Getting to know you - again.

How Indonesians and Portuguese are becoming reacquainted

When I visited Portugal in 2005, I had the opportunity to visit the Indonesian Embassy. It was
a strange experience to see the Sang Merah Putih and Garuda Pancasila prominently
displayed in what was for a quarter of a century ‘enemy territory’, but it was a welcome sight..

‘Look for the Indonesian flag’, the then Political Counsellor, Achmad Gozali told me, to which
I replied ‘bendera Indonesia, bandeira indonésia – same in both languages!’ Indonesian is
full of words derived from Portuguese, and walking past shops in Lisbon, I was reminded of
Indonesia whenever I saw the word ‘sapatos’ displayed on signs, not to mention signs outside
churches with the word ‘igreja’.

A sample of Portuguese loanwords in Indonesian

If some Australians saw Indonesia, as Paul Keating put it, through the ‘prism’ of East Timor,
many more Portuguese saw Indonesia in much the same way, and vice versa. Geographical
distance between the two countries, obviously allowed ignorance and prejudice to flourish,
largely unchallenged, as did the disappearance of what few social and economic links existed
– Portuguese and Indonesian citizens could not visit each other’s countries.

It did not help Indonesia that its most vocal defender in Portugal, the late Carlos Galvão de
Melo, was a retired military officer with reactionary views, who was president of the ‘Portugal
Indonesia Friendship Association’ (PIFA). When he visited Indonesia and was feted by Ali
Alatas, he branded Xanana Gusmão a ‘war criminal’. Dismissing reports of human rights
abuses as ‘a lie’, he remarked that ‘all the genocide attributed to the Indonesians by people
here in Portugal was committed by the communist Fretilin.’

Yet in Portugal he was seen as a has-been and a nobody, who only received 0.8 per cent of
the vote when he stood for president in 1980, while Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo described
him as ‘Indonesia’s ambassador to Portugal’.

Who cares?

PIFA is now defunct, but there is now an organisation known as ALIAC (Luso-Indonesian
Association for Friendship and Cooperation). While in Lisbon, I met its President, António
Pinto da França, a Portuguese diplomat who lived in Indonesia from 1965 to 1970, and author
of the book Pengaruh Portugis di Indonesia. (Portuguese Influence in Indonesia). His
colleague, Dr Maria Manuel das Neves Bandeira, formerly an interpreter at the Portuguese
Embassy in Jakarta, has taught Indonesian at the Portuguese Catholic University.
Speaking to them was a welcome change, because I had long been accustomed to
Portuguese who held negative views of Indonesia, and the Indonesian language, which,
despite the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1999, still persist. Many cling to predictable
stereotypes of Indonesia being a cultural wasteland and an Islamic theocracy, or are
sentimental and condescending: one Portuguese, who lived in East Timor under colonial rule,
told me that he respected the Indonesians ‘because of their Portuguese heritage’.

Yet this is as of much interest to Indonesians as Portugal’s Arab heritage is to the

Portuguese. The name of the island of Flores comes from the Portuguese word for ‘flower’,
but the name of the Algarve region comes from the Arabic for ‘the west’. In other words, who
cares?

Last year in Portugal, there was media coverage of a suggestion by the outgoing Indonesian
Ambassador, Francisco Lopes da Cruz, that Indonesia should have the status of observer at
the CPLP, the Portuguese-speaking equivalent of the Commonwealth of Nations. (Lopes da
Cruz, is, of course, originally from East Timor and Portuguese-educated.)

If there had been any mention of this in the media in Indonesia, it is likely that it would have
been met with incomprehension and ridicule. Indonesians might well think that it might be
better to seek membership of the Commonwealth, given the far greater interest in learning
English than other western languages, least of all Portuguese. The Commonwealth does not
even expect members to have English as an official language, which Malaysia has not done
since 1968, and which formerly Portuguese Mozambique has no plans to do.

Despite having restored diplomatic relations with Indonesia nearly a decade ago, Portugal
has made little effort to develop stronger ties. While initiatives like helping the Tugu people in
Jakarta appreciate Portuguese songs, highlighting the influence of Portuguese fado music on
Indonesian keroncong, and exchanges between Sikka in Flores and Lagos in the Algarve, are
laudable, they do nothing to dispel the stereotype of Portugal as a country fixated with relics
of its faded colonial past..

The language of Camões

Indeed, there is still neither a Portuguese-Indonesian nor Indonesian-Portuguese dictionary,

much less other Indonesian-language materials for learning Portuguese. Although
Portuguese speakers learning Indonesian, or vice versa, can recognise many Portuguese
loanwords, in addition to the many Dutch loanwords of French or Latin origin, such as
frambus, aktualitas, redaktur, saldo, persik and advokat, and the even greater number of
English loanwords, again of French or Latin origin, they still have to use twice as many
dictionaries as speakers of other languages.

By contrast, there are numerous books available for Indonesian speakers wishing to learn
Spanish, including dictionaries, some of which are being used in East Timor by people going
to Cuba to study medicine. While it is not surprising that Portuguese is overlooked in favour of
Spanish, what should be a source of embarrassment to Lisbon is the fact that Gramedia has
just published a Swedish-Indonesian dictionary.

For years, there has been talk between Jakarta and Lisbon about the publication of such
dictionaries, but nothing has been done. And yet, the Instituto Camões, the cultural offshoot of
the Portuguese Foreign Ministry, expects the language to be taught in Indonesia without any
such materials. Its lecturer in Jakarta, Maria Irmler, who teaches Portuguese at the University
of Indonesia (although the UI website makes no mention of it) told me that she had been
feeling the lack of them “in every day of my work”.

