About Preanger Bode

Preanger Bode

Preanger Bode was a Dutch-language newspaper published in Bandung, in the Preanger Regencies Residency of the Dutch East Indies, in what later became Indonesia. It was published from 1896 to 1957, a span that carried it from the late colonial period, through the final decades of Dutch rule, to the first years of Indonesian independence. Its full name in Dutch, De Preangerbode, meant The Parahyangan Messenger, a reference to the Parahyangan highlands of West Java in which Bandung stood. After 1923 it was renamed Algemeen Indisch Dagblad de Preangerbode, meaning the Indies-wide daily paper, the Parahyangan messenger. For more than six decades the paper served the Dutch-reading public of Bandung and its surrounding plantation region, and its history traced, in miniature, the rise and the end of the Dutch-language press in the Indies.

Founding in Bandung in 1896

The paper was founded in 1896 in Bandung, with J. De Vries and Co. as its publisher. One of its co-founders was Jan Fabricius, the father of the writer Johan Fabricius. Jan Fabricius had worked with Klaas de Vries in bookselling and book publishing in Bandung during this period, and he had worked for newspapers in the Netherlands and in Batavia before becoming co-founder and first editor of the new Bandung paper. The founding therefore joined local bookselling and publishing experience in Bandung with newspaper experience gained elsewhere in the Netherlands and the Indies. Bandung at that time was the centre of the Preanger Regencies Residency, a highland region known for its plantations, and the new paper addressed a European readership whose lives were tied to the administration, commerce and plantation economy of that residency.

Early years and the Kolff acquisition

Jan Fabricius was diagnosed with liver disease in 1902 and was forced to return to the Netherlands. In that same year, 1902, the paper was acquired by the Kolff firm, the owner of the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad in Batavia. According to Gerard Termorshuizen, the historian of Indies newspapers whose work underpins much of what is known about the paper, during this period Preanger Bode was mainly of local interest and relied mostly on content from its parent paper, the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, for wider news. During this time it had slightly over one thousand subscribers. That portrait was of a modest provincial daily: important to its immediate Bandung readership, dependent on a larger Batavia stablemate for coverage beyond its own locality, and operating on a subscription base that reflected the small size of the Dutch-reading population in the highlands at the turn of the century.

The Van Schaik editorship and the Ethical Policy

Under the editorship of Willem Frederik Marinus van Schaik, who ran the paper from 1904 to 1910, Preanger Bode was a mild supporter of the Ethical Policy, but did not involve itself too deeply in politics. The Ethical Policy was the Dutch colonial policy of the period that presented colonial rule as carrying a moral obligation toward the welfare of the indigenous population. A mild editorial support for that policy, without deep political engagement, placed the paper in the moderate mainstream of the Dutch press in the Indies in those years. After retiring from Preanger Bode, Van Schaik returned to the Netherlands and became head editor of the Leeuwarder Courant and later of the Deventer Dagblad, a career path that illustrated the circulation of journalists between newspapers in the Indies and newspapers in the Netherlands that characterised the Dutch-language press of the era.

The Stufkens years, nationalism and the First World War

The next editor of the newspaper was Theodoor E. Stufkens, who ran it from 1910 to 1921. His tenure coincided with a turning point in the colony, because during his time at the newspaper the first modern nationalist parties arose in the Indies, including Ernest Douwes Dekker's Indische Party as well as the Sarekat Islam. As with most Dutch newspapers, Preanger Bode was extremely hostile to these movements, and Stufkens dedicated himself to slandering them. He even published a pseudonymous novel called Meta Mormel as part of that hostility. During the First World War, the paper also gained a reputation as a good source of information from the German side, a notable distinction for a Dutch newspaper at a time when the Netherlands itself remained neutral and readers in the Indies sought news of the war in Europe from competing sources. The contrast defined the paper in this period: conservative and defensive toward Indonesian political awakening at home, yet valued by its readers for its wartime reporting from abroad.

Ownership changes, a new office and Abdul Muis

In 1913 the Kolff firm sold the paper to the N.V. Maatschappij Vorkink. The paper relocated to a new office on the Groote Postweg in Bandung, and added some new editors, including H. Mulder and Bart Daum, the son of Paulus Adrianus Daum, one of the best-known figures in Indies journalism. In 1919 the ownership was restructured again into the N.V. Preangerbode, with the previous owner Vorkink remaining in charge. It was around this time that the Indonesian nationalist figure Abdul Muis worked as a proofreader for the paper, before moving on to a more important role in the Malay-language press of the Indies. Abdul Muis's presence in the proofreading room, even in a junior capacity, linked the Dutch-language daily, however briefly, to a figure who became important in the Indonesian nationalist and vernacular press world that the paper's own editorial line opposed.

