About De Locomotief

De Locomotief

De Locomotief was a Dutch-language daily newspaper published in Semarang, in Central Java, in the Dutch East Indies, in what is now Indonesia. It was remembered as the first newspaper published in Semarang, and over a life that stretched, with interruptions, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, it became one of the best-known Dutch-language papers in the colony. It was aimed at the Dutch-speaking population of Semarang, it reported on trade, politics and everyday life in Central Java, and under its editor Pieter Brooshooft it was associated with the campaign that produced the Dutch Ethical Policy. The paper was closed for good in 1956, and its former building was taken over, after renovation, by the Bumi Daya Bank.

Origins in Semarang and a complicated early chronology

The early chronology of De Locomotief was recorded in more than one way, and an honest account of the paper has to acknowledge that. Reference works described the paper as established in 1845, originally under the name Semarangsch Nieuws en Advertentieblad, a Semarang news and advertising sheet. Other accounts of the Indies press described a Semarang paper founded in 1845, the Samarangsch Handelsblad, as becoming De Locomotief after 1852. The title De Locomotief itself was explained by the renaming of the paper in 1863, said to have followed the passage of the first train in Semarang, while library listings gave January 1864 as the starting date of the run under that name and the ISEAS Library in Singapore described De Locomotief as the first newspaper to be published in Semarang in 1864. These dates were not necessarily contradictory in the minds of the cataloguers who recorded them: a predecessor title, a renaming and a surviving run of issues were three different things, and different records dated the paper from different points in that sequence. What was not in dispute was the paper's priority in its city. No newspaper had been published in Semarang before it, and its long predecessor history placed it among the generation of longer-lasting Indies papers that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s, when titles such as De Java-bode in Batavia and the Soerabaja Courant in Surabaya were also establishing themselves.

The name itself tied the paper to a landmark in the colony's development. Railway building in the Indies began at Semarang: the first railway line was initiated there in June 1864, and the first section, from Semarang to Tanggung, opened on 10 August 1867, operated by the Nederlandsch-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij. A newspaper that renamed itself after the locomotive was announcing, in the language of its time, that it stood for the modern, commercial and connected Semarang that the railway was coming to symbolise.

Semarang, its city and its readers

Semarang was a port city on the north coast of Central Java, and De Locomotief was written for its Dutch-speaking community of officials, merchants, planters and professionals, as the ISEAS Library's description of its microfilm holdings made clear. In its earliest decades such a paper had necessarily been a modest affair of trade notices, official announcements, advertisements and news brought from Europe, but historians of Indies censorship and the Indies press noted that the generation of papers to which De Locomotief belonged went beyond that limited fare: they covered European and Indies news, a change made easier by the introduction of the telegraph in 1856 and of a modern postal service to the Indies in 1869. De Locomotief grew with that wider ambition, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was carrying advertising of the kind preserved in an 1898 advertisement for the paper itself, presenting it to readers and advertisers as an established Semarang institution.

A critical voice on labour in Java, 1864 to 1870

Modern scholarship using the Delpher digital archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, has shown that the young De Locomotief was not merely a commercial sheet. A study of the paper's reporting between 1864 and 1870, published in the journal Santhet, found that it displayed a critical attitude towards colonial policy in its reporting on labour in Java. It reported on labour exploitation, on contract violations and on inadequate wages, and it worked to debunk the myth of indigenous laziness that was used to legitimise colonial arrangements. Unlike contemporary colonial newspapers such as the Java-Bode and the Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, the study found, De Locomotief consistently raised labour issues as structural problems rather than as individual failings. The period the study examined was a consequential one, running up to the enactment of the Agrarian Law, the Agrarische Wet, in 1870, and the study concluded that colonial media such as De Locomotief played an important role in creating the critical discussion that contributed to changes in agrarian policy. That early record helps to explain why, a generation later, the paper became a platform for a still larger campaign about the ethics of colonial rule.

Pieter Brooshooft and the Ethical Policy

The editor most closely associated with De Locomotief was Pieter Brooshooft, who lived from 1845 to 1921 and was described as an ethical political activist and journalist. Brooshooft wrote about the moral duty of the Dutch to provide more for the peoples of the Indies, campaigned, with the support of socialists and concerned middle-class Dutch readers, against what he saw as the injustice of the colonial surplus, and described the indigenous peoples of the Indies as childlike and in need of assistance rather than oppression, in the paternalist language of his time. One scholarly account credited Brooshooft, as an Indies journalist, with coining the name ethische politiek, the Ethical Policy, itself. As editor of De Locomotief, described in accounts of the Ethical Policy as the largest of the Dutch-language newspapers in the Indies, he published writing by Snouck Hurgronje on how to understand Indonesians, and he sent reporters across the archipelago to report on local developments. Those reporters described poverty, crop failure, famine and epidemics around 1900, at a time when Dutch prosperity was rising. Newspapers were one of the few channels of communication from the Indies to the Dutch parliament, and Brooshooft's campaigning reached the highest level: lawyers and politicians who supported his campaign had an audience with Queen Wilhelmina and argued that the Netherlands owed the peoples of the Indies a debt of honour. In 1901 the Queen formally declared the benevolent Ethical Policy, aimed at bringing progress and prosperity to the peoples of the Indies, with programmes that came to centre on irrigation, education and emigration. De Locomotief's place in that story was a lasting part of its identity: it was the paper through which one of the colony's most consequential policy debates had been conducted.

