Postcolonial Citizenship

no trouble seeing that protest as a flare-up of a fight that had lain dormant
since the 1920s. He had sentenced Jan Djong and the others to six months
prison.
Nor did the 1953 ‘demonstration’ mean that Djong had abandoned violence
and become a follower of Daniel O’Connell. Several years of lawlessness ensued
in which roving bands of villagers burned and robbed. This came to be
known as the ‘scorched earth’ period (bumi hangus). Jan Djong must have
been involved in at least some of it, because in 1957 he was sentenced again,
this time by a modern court. He got three years prison for encouraging violence.
There were other informal institutions as well. We only have time to sketch
the barest details of three of them. Just enough to ask the question: How do
the informal and the formal institutions of citizenship relate to each other?
Does one weaken and undermine the other, or could they also work together
for good?
The ethnic organization
Another informal institution was the ethnic organization. This too was a mix
of old and new. In between demonstrating – June 1953 was not the last – and
half encouraging a bit of burning and bashing, Jan Djong became a politician.
The Raja of Sikka died suddenly of a heart attack in May 1954, and republican
institutions soon began to fill the void. That included an elected local assembly,
and professional bureaucrats with legally limited mandates. Political parties
were poorly developed in the 1950s. Djong’s main organizational instrument
was an ethnic organization named Kanilima. This name was an
acronym from the three former kingdoms in the hills around Maumere that
had lost their autonomy to the Raja of Sikka in the 1920s – Kanga’e, Nita, and
Lio-Maumere. Kanilima was a rural coalition against the elite in Maumere
township. The ‘ethnic’ representatives that belonged to it did not claim aristocratic
descent – they were emerging middle class officials and politicians like
Jan Djong. Their complaint, too, was modern. They started it because they felt
Raja Thomas was depriving them of state scholarships and bureaucratic jobs.
Their protest met with success. The principle of ethnic representation was
soon formalized. Jan Djong became an assembly member on behalf of the
Kanga’e kingdom, now renamed the Kanga’e ‘ethnic group.’ The group also
won control over the copra-funded junior high school over which it had demonstrated
in 1953. The novel idea that public matters such as finance and
education should be run by elected assemblies had been widely accepted as
MURDER IN MAUMERE: POSTCOLONIAL CITIZENSHIP 11