Melle had managed to reconstruct this lobby through archival research. But, he tells the relatives, many facts were already known. They were just in Stoop’s biography written by Jet. Fascinatingly, no one in the family has ever gotten caught up in those facts—not even me. Take the Steenkolen Maatschappij Oost-Borneo (SMOB), a company of which Stoop was a supervisory director. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, this company shipped Javanese and Chinese indentured laborers to Kalimantan on a large scale for heavy work in the mines. They proved unable to withstand the sweltering climate and the mosquitoes – and died en masse from malaria. “In 1894,” writes Jet, “one-third of the labor force died.”
A third! A great human tragedy. Yet the directors of the SMOB, including Stoop, seemed to see the fallen contract workers mainly as an annoying expense. “Since the coolies received a hand money when they entered service and their passage was also paid, together about NLG 150, this meant a significant loss for society on a few hundred coolies,” writes Jet.
So far the audience has been sitting quietly listening to Melle. No questions, no interruptions. I myself am starting to find the picture that Melle paints quite uncomfortable. Stoop in no way emerges as the empathetic entrepreneur and benefactor of the family stories. Is there perhaps some compensation, a kind of alibi, in the form of progressive ideas about the Dutch East Indies? Evidence for the statement that Stoop was ‘on the right side’ in the debate about colonialism, just like his brother-in-law Coen van Deventer?
Melle also has a difficult message here. He has searched extensively, but nowhere in Stoop’s letters or diaries are enlightened views on the Indies to be found. What the family assumed to be true for decades turns out to be unfounded. In fact, Melle tells the audience, in his writings Stoop regularly speaks condescendingly about the indigenous population. He is talking about “the laziness of the Javanese”. When he signs a contract with residents of a desa (village) for giving up drilling concessions, he scorns in a letter: “Backing down is not a rarity among our Javanese natives.”
“That was in the 1890s, wasn’t it!” shouts an uncle from the audience. “Just as good to know.”
When I reread Jet’s biography later, I am struck by an event in Northeast Sumatra. In 1895 Stoop makes an adventurous hike there to see if oil can be found in the jungle. Crossing a raging river, one of the coolies panics: his sampan overturns and he drowns. But in his travelogue, which Jet quotes in full, Stoop is only concerned about the loss of his leather bag. “With my ‘bag’ some white clothes, my compass, revolver, toiletries, notes and the last received letters have disappeared.”
He does not dwell on the lost human life.
Melle’s facts only point in one direction. Stoop was a gifted engineer and entrepreneur, without further ado, and later a sympathetic benefactor to his surroundings in the Netherlands. But he also made ruthless use of colonial relations. He only wanted one thing, says Melle: to earn money. Profit and dividend came first. “The money has never benefited the Indonesian people.”
Melle has finished his story. Now it is up to the audience, which has kept silent until now. How will our family react to his findings?
In the weeks leading up to the meeting, we knew it was going to be exciting. Concerned emails and phone calls came in from elderly relatives. An uncle by marriage, usually very faithful in matters like this, announced that he would not come: he did not wish to witness the smearing of Grandpa Stoop’s reputation. His brother-in-law and his children also stayed away. Another family member had to be reassured by telephone by Melle: we were not concerned with a moral condemnation, but with an adjustment of the image, with new facts.
“When I hear you speak, I think: man, relax!”, says an uncle
An elderly uncle gets the microphone first. “At the moment,” he says, “it is rather fashionable to say that we are guilty…”
“I never said that we are guilty,” says Melle. “Let that be clear.”
“…but before, when you went to the Indies, you adapted to the context without knowing exactly what you were doing.”
Another uncle takes the floor. “I sense a heaviness in you that I personally cannot place at all,” he says to Melle. “Where does that come from? When I hear you speak, I think: man, relax!”
“Yes”, responds an aunt, “you feel uncomfortable, you say, but you don’t donate your inheritance to a foundation for Indonesian orphans or something!”
Melle jumps nervously from one leg to the other. He’s having a hard time, I see. However nuanced he may have been, his story has not exactly led to humility or introspection among the speakers. On the contrary. The criticism focuses on him, the messenger. They think he is a hypocrite: if he has so much trouble with the origin of our family capital, why is he reaping the benefits?
Now it’s the turn of an uncle by marriage with a lush beard, once a renowned alpinist. “In your presentation, you measure everything against today’s situation,” he says. “But have you ever walked in the bush? Have you ever been in a truly primitive environment? In the Indies there was no organization, no capital. Stoop brought all that.”
We had foreseen it, the criticism. And yet I am surprised at the reproachful undertone. I know my family members as amiable people, mostly progressive, with nice jobs and a love for books, music and the world around them. Yet they feel attacked. You have to see Stoop ‘in his day’, they say. Colonialism was there. Melle may feel uncomfortable, but she certainly doesn’t. Find them.
Why the defensive attitude? After the meeting, that question often comes to my mind. Looking for an answer, I decide to visit Allard, the family member who had been reassured by Melle beforehand by telephone. He is considered the encyclopedic conscience of the family. He had kept his cool during the meeting, but it was clear that he disagreed with Melle.
Allard is in his mid-seventies. Petite build, twinkling eyes, tousled gray hair. He lives in a beautiful red-brick house in Overveen, on the other side of the dune on which Grandpa Stoop settled after his Indonesian years. We take a seat in the conservatory, at the round kitchen table. There is marzipan on the table, and a steaming pot of tea without a lid.
Allard begins to talk about how important the Stoop family is to him. It was thanks to the Indian stone collection of his grandmother Bep, the third daughter of grandfather Stoop, that he decided to study mining engineering – just like his great-grandfather. He worked as an engineer for the Hoogovens, including in Canada and Australia, and as an organizational consultant and business consultant.
“Grandpa Stoop,” says Allard, “was a consciously material person, he was out for success. But he was on the right side, I think. He thought that we were there to push the Indians, and especially the Javanese, in the momentum of the nations. Just like Coen van Deventer.”
I ask him what he bases that on. Surely there are no known sources in which Stoop says such a thing?
“I have studied him all my life,” says Allard. “I just feel that.”
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