Indonesia – The Rainbow Troops

By Andrea Hirata

Laskar Pelangi, meaning the Rainbow Troops in Indonesian, is a title that conveys hope.  In this autobiographical novel, Andrea Hirata tells readers about a childhood in the struggling village school of Muhammadiyah Elementary in Beilitong, an island province in Indonesia that had been exploited for tin since the Dutch colonial times.   The land was so rich with tin and other precious metal, yet the discrimination so pervasive, that the poor native coolies of the tin mining company were like a “pack of starving rats in a barn full of rice.”[i]

The story begins as nine children attend the first day of school.  There must be a tenth child to come, lest the school shall be closed by the order of the superintendent.  In the very first chapter, the readers witness the first of the many miraculous triumphs that the two teachers and their students would come to experience together: the tenth child comes, in the eleventh hour of the school opening day.

The Muhammadiyah, despite its state of disrepair in the author’s time, had its glorious days as the first school in Belitong.  Pak Harfan, the school principal, bore on his own shoulders the supporting beam in the classroom.  Yet, prejudices slowly ate away the spirit of education for the poor: the community believed that only those that attended rich schools would succeed, and look at those children who did not go to school and worked instead!  They brought home bread.  As such, the students left, and eventually so did all the teachers.   By the time the ten children began elementary education there, the school building was in near-collapse, with only the passion of the principal and the heroine teacher Bus Mus as the sole support of the school.

In the middle of the sorrowful school is a filicium tree, which bears witness to the joys and pains of the poor childhood of these ten children.  They tell each other stories as they climb the tree chasing rainbows.  They swear by the filicium to be forever friends.  Under this same tree they learn, first-hand, that poverty inspires the love of education for the sake of knowledge and humanity.[ii]  The education for poor children in such conditions forms character and values, first and foremost.

Although this book is not intended to be an expose of the exploitation of the natives by the Dutch, the Japanese or the state owned tin mining company, the colonial mindset and the discriminatory, systematic injustice is what consistently threaten the village school, “[their] goal was to give power to a few people to oppress many, to educate a few people in order to make the others docile.”[iii]  In their struggle to survive and the many triumphs that follow, the ten children of coolies, fishermen, shop keepers, dam keepers and the lowly classes of Indonesia not only learn to hope, but also dare to dream.

This Book has been recommended by the Guardian’s World Literature Tour.

[i] Andrea Hirata, The Rainbow Troops, at 20.

[ii] Id. at 197.

[iii] Id. at 24.