Not Just a Memento

All the local people want to have white skin. If they could become white-skinned people by cutting off their little fingers, certainly the entire Indies would be full of people without little fingers

The above passage was written by Willem Walraven, a Dutch soldier posted in colonial times to Indonesia, known to the Netherlands as the Dutch East Indies. Walraven married an Indonesian woman named Itih and had nine children. Later he became an administrator at a sugar plantation and eventually was better known as a journalist. The aforementioned quote is from a letter he wrote his nephew in Europe.

July 15, 2014