Officials who exposed colonial planter abuses were punished and removed from service

Evidence

What happened to Valck and his letter? He was not destined for long in the civil service. Less than a year after his appointment in Deli, he was, as noted above, transferred (in February 1877) to Java, while an official investigation of his “serious misconduct” continued after his departure. The following year he was honorably dismissed from the civil service with a meager pension and placed on the retired list at the relatively young age of forty-three. The Resident Locker de Bruijne, reprimanded for allocating too much responsibility to Valck and for blaming the latter for his own mistakes, emerged from the inquiry with his character, though not his position, intact. What was wrong with Valck? Was he merely a bungling bureaucrat, as some investigators later contended, or the right person in the wrong place at the wrong time? Were the increased disturbances during his tenure of his own making, as Director Henny of the Civil Service charged, or the result of a situation inherited from his predecessor, as his friend Norman Levyssohn and his uncle van Rees were to assert on his behalf? Or was it, as Valck in his own defense continually claimed, “the result of a long-standing government policy of leniency towards the planters”? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1115

Categorization

• QUESTION: The framing question ‘what was wrong with Valck’ is exactly the epistemic anxiety this book explores — how blame attaches to the messenger rather than the message in colonial governance.