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

• 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.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Historia (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Timor

Netherlands East Indies

colonialism

warfare

oral history

Historia

History

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)