Upriver, Down River and Across Rivers
Because the major sea-lane between South and East Asia passes along Sumatra's east coast, traffic has been crucial to the development of the east coast of this island since at least the beginning of the common era. Attempts at connecting and disconnecting lowland and highland mutually and with overseas destinations have been the stakes in many political games. The development of road transport has changed the balance of power between different parts of Sumatra, but has left the strategic relevance of transportation as such unchanged.
* By FREEK COLOMBIJN
Before the advent of trains and motorcars, the only, but quite convenient way to transport goods in bulk was via one of the many rivers of East Sumatra. The capitals of the various sultanates of the early modern era were strategically situated so as to enable the rulers to control the river traffic. These port towns were situated relatively downstream, past where all the tributaries had emptied themselves into the main course, but upstream from the point where the river split into the branches of its delta. Towns and villages of secondary rank were found at the upriver confluences, and at places where the depth of the river permitted to tranship goods going downstream in bigger boats. It is worth noting that the spatial orientation of people was one-dimensional only: places were positioned upstream (hulu) or downstream (hilir).
The sultan in his downstream capital nurtured the pretension being of superior standing to the upstream people and nominally ruled the whole river basin. In practice, he, for the ruler was almost always a man, was much more dependent on the people in the hills than vice versa. There were three reasons for this imbalance: one ecological, one social, and one based on transportation. Firstly, the hills have a much denser population than the coast. Some highland valleys, with flat terraces and natural fertilization by volcanic ashes, are suited for wet-rice cultivation, whereas the coast consists of potentially acidic swampland with only a thin layer of fertile topsoil. Secondly, the Minangkabau people in the highlands had a different ethnic background to the Malay people on the coast. Although the Malay sultans considered themselves rulers of the Minangkabau, the hill people often actually felt contempt for their sovereign. Thirdly, the sultan had no alternative source by which to acquire trade goods (pepper, non-timber forest products, and others) to the highland people. The highland people, however, had alternative outlets for their goods within a few days walking distance, namely, via other rivers on the eastern or via the western coast of Sumatra. When the hill people found a ruler too demanding, they could close the river with logs or rattan ropes. These three factors taken together, ecology, social-cultural difference, and transportation, constituted a frontier between coast and interior.
The subjugation of the sultanates by the Dutch and later the collapse of the colonial state during the Indonesian Revolution implied a transfer of power into different hands, but did not fundamentally alter the balance of power between up and downstream. At most, it could be said that the Dutch, who settled on the west coast almost a century before they settled on the east coast, improved the overland connections from the highlands to the west in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thereby they temporarily shifted the balance of power between the eastern coast and the highlanders in favour of the latter. In the 1920s, when a road for motorized vehicles was built to connect the highlands to the eastern coast, the old balance was restored. The Dutch governor on the western coast tried to obstruct the construction of this new road to the east, but to no avail.
Oil and infrastructure
The situation changed fundamentally when mineral oil deposits were found in the swampy coastal plain, and an American oil company, Caltex, constructed a road and pipeline to connect the oilfields with a suitable deep-sea tanker terminal on the eastern coast. This road, located in the mainland of the Riau province, was completed in 1956 and has been upgraded, and many side roads have been added since. It happens to be, and this is merely a coincidence, that the shortest distance between the oilfields and the tanker terminal crosses the main rivers at right angles. Thus the spatial orientation of the whole region has made a 90-degree turn: from the rivers (flowing from west to east) to the new road (running from south to north). No longer is the spatial orientation one dimensional, along a line, but two dimensional, in a plane.
The new road, or today rather the network of roads, has made an impact which goes much deeper than a spatial reorientation. It has opened up the previously inaccessible swampland to various entrepreneurs, who have entered the region in successive waves. Their order of appearance has roughly been, logging companies, plantations, spontaneous settlers, and finally small industries. The old frontier between coast and interior has now been shattered into three different frontiers. A new ecological frontier is gradually moving over the land, following the new roads. The original lowland tropical rainforest is giving way to estate and smallholder gardens planted with rubber trees and oil palms. Whenever replanting with commercial trees has been postponed, the environment has quickly deteriorated to acidic, scrubby grassland. A closer look reveals more frontiers, like the frontier of oil palms encroaching upon former rubber gardens, or industrial enterprises beginning to replace agricultural land. With the influx of many immigrants there is no longer a clear borderline separating Malays and Minangkabaus. The new social frontier runs between companies (Caltex and the estates) on the one hand and settlers on the other. Finally, various actors try to open or close new connections. Caltex continues to open new roads. Estates, afraid of local people who poach on the estate crops or even squat on estate land, close many roads with a barrier, or by digging up the surface layer. Not to be outdone, now and then local people block company roads and entrance gate to force concessions from these companies.
Dr Freek Colombijn is an anthropologist and research fellow at the IIAS.
E-mail: colombijn@let.leidenuniv.nl