Chapter 14 - Passports to the Post-colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys

Summary

Abstract

Francisca Fanggidaej (1925-2013), a left-wing intellectual in the postwar decades and subsequently a member of the Indonesian parliament, was an active participant in Afro-Asian political exchanges. The trajectory of Third World internationalist movements can be mapped onto Fanggidaej’s lifepath through the passports she obtained, destroyed, abandoned, and forged. She was a student activist with a rudimentary passport issued by a new government, an official with a diplomatic passport, a political exile with an annulled passport, and a refugee with a doctored passport. By tracing her journeys in the Bandung era and her later immobility and isolation, this chapter reveals Fanggidaej’s understanding of the international realm as simultaneously personal and political, shaped by reason and diplomacy as well as by sensibility and intimacy.

Keywords: Indonesia, migration, colonialism, national independence, youth movements, international communist movement

On 20 July 1947, at the Maguwo Airfield of Yogyakarta, the temporary capital of the Republic of Indonesia, twenty-two-year-old Francisca Fanggidaej hurriedly boarded an airplane bound for India. She had been waiting for her passport, which was signed by Indonesian Prime Minister Amir Sjarifuddin Harahap (1907–1948) shortly before her plane took off. Made of “rough and yellowish” straw paper and without even the word “passport” on its cover, what Francisca held in her hand was one of the first travel documents issued by the nascent republic. In her late seventies, Francisca would comment in her memoir that this little booklet was not only a legal document that enabled her international travels but also a symbol of her national identity.

The rudimentary passport opened doors for Francisca, an activist in the Socialist Youth of Indonesia (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia or Pesindo) who later became a journalist at Indonesia’s Antara News Agency and a member of the Indonesian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Commission (Komisi Luar Negeri, Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Gotong Royong or DPR-GR). Having campaigned in India and Europe for Indonesia’s national independence during her youth, she actively participated in Afro-Asian political and intellectual exchanges. In the 1950s and early 1960s, she attended important events such as the Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Berlin, the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, and the World Peace Congress in Helsinki.