They identify as ‘Wandan’, which is the original name of Banda. According to their accounts they did not run away but they performed the ‘hijrah’, an Islamic term for migration.
In her book ‘Banda’, Marjolein van Pagee shows how the genocide of the Bandanese, and their subsequent erasure from the history books, relates to the VOC as an occupying force that used any means necessary to obtain a monopoly. She positions the genocide in the larger context of Dutch national history and the emergence of the Netherlands as a nation state.
Speaker Profile:
Marjolein van Pagee (1987) is a Dutch historian and writer. Since 2010 she has conducted extensive research on Indonesia’s war of independence (1945-1949) and also studies the working of the Dutch apartheid system. In the Netherlands she became an outspoken critic of ongoing colonial attitudes and practices. In 2018 she obtained a masters in Colonial History at Leiden University. Marjolein is the author of ‘Banda. De genocide van Jan Pieterszoon Coen’ (Banda. The genocide of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, 2021) and ‘Bung Tomo. De revolutie van 1945’ (Bung Tomo. The Revolution of 1945, 2023.) In 2016 she founded the Histori Bersama Foundation and in 2024 she started another platform: Media Mondo. She is a frequent contributor to The Jakarta Post.
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