On September 10, 2022, during the inauguration of the new metro station in the historic district of Jakarta, the governor of the capital, Anies Baswedan, said: “This area is called ‘Kota Tua’ [‘Vieille Ville’]but we are renaming it ‘Batavia’, a name that reflects the past in this modern city of the future.”
For Ajeng A. Arainikasih, a researcher on colonial history and the decolonization of museums at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, this initiative by the governor marks a pitiful step back: “It shows that the spirit of decolonization has still not been understood [en Indonésie]because Dutch names are always considered more attractive”, writes the academic in Tempo Newspaper.
Arainikasih recalls that “Batavia” is the name of the city built in 1621 on the site of present-day Jakarta by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, then Governor General of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). “To rename Kota Tua ‘Batavia’ is to celebrate the victory of Coen and colonialism, even though the figure of Coen is today very controversial in the Netherlands”, emphasizes the researcher.
In Hoorn, birthplace of Coen, in the Netherlands, citizens demand that the statue of this bloodthirsty general be unbolted, considering that he is not a hero but the one who led the massacre of the entire population of the islands of Banda, in the Moluccas archipelago, to give the VOC a monopoly on the nutmeg trade.
Renaming this district “Batavia” is also, according to Tempo Newspaper, to deny the work of the former governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, who, in the 1970s and in a spirit of early decolonization, converted all the administrative and commercial buildings built by the Dutch into national museums.
“While in France, President Emmanuel Macron has returned 26 collections from the Quai Branly Museum, looted by the French, to their country of origin, the Republic of Benin. While the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has acknowledged the dark history of colonialism with the exhibition ‘Revolusi! Independent Indonesia’, in Jakarta the spirit of colonialism rises from its ashes”, castigates the academic in a column previously published by The Conversation.