When the mission in Makassar (Sulawesi) received its first visitation committee
in 1939, the administration records were inspected, all according to the Mission
Order (Zendingsorde)30 When D.J. van Dijk, missionary of the Gereformeerde
Zendingsbond (the missionary society of the orthodox wing of the Nederlandse
Hervormde Kerk) in Central Sulawesi, realised that he and the other Europeans
would be interned by the Japanese, who occupied the Dutch East Indies in
1942, he sent his library and precious objects among which the archive of the
mission to the kampong. He hoped to safeguard it there, but when he returned to
Sulawesi in 1946 the library had disappeared. Unfortunately he did not mention
what had happened to the archive, but it must have survived.31
Five questions
a. What information was put on paper?
Boards of Protestant missionary organisations tried to get control on what
was going on. This was not a simple matter because of the large distances and
the often bad or slow communications. The boards were always a little bit
afraid that their missionaries might become too autonomous. The board of
the Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging (Dutch Missionary Society; NZV) wrote
to the missionaries in West Java in 1864 that all the important decisions were
to be made in the Netherlands. They objected to conferences convened by the
missionaries because the decisions taken at that level might affect the board's
authority.32 Boards wanted to be well informed, so they frequently issued rules
with regard to reports and other documents.
Missionaries were obliged to make periodical reports on the happenings in their
district. These were sent to the Netherlands and put on the agenda of the board's
meetings. From 1900 onwards Protestant missionaries working in the different
regions of the Indonesian archipelago convened annually to deliberate on what
was going on. Problems they had come across were analysed. The minutes of
the meetings were meticulously kept and sent to the Netherlands. The boards
answered the questions and deliberated the problems set before them.33 Another
method controlling the overseas scene was to send a member of the board
abroad to visit the stations. Reports of