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Prabowo Subianto’s time as an exile, has helped him sell nationalism at home and his image abroad, writes Danau Tanu.
In a recent post, New Mandala’s Liam Gammon said of Prabowo:
The pro-business cosmopolitan who can ‘knock Indonesia together’ is the one who shows up to events at posh Jakarta hotels with diplomats and investors. The fist-shaking demagogue is the one who appears in front of the voters. It’s important that foreigners tempted to see Prabowo as the leader Indonesia needs, understand just how different these two personas are.
So, how does Prabowo pull off these personas?
Prabowo Subianto is a ‘Third Culture Kid’. Despite sounding child-like, the term is popular among globe trotters and often appears in the international media. ‘Third Culture Kids’, or ‘TCKs’ for short, describe those who spend their childhood moving internationally multiple times and attend international schools. Prabowo did both.
In the 1950s and 60s, Prabowo left Indonesia and lived overseas with his family while his father was in exile for supporting a failed regional revolt. During this time, Prabowo grew up in Singapore (while it was still under British rule), Hong Kong, Malaysia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom while attending British, American and international schools. Prabowo graduated high school from the American School in London in 1969.
Growing up in six countries as Prabowo did is typical of Third Culture Kids, but it is no easy feat. TCK experts, David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, explain that, ‘With one plane ride a TCK’s whole world can die.’ These children have to trade in their social network of relationships for new ones each time they move, with repercussions on their adolescent development.
A young Prabowo Subianto. Photo from Facebook.
When this is coupled with the reality of having to adjust to a new country, new language and new culture every two to three years, growing up can be rather confusing. It is an elite form of cultural displacement. Unsurprisingly, many TCKs become ‘cultural chameleons’ as a matter of survival. They learn to pick up the cultural cues, languages, accents and mannerisms of their surroundings so as to blend in with the dominant culture.
In Prabowo’s case, he was also a minority within a minority in the majority-white international schools that he attended. In an interview with the tabloid ‘The Politic’, Prabowo explains that he was almost always the only non-white student in class, making it even more important for him to learn to act appropriately within a Western milieu. If there were other non-white students in the school, they were often his own siblings.
Given the immediate post-colonial atmosphere of the time, one of Prabowo’s strongest memory of his experience abroad is that of racism:
There was still a strong sense of superiority among white people, westerners. They often insulted me at school. I was always part of the minority…Because we were often bullied, often insulted, we became tough. I can’t forget the first day I went to school in Switzerland. It was an international school where the majority were Americans. I must have been fourteen at the time. I got on the bus – immediately I was asked, ‘Where are you from?’ I answered, ‘I’m from Indonesia.’ [They said,] ‘Oh, your people still live on trees?’ Can you imagine? It was only the first day and already I was being greeted like that.
Rasa superioritas daripada bangsa kulit putih itu sangat tinggi, bangsa barat. Jadi di sekolah saya sering dihina. Saya selalu kelompok minoritas…Iya, karena kita kan sering diejek, sering dihina jadi kita makin…lebih tough. Saya gak bisa lupa, saya ingat hari pertama saya masuk sekolah di Swiss. Sekolahnya sekolah internasional, sebagian besar orang Amerika. Saya umurnya berapa waktu itu, 14 tahun. Naik bus, langsung ditanya, ‘Where are you from?’ Kamu darimana? Saya jawab, ‘I’m from Indonesia’, ‘Saya dari Indonesia’. ‘Oh, your people still live on trees?’ ‘Masih tinggal dipohon?’ Bayangkan itu ya, hari pertama kita sudah disambut semacam itu.
These experiences implanted a sense of nationalism for Indonesia in Prabowo.
Also, having had his whole childhood to train for, switching between a cosmopolitan who talks like a Westerner and a ‘fist-shaking demagogue’ that appeals to specific sectors of Indonesian society would come naturally for him. This leaves on-lookers wondering: which one is the real Prabowo?
