Book reviews Des Alwi, Friends and exiles; A memoir of the nutmeg isles and the Indonesian nationalist movement. Edited by Barbara S. Harvey. Ithaca, New York: South East Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2008, vii + 171 pp. ISBN 9780877277446. Price: USD 20.95 (paperback). CHRIS F. VAN FRAASSEN Goes (Netherlands)
[email protected] Des Alwi was born on 17 November 1927 in Banda Neira, capital of the fabled ‘Nutmeg Isles’. His maternal grandfather, Said Tjong Baadilla (1859-1933), born from a marriage between an Arab entrepreneur and a daughter of the head of the Chinese community in Banda, was a very prominent figure in Bandanese society. He had got fabulous rich by the exploitation of pearl banks. However, in the beginning of the 1930s he became bankrupt and shortly the- reafter he passed away, according to Des Alwi in this memoir (p. 15) in 1934, and according to other sources on February 4, 1933. Des Alwi’s paternal grandfather, Pangeran Omar, descended from the royal dynasty of Palembang. He came to the Moluccas to seek information about the fate of his grandfather, Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin of Palembang (1818-1821), who had been banned to Ternate in 1825, where he died in 1852. Des Alwi’s father was born in Ternate and came to Banda in 1912, where he got a job in the Baadilla fleet. He married a daughter of Said Tjong Baadilla in 1923. After the Baadilla glory had crumbled in the early 1930s, Des Alwi grew up in destitute circumstances. Nevertheless, in Friends and exiles he looks back on a relatively carefree youth.