About Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië

Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië

Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, whose name meant The News of the Day for the Dutch East Indies, was a Dutch-language newspaper published in Batavia, on the island of Java, in the Dutch East Indies, in what is now Jakarta, Indonesia. It began at the end of the nineteenth century as a paper called De Indische Courant and was renamed in 1900, after which it published for more than four decades as one of the capital's established Dutch-language dailies. It was known as a conservative paper, and it editorialised vehemently against the emancipation of the native people of the Indies. Under its editor-in-chief of the 1920s, K. W. Wybrands, it was so strongly marked by its editor's personality that it was also known as Wybrands' paper. In the early 1930s it had a circulation of six to nine thousand, which dropped to between three and six thousand in the following decade. It was closed in 1942 by the Japanese occupying forces and never resumed.

Origins as De Indische Courant in Batavia

The paper was originally called De Indische Courant, one of a number of papers that bore that name in the Indies. It was published in Batavia from 1895, according to one reference, or 1896, according to another, until 1900, when it was renamed. In the International Institute of Social History's classification this Batavia paper was De Indische Courant II, following an earlier Batavia paper of the name published in 1870 and preceding the better-known Surabaya De Indische Courant founded in 1921. Reference works listed the Dutch author and critic of the colonial system Multatuli among the contributors associated with this paper's predecessor history, a connection recorded in Paul W. van der Veur's study of Dutch colonialism and E. F. E. Douwes Dekker. The renaming of 1900 gave the paper the long title under which it made its reputation, Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, a name that announced a daily ambition: to be the news of the day for the whole of the Netherlands Indies, from its office in the colonial capital, Batavia, the seat of the Governor-General and of the colony's government, and a city whose Dutch-language press, including the Java-Bode and the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, was the most politically exposed in the colony.

A conservative voice in the capital

The paper was known as conservative, and it editorialised vehemently against the emancipation of the native people. That position placed it on the right of the Batavia press spectrum, in opposition to the current of opinion associated with the Ethical Policy and with papers that gave space to Indonesian national awareness. Its conservatism was of a particular, combative Indies kind, expressed in the sharp, personal style that historians of the colonial press called the tropenstijl, the tropical style. A study of Dutch press reactions to the Greco-Turkish war described the paper as widely read in the Dutch East Indies with a conservative profile, often denouncing Indonesian anti-imperialism, while at the same time regularly voicing dissatisfaction with the Dutch colonial administration. That combination, loyal to the colonial order and to European supremacy in the Indies, yet frequently at odds with the administration that ran it, defined the paper's editorial character throughout its life. Its commentary could be crude in that cause: a study of the memory of the Java War recorded that in March 1929 the conservative colonial newspaper Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië greeted the execution at Pandeglang of Abdoelhadi, an admirer of Diponegoro convicted of murder during the communist insurrection in West Java, with the hope that it would be a resounding warning to Jong Java, the Indonesian youth movement, an intervention the Indonesian public resoundingly rejected.

Wybrands' paper: the editor of the 1920s

The paper's editor-in-chief during the 1920s was K. W. Wybrands, who put such a personal stamp on the paper that it was also known as Wybrands' paper. His signed work, often under the initials K. W., was described as sharp, critical and highly personal, an example of the tropenstijl that characterised European journalism in the Dutch East Indies at the time. In an article of 25 October 1922 on the recapture of Smyrna by the Turks, for instance, Wybrands treated the Allied peace settlement as a diktat that could never be preserved except by destruction and death, welcomed Smyrna's return to Turkish hands, blamed the British for the Greco-Turkish War and argued that Turkey would be better off if all the Allies went away and left the Turks to their own fate, a position strikingly different from the sympathy for the Greeks as fellow Christians expressed by De Telegraaf in the Netherlands. The same writer at home denounced Indonesian anti-imperialism, so his foreign commentary and his colonial commentary shared a single instinct: hostility to interference he disliked, whether British interference in Turkey or Indonesian challenges to Dutch rule. Under the spelling Karel Wijbrands, the editor appeared in scholarship on the First World War as the editor of 1914 who made no secret of his hatred of Germans and wrote that he would like to strangle a German after every dessert and hear his death-rattle, language the colonial authorities noted when they counted Het Nieuws van den Dag among the largest newspapers that disturbed the administration with a vehemently anti-German tone. His successor in 1915, W. K. S. van Haastert, likewise known for the derogatory way in which he wrote about Indonesians, left no stone unturned in lashing out against Germans, and B. J. O. Schrieke qualified the paper, with the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad and the Soerabaiasch Handelsblad, as rabidly Allied.