They are both real. To those unfamiliar with the skills of a cultural chameleon, it may seem as though Prabowo is putting on different personas. But acting as a cultural chameleon is a communication skill, not the symptoms of a split personality.
If Prabowo appears to some Westerners as ‘someone who “thinks like us” and talks like a Westerner’, it is because they mistakenly conflate Prabowo’s fluency in English and Western culture-speak with having democratic values that the West tends to associate with itself. Essentially they are saying, ‘You’re not like all those other Indonesians. You’re different because you sound like us.’
It is false to assume that cultural assimilation is a prerequisite to sharing fundamental values, as though the likes of Joko Widodo, a non-Western educated man of humble origins, cannot understand international protocols.
To make it more confusing for the observer is that not only is Prabowo a cultural chameleon, but he is also a political chameleon – two very different skills that are not to be confused with each other. The former allows Prabowo to communicate effectively with different audiences, the latter allows him to change political tunes when it suits him. Over the past decade or so, he went from a military commander who was implicated in the killing of unarmed citizens to a defender of the poor.
In fact, acting like a political chameleon is a common trait among the famous faces in his election team regardless of where they spent their childhoods. Mahfud MD was a vice presidential nominee to Jokowi, but jumped ship after failing in his bid and became Prabowo’s campaign manager. Similarly, Amien Rais was well-known for his role as a spokesperson for the reform movement that brought Suharto down in 1998, but he recently surprised many by backing Prabowo whose campaign harks back to the Suharto era.
Rais’ support came after Prabowo chose Hatta Rajasa from the National Mandate Party (PAN), in which Rais is chairman of the advisory board, as his running mate. It is not the first time that Rais changed his tune. Previously, he was known to be hostile towards the ethnic Chinese and Christians up until 1998 when he realized that he would stand a chance running for presidency once Suharto falls, after which he adopted a more accommodating stance towards pluralism.
If there is one thing that is consistent about Prabowo and his campaign team, it is their willingness to barter political tunes for political gain. It just so happens that Prabowo’s childhood gave him the ability to present these tunes in a cosmopolitan package when it suits.
Danau Tanu completed her PhD in Anthropology and Asian studies at the University of Western Australia on mobility and international education in Indonesia.
The article is an interesting read, despite the stupid comment.
More interesting articles with no stupid comments, please!
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This article reminds me my old philosophy professor who was used to warn me not to use psychoanalytic arguments to justify my prejudices. “The psychoanalysis is the main failure of the previous century as psychological therapy but unfortunately it has cankered our culture and our common sense” – he was used to say. And he was right: here for example the author is seeking for some “traumatic” experiences in the Prabowo’s childhood to find out an explanation (a cause-and-effect relationships) that could justify the idea that he has a chameleon personality (which is considered as a bad quality). So, the multicultural context of the Prabowo’s education, in this vision, turns to be the metaphor of his unconscious, the world of repressed events on which his personality is implanted. So he experienced racism – which can explain his nationalism – he experienced how to show a different identity speaking a different language – which can explain his ability to show different images of himself … My professor would laugh in front of such ridiculous abstraction! Prabowo had a multicultural education, that’s all. No need to apply psychoanalytic categories on this matter of fact. It may include traumatic events, but the whole experience (all the years spent in international schools) cannot be reduced to this meaningless events. The ability to adapt to different audiences is absolutely an intellectual quality not a symptom of an inconsistent personality. Furthermore the change of personality and behaviour is symptom of authenticity, of a continuing learning and education. A fixed identity is something detached from the world and from the history!
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Nice conclusion Adamo: “The ability to adapt to different audiences is absolutely an intellectual quality not a symptom of an inconsistent personality. Furthermore the change of personality and behaviour is symptom of authenticity, of a continuing learning and education.” Despite your criticism of the tendency toward pyschoanalysis in this article, you drive home its main argument very clearly!