The paper in the early twentieth century

De Locomotief remained a leading Semarang daily into the twentieth century, and its standing was visible in the competition it attracted. When a new Semarang daily, the Algemeen Handelsblad voor Nederlandsch-Indië, was founded in 1924, it was established explicitly as a competitor to De Locomotief, which reference works described as one of the most successful Dutch-language newspapers in the Indies. That rival struggled through the Depression and was taken over by De Locomotief in 1936, although it continued to be run as a separate newspaper, an outcome that underlined which of the two Semarang titles was the stronger. The paper was also read outside the Indies: an Australian newspaper, The Argus of Melbourne, carried an item headed Editor Here on 10 September 1938 in connection with the paper, a small sign of the personal and professional networks that linked Indies editors to the wider region. During the First World War, scholarship on the Indies and the war recorded, De Locomotief had tried to strike a moderate, balanced tone, and its editor-in-chief Stokvis did his utmost to remain impartial, in contrast to the vehemently anti-German tone of some Batavia papers, although that war belongs to the paper's earlier twentieth-century history rather than to its final decades.

Suspension, war and a post-war revival

The paper's long first life came to an end around the start of the Second World War. Its recorded dates listed a suspension in March 1940, while other accounts described it more simply as closed during the war, and the ISEAS Library summary likewise recorded that it was suspended in 1940 during the Second World War. The Netherlands itself was occupied in May 1940 and the Dutch East Indies was occupied by Japan from 1942, conditions under which the old Dutch-language press of the colony could not continue as before. De Locomotief's story, however, was not finished. In September 1947, during the Indonesian War of Independence, the daily was reopened in Semarang, and it published through the final years of the colonial era and into the first years of the Indonesian republic. Its reporting in that period travelled: in the 1950s the Dutch-language newspaper was cited outside Indonesia as a source of information about Indonesian War of Independence issues, as when The Daily News of Perth, on 20 April 1950, carried a report headed A Sultan Confesses drawing on such material.

Final closure in 1956

The revived paper lasted less than a decade. In 1956 De Locomotief was closed, and its building in Semarang was taken over by the Bumi Daya Bank after renovation. One library summary gave 1957 as the year publication ceased, a one-year difference of the kind that recurs throughout the paper's recorded chronology, but the date carried in the paper's own recorded dates was 1956. Its closure came near the end of the Dutch-language press in Indonesia as a whole: within a year, in December 1957, Dutch-language newspapers in Indonesia were prohibited amid the West Irian dispute, ending the era in which papers such as De Locomotief had been a central part of public life in cities such as Semarang. De Locomotief, characteristically, had closed just before that general ban, its post-war revival exhausted.

Survival in archives and use by historians

Although the newspaper itself was defunct, its pages survived to an unusual degree. A significant part of the run of De Locomotief was microfilmed, with editions associated with the Inter Documentation Company and with J. A. Wormser recorded in library catalogues, and the ISEAS Library reported that it held almost all issues published by the newspaper. The OldNews archive reported tens of thousands of scans of the paper, beginning in 1864, and scholars continued to mine the Delpher digital archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek for its reporting, as the study of its labour coverage between 1864 and 1870 demonstrated. The material in the newspaper was used to review events that occurred during the era of the Netherlands East Indies, which was, in the end, the paper's second life: having reported the colony's affairs for the Dutch-speaking readers of Semarang for the better part of a century, De Locomotief remained, in microfilm and digital form, one of the principal printed records through which that era was studied.

Assessment

De Locomotief mattered for three reasons that the surviving record supports. First, it was a pioneer: the first newspaper of Semarang, founded in the 1840s generation of Indies papers and renamed for the locomotive just as Java's first railway was being built from its own city. Second, it was a participant in history rather than only a witness to it: its critical reporting on Javanese labour in the 1860s and, above all, Pieter Brooshooft's editorship made it a platform for the ideas that became the Ethical Policy of 1901. Third, it was durable and adaptable enough to outlast a wartime suspension, to revive in 1947 amid a war of independence, and to be cited abroad into the 1950s, before its final closure in 1956 brought its story to an end. Few colonial newspapers left a record that touched so many sides of the world that made them, from railway building and plantation labour to royal policy and decolonisation.