The paper and Batavia public life

Beyond politics, the Nieuws van den Dag was woven into the public life of its city in ways that left traces outside press history. In the summer of 1904 the newspaper organised a league competition in football, open to clubs from Batavia and Meester Cornelis, the first ever league competition in Batavia. The tournament, recorded in the RSSSF football archive as the Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië voetbalcompetitie, was won by Vios, and the newspaper also organised the Droogdokbeker competition that followed it, before the first Batavia football federation, founded in July 1906, took over the organisation of such competitions. A newspaper that ran a city's first football league was acting as a civic institution, not merely a political voice, and the episode belonged to the paper's earliest years under its new name, when it was establishing itself in the capital. Its cultural reach extended across the Indies as well: when the Chinese-Indonesian doctor and writer Oen Boen Ing published a notable article in September 1925 entitled De Chineesche Beweging, it was a blatant criticism of the coverage by the Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, described there as a top-tier Dutch newspaper published in Java, of conditions in China, evidence that its reporting was read, and contested, well beyond its European readership.

Circulation in the 1930s

In the early 1930s the paper had a circulation of six to nine thousand, but that had dropped to between three and six thousand in the next decade. Those figures, recorded in Mirjam Maters' study of press freedom and press restriction in the Netherlands Indies, placed the Nieuws van den Dag in the leading group of the colony's Dutch-language press without making it the largest: by 1938 the Surabaya De Indische Courant and the Batavia Java-Bode each stood at about 7,000 copies. The decline across the 1930s was the common experience of the Indies Dutch press in the Depression and its long aftermath, as advertising contracted and the Dutch-reading public's circumstances tightened, and the Nieuws van den Dag's halving range, from six to nine thousand down to three to six thousand, charted that pressure on a conservative capital daily whose combative style did not protect it from the market.

Willem Belonje and the final years

In 1938 Willem Belonje became editor-in-chief of the paper. Belonje had earlier run De Indische Courant in the 1920s, where, in that paper's history, he had replaced editor-in-chief Koch under pressure from union members and taken the Surabaya paper in a much more conservative direction. His appointment in Batavia therefore brought to the Nieuws van den Dag an editor whose conservative instincts matched the paper's own long-standing line, and it illustrated again the small circuit of senior editors who moved between the colony's leading Dutch-language titles. A dated specimen of the paper's final period, its issue of 18 December 1939, was preserved and described by the International Institute of Social History's Journalistiek in de Tropen project on journalism in the tropics, the source from which much of the paper's bibliographic record derived. The paper Belonje led was by then publishing in the shadow of a European war that had begun in September 1939, and its remaining life was short.

Closure in 1942 under Japanese occupation

The paper was closed in 1942 by the Japanese occupying forces. The Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942 ended the Dutch-language press of the colony as a whole: in Batavia, Surabaya and Semarang alike, the established Dutch dailies, the Java-Bode's contemporaries, the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad and De Indische Courant among them, ceased in the same collapse. Unlike some of those titles, the Nieuws van den Dag was not revived after 1945 under its own or a successor name. Its forty-two years under the Nieuws van den Dag title, from the renaming of 1900 to the closure of 1942, closed with the colonial order it had defended.

Survival in archives and scholarship

The paper's issues survived through the Dutch digitisation of the colonial press: Delpher, the archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, provided online access to newspaper archives including the Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië, and its front page of 1 November 1918 was reproduced as its representative image in reference works. Its history was documented in the Journalistiek in de Tropen materials of the International Institute of Social History and in Maters' Van zachte wenk tot harde hand, the standard study of press freedom and the press curb in the Netherlands Indies from 1906 to 1942, which recorded both its Wybrands era and its circulation figures. Later scholarship continued to use it as evidence: studies of the First World War in the Indies, of the Greco-Turkish war's reception, of Diponegoro's memory in the nationalist movement and of Chinese-Indonesian public life all cited its pages, usually as the clearest printed voice of the conservative colonial position they were examining.

Assessment

Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië was the conservative standard-bearer of the Batavia Dutch-language press in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Born as a De Indische Courant in the 1890s and renamed in 1900, it opposed the emancipation of the Indies' native people, denounced Indonesian anti-imperialism while quarrelling with the colonial administration itself, and bore for a decade the personal stamp of K. W. Wybrands so completely that contemporaries called it his paper. It organised Batavia's first football league, held a circulation in the colony's top range into the 1930s, and passed finally to Willem Belonje, another veteran of the Indies' small senior editorial circuit, before the Japanese occupation closed it in 1942. Historians kept returning to it for the same reason its contemporaries had read or fought it: no other Batavia paper stated the hard colonial case as sharply.