A bilingual colonial protest slogan could pun on a bureaucratic credential

Evidence

But what was this outcry, “Samoanja radical,” which seems to have captured a bilingual jeu de mot, a Dutch Malay play on words, embedded in the phrase? The Malay word “samoanja” (or semuanja) literally means “they’re all,” or “everything is,” which is clear enough. But “radical,” in mid-nineteenth-century Indies Dutch had two distinct referents: one, to “radical,” in the more familiar political sense; and two, to the “Radikaal” (sometimes spelled “radicaal”), that despised diploma for entry into the elite ranks of the civil service, granted only by the academy in Delft. It was of course abolition of the Radikaal that was the principal subject of the next day’s planned assembly. Whether “Samoanja radical,” as shouted on the streets of Batavia in 1848, meant “everything is about the diploma,” or “everyone should be able to get the diploma,” or “they’re all radical” (the most unlikely) is impossible to say. There was no further mention of the phrase. It disappears from the archive, as does its rich ambiguity and bivalence from Indonesia’s colonial history of dissent. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 555

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: The untranslatable, bivalent colonial protest slogan that vanishes from the archive is a perfect opening for an essay on how ambiguity gets flattened by archival record-keeping.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s archival focus: the disappearance of ambiguity from the colonial record echoes themes in the reader’s stance on colonial commonsense and epistemic anxieties.
• DEFINE: Defines the Radikaal, the Delft-granted civil service diploma, a key colonial credentialing mechanism.

Related

• Colonial protest slogans can encode ambiguity the archive erases (similarity 0.94)