Nevertheless, that has not discouraged her Indonesian students, who learn Portuguese
because they consider it to be an interesting European language, with the added bonus of
historical links with Indonesia. East Timor is a non-issue for them, as it should be, and of no
more relevance than Vietnam and the Philippines are to Indonesians who want to learn
French or Spanish.
Indeed, the fact that there are still no such dictionaries has owed more to Portuguese inaction
than Indonesian lack of interest, as Gramedia has asked people from the Instituto Camões to
help compile them, but no one has been available.

Similarly, not all Portuguese living in East Timor look at Indonesia with disdain, and some
have taken advantage of the ability to travel around the archipelago as freely as any other
foreign nationals, or indeed, as their ancestors did centuries ago. And while many react with
horror that the suggestion that they should learn Tetum, never mind Indonesian, there are
some who speak both.

One of them, João Paulo Esperança, a teacher in Dili, has writen about this extensively on
Portuguese-language blogs, dispelling the unpleasant and embarrasingly dated stereotypes
of Indonesia that, sadly, are still all too common in Portugal and elsewhere in the
Portuguese-speaking world. To say that Indonesia is neither a cultural desert nor an Islamic
theocracy may be a statement of the obvious, but to a Portuguese-speaking readership, it can
be nothing short of a revelation.

Visiting East Timorese studying at university in Jogjakarta, he noted ruefully that there were
far more facilities for people wanting to learn French than Portuguese, and that the local
French Cultural Centre was larger than its Portuguese counterpart in Dili.

And of course, if Portugal wants its language to be taught in Indonesian universities, it should
get Portuguese-educated politicans in East Timor to cut the ‘sarjana supermie’ stuff, and even
worse, references to ‘a language of donkeys’. It would also help if the Portuguese got the
name of the Indonesian language right – while it is offered at the University of Lisbon, it is
called ‘Bahasa Indonésio’, or ‘Indonesian Bahasa’.

Even more embarrassing has been the lack of initiative on the part of Brazil, the largest
Portuguese-speaking country in the world, despite the fact that Brasilia and Jakarta have
always had diplomatic relations. Brazil should have a considerable advantage over Portugal,
in that it does not have the historical or colonial baggage, which should be able to promote
Portuguese as it should be promoted, on purely commercial and geopolitical grounds, as the
language of a regionally important country.

Regional giants

While it is unlikely that Indonesia sees the same advantage as China in forging trade links
with Brazil, given that it is a resource-rich, rather than resource-hungry economy, the two
countries presidents have visited the other’s country in the past year. However, ‘south-south’
cooperation is to mean anything more than rhetoric, then it will need more than just state
visits, it will mean ‘people to people’ links. Now that it is cheaper and faster to fly from Jakarta
to São Paulo via Dubai, than from Jakarta to Lisbon via Hong Kong and London, forging
these links is more feasible than before.

Sadly, while Portugal is guilty of being backward-looking with regard to Indonesia, Brazil is
guilty of being inward-looking. While Indonesians can now watch Record TV from Brazil via
satellite, which shows telenovelas in the original Portuguese, rather than dubbed, the
channel has not seen the merits of subtitles. (The channel’s target audience is the 300 000
strong Brazilian community in Japan.) At least it would be more appealing to an Indonesian
audience than Portugal’s RTPi, which no amount of subtitling or dubbing would make less
unwatchable.

In fact, Portuguese and Indonesian share a common problem, in that they are often
overlooked in favour of other languages, despite being spoken by hundreds of millions. Even
in Western countries, Portuguese is less widely taught in schools than Latin, and while
education ministers have advocated that children should be able to study Asian languages
like Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, Indonesian never gets a mention. Of course, many children in
the UK no longer study a foreign language at all.
In the footsteps of Fernão Mendes Pinto

During my meeting at the Indonesian Embassy in Lisbon, the Political Counsellor presented
me with an Portuguese-Indonesian phrasebook called Mengenal Bahasa Portugis (Get to
Know the Portuguese Language) that he an a Portuguese colleague had compiled, along with
an Indonesian-Portuguese phrasebook called Conhecer a Língua Indonésia (Get to Know the
Indonesian Language). Sadly, neither has been published commercially.

A Portuguese-Indonesian phrasebook, compliled by the Indonesian Embassay in Lisbon

Another Portuguese in East Timor who has learned Indonesian, Margarida Gonçalves, told
me about the hostility that she encountered from other Portuguese. It was, she told me, as if
she had “committed lèse majesté”. She recounted how she once viewed Indonesia, and how
she views it now:

“I once burnt cuddly toys marked ‘MADE IN INDONESIA’. I hated Indonesia and Indonesians,
without really ever realising who they were. That was more than fifteen years ago. I became
passionate about Timor, but I would only really start to understand the country when I
understood Indonesia. It was like that. Now, I only hate Suharto and his coterie of generals.”

“But after having beeen immersed in some of the cultures of Indonesia, I have discovered that
the country is not at all like what the propaganda of the 1990s had me believe. It is that
propaganda (understandable at the time) which is nowadays an affront to those Portuguese
sailors who signed treaties in Sunda Kelapa with the Bataks, sang with the inhabitants of
Manado, prayed with those of Flores, Ende, Solor, Alor and Rote and left descendants from
Aceh to Ambon.”

“[The sixteenth century explorer] Fernão Mendes Pinto did not describe these people in such
rabid and hateful terms as do the majority of Portuguese of the present day. And today, in the
information society in which we live, I think that it is inexcusable.”

Indeed it is, but while Indonesia’s relations with Portugal may never be as important as those
with the Netherlands, at least now there are now some Indonesians and Portuguese who no
longer view each other through the ‘prism’ of East Timor.