27 September 2009

About Medan

Medan is the capital of North Sumatra Province. It is sandwiched on the top by the Aceh Province, a place well known for it's unbelievably strong willed people or the rest of us would simply call hostile, the Acehnese. They have been fighting all foreigners in the widest range of it's meaning for as long as the name first noted in history. Below, it is sandwiched by the Riau Province, the richest province in Indonesia, so says the newspaper. So what's up in North Sumatra today? How would one sum up its character. I would say probably a combination of Riau and Aceh, of wealth and the roughness of the people, but without the extremes. Medan is the number three city in Indonesia with a significanct commercial influence for the country.

The areas surrounding the city have been the traditional home land of Batak, or Bataknese, a group of people with a proto-Malay facial or racial characteristic. Some of the names of these people are the Karoneses, Tarutungs, Mandailings and few others that mostly refer to the locales where there are from. The source of uniqueness of Medan actually comes from it’s colonial past. It’s a major Dutch trading post with the harbor, Belawan. The city was contending head to head with other British ports right across the straits, Penang, etc. In addition to that, the areas around Medan were spread with plantations (probably sugar as the bigger one) hungry for man powers. So the Dutch transported hundreds of thousands of Javanese from Batavia and the inlands of Java, and other Dutch subjects from around the archipelago. As in many parts of the country the Chinese were also part of fray. Some were from the previous waves of immigrants. Some were from more recent ones. One of the hikes of these “more recent” incoming Chinese laborers was in the 1920s-30s, a time of great turmoil in the mainland. My grandparents were part of this group. Set off from villages in the Fujian province, they joined thousands of others and departed from Xiamen port to seek for a slightly better life. I can’t imagine how difficult life must be there in their homeland that they were attracted to go to a new place, the Dutch colonies in the south, to work for their gruesome economic machines, to be laborers in sugar plantations there. The Malays have always been the regular character in the region. They had been crisscrossing the cities and ports between the Malaka straits for centuries before the Portuguese arrived. They sewn the trading net between the Sumatra coast and the Malaysian coast. Their traces and imprints are very clear in our daily life even until today, most obviously in Indonesian language. Medan also has a sizeable amount of people with Indian origin. Again, this was because of the geography and the presence of the Belawan port. No other cities in Indonesia that I know yet have historical Indian immigrant enclaves like in Medan.

So although the demography in Medan may seem like the typical composition of major cities in Indonesia, the bits of history above make the difference. The Javenese, Chinese, Indians, and Malays in Medan today are the descendants of migrants but they have deep roots to the land. Through out these times they all live and blend relatively well with each other. Sometimes they fight and most of the time they are good neighbors. So it is this character that differentiate Medan or North Sumatra from Aceh to the north and Riau to the south.

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