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Timor and Colonial Conquest: Voices and Claims about the End of the Sonba’i Realm in 1906

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2017

Hans Hägerdal
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Abstract

In 1905–1906 the Dutch colonial state ended the autonomy of the inland of West Timor, hitherto home to the prestigious but crumbling Sonba’i Dynasty. The article addresses the problems and possibilities of writing the history of this traumatic event, which is described in several colonial reports and memorandums, while the Timorese did not leave written texts. A number of oral accounts were recorded in the 1960s by local historian F. H. Fobia, some six decades after the event. The article discusses the possibilities of an oral history approach against a backdrop of recent research about such methods. The contemporary and near-contemporary Dutch reports are systematically compared with the recordings of oral versions. It is argued that the latter destabilize the colonial version in a number of ways regarding the causes of the conflict, the conduct of the colonial troops, and the circumstances of the capture of the Sonba’i lord. At the same time, the oral versions are likely to have been processed over the decades into a meaningful set of decisive events that make sense to “traditional” Timorese discourses as well as modern Indonesian ones.

Keywords

TimorNetherlands East Indiescolonialismwarfareoral history
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2017 , pp. 581 - 605
Copyright
© 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Hans Hägerdal is an Associate Professor of History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research interests include Western images of Asian civilizations, and cultural encounters in eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste in the colonial era. Research for this article was made possible through funding by the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and the Swedish Research Council.

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