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Students of Indonesian politics should be grateful to Danau Tanu for the reference to the interview with Prabowo, if for little else. This interview is well worth watching, as it is full of interesting information. Ms Danau quotes the multi-schooled Prabowo as saying that Americans at his Swiss school had asked him if his people lived in trees. Ms Danau assumes that this implausible story is true. In the interview, Prabowo says that he was fourteen when this conversation took place. So it was probably in 1965 or 1966.
Prabowo also says that he was born into a ‘republican’ family. Given that Prabowo was born in 1951,by the time his brain began recording experiences that his memory could divulge in an interview fifty-odd years later,’republican’ families were the only ones around. So why bother saying that his family was republican? Had he been born ten years earlier, he would have been onto something. But Federal Indonesia, or pro-Dutch Indonesia, had vanished long before Prabowo was out of nappies.
The interview that Danau Tanu links to is interesting because Prabowo clearly prefers to talk about his grandfather, Margono, rather than his father, Sumitro. Sumitro had obtained a doctorate in economics from Rotterdam more than twenty years earlier. Sumitro’s professors probably didn’t ask him before granting him his doctorate whether ‘inlanders’ still lived in trees, but American teenagers resident a thousand kilometres or less away in Switzerland as late as 1965, when America began deploying large numbers of troops to Vietnam, still believed that Southeast Asians lived in trees. I began studying Indonesian at Sydney University in 1965 and I remember that no Australians in that year believed that Indonesians lived in trees. Indonesia was then ‘confronting’ Malaysia, and Australian soldiers were shooting at Indonesian soldiers in Sarawak. They didn’t have to aim at tree-level. I must confess that I don’t know what American teenagers in Australia then believed about Indonesian tree-dwelling customs, but their future president was about to head off to Indonesia for three or four years’ education. Obama at least had got the message about Indonesians living in houses and attending schools, even if Prabowo’s school-mates in Switzerland hadn’t.
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Actually, students of Indonesian politics should be grateful to Dominic Berger from ANU/ New Mandala for showing me the interview and encouraging me to write the article after I commented on the interview.
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Nappies ? Ken’s riposte is amusing, as it is anachronistic and facetious. If it is not facetious, it well should be. There were already thousands and thousands and thousands of Nanyang Chinese, Mainland Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais, and 200,000 Filipinos in the United States, long long long before the Vietnam War. NO American believed that ANY Asian person lived in trees, on trees, or under trees (unless they were monks who lived in Buddhist temples under large Banyan trees). Ken’s humorous riposte is, in fact, as incorrect as it is malodorous. The common false belief, often held by our dear cousins in the UK and Oz, being that only elite WASPS
from Cambridge, Massachusetts, knew anything
about Asia. Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia and Edwin Reischauer was born in Tokyo. Clifford Geertz served in the U.S. Navy, well before his ethnographic work in Java. I imagine English and Australian stereotypes would be equally odious as the ones that Ken makes reference to. Yet on the other hand, I distinctly remember, one day in Adelaide at a local arts festival, a heckler asking David Gulpilil in 2003, whether he lived in trees, and whether the Moore River Native Settlement was populated by Aboriginal tree dwellers (in the 21st Century). I assume the heckler meant native Australians, and not Caucasian hippies trying to max out on native herbs and enter the “Last Wave”. Perhaps it is to Oz, that Ken should look for such anthropological anomalies, and not in the United States. Finally, no Americans believe that Southeast Asian adults wear nappies, 100 years ago or today.
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I would like to apologize with Danau Tanu for the tone of my previous comment. I don’t agree with the psychoanalytical approach, but this doesn’t give me the right to slam the article as ridiculous. The quality of the article is not under discussion. And after all, as it was pointed out by Samuel Martin, my conclusion was not very different. The only difference is that I consider a good quality the ability to adapt to different audiences. Second, I believe that changing a political view, in different historical periods, in an index of authenticity just because it’s the world that is changing and it needs always new interpretations and answers.
About the Ken Ward’s comment, I don’t think that the episode of bullying mentioned by Prabowo is relevant from the historical point of view: it happened among teenagers and as such it can happen also today, in 2014.
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