The Daum era and circulation growth in the 1920s

In 1921, Bart Daum became head editor, a post he held until 1929. He soon shared the duties with another editor, C. A. Crayé, who held his post from 1923 to 1929. It was in this period, after 1923, that the paper carried its expanded name, Algemeen Indisch Dagblad de Preangerbode, signalling an ambition wider than a purely local Bandung sheet. The circulation figures recorded by Termorshuizen showed steady growth: by 1923 the newspaper was estimated to have a circulation of six thousand, which grew to seven thousand by 1930. Compared with the slightly over one thousand subscribers of the Kolff years two decades earlier, that growth reflected both the expansion of Bandung itself and the paper's consolidation as the established Dutch-language daily of the Preanger highlands in the 1920s, the decade in which Bandung grew in importance as a planned administrative and educational centre of the Indies.

Editors of the 1930s and the final prewar issue

After 1929 two new editors were appointed: C. W. Wormser, who served from 1929 to 1934, and C. J. Nauta, who served from 1929 to 1937. In 1934 A. Goote was appointed editor, a position he held only until the following year. In 1936 B. Sluimer was appointed to the position, which he held until the outbreak of the war in 1942. The paper printed its final prewar issue on 2 March 1942, on the eve of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, which began that month and ended Dutch colonial publishing across the archipelago. The paper was later refounded during the war period, according to Termorshuizen's history, before resuming its place in the postwar Dutch-language press landscape that reappeared after Indonesian independence was proclaimed on 17 August 1945.

The postwar years under J. P. Verhoek

The postwar editor of the newspaper was J. P. Verhoek, who ran it in the early period of Indonesian independence, from 1950 to 1956. In those years the paper operated in a transformed country: the Netherlands had recognised Indonesian sovereignty in December 1949, yet a Dutch-language press continued to publish in Indonesia for a Dutch and Dutch-reading readership that remained in the new republic. Verhoek resigned in 1956 after a disagreement with the management. He stayed in Indonesia, however, working for De Volkskrant and other newspapers, until finally returning to the Netherlands in 1958. His departure in 1956 came near the end of the paper's life, at a moment when relations between Indonesia and the Netherlands were deteriorating sharply over the West New Guinea dispute, the issue that would shortly end the Dutch-language press in Indonesia altogether.

Closure in December 1957 and the end of the Dutch-language press

Preanger Bode closed along with all other Dutch-language press in Indonesia as a result of the 1 December 1957 regulation which prohibited them, as a punishment for the Dutch position in the West New Guinea dispute. On that date, as studies of the downfall of the Dutch-language press in Indonesia between 1950 and 1957 record, the Indonesian Minister of Information Soedibjo announced a nationwide General Strike Day, followed by the prohibition of all Dutch-language newspapers, magazines and films in Indonesia, including Dutch publications from the Netherlands. Before that announcement there had already been several cases of press offences by editors of Dutch-language newspapers, whose sanctions ranged from prison to expulsion to the Netherlands, some of them rooted in anti-Dutch sentiment arising from the West Irian dispute. For Preanger Bode, the December 1957 prohibition was final: a newspaper founded in 1896 did not survive the ban, and its six decades of publication ended with the Dutch-language press as a whole.

Building, archive and legacy

The Indonesian newspaper Pikiran Rakyat came to occupy the former building of Preanger Bode on the Grote Postweg in Bandung, which by then was called Jalan Asia-Afrika. That succession gave the paper's physical home a continuing newspaper life under an Indonesian title, in the same street where the paper had moved under Vorkink ownership in 1913. Issues of De Preangerbode remained available to later readers and researchers through the Delpher newspaper archive, which preserved the Dutch colonial press in digital form. In historical writing, the paper was treated principally through Gerard Termorshuizen's history of the Indies-Dutch press, Realisten en reactionairen, which documented its founders, editors, ownership changes and circulation. The paper was remembered as Bandung's Dutch-language daily: locally rooted in the Preanger highlands, hostile in its editorial line to the early Indonesian nationalist movements, sustained for sixty-one years, and closed not by commercial failure but by the political settlement of decolonisation in December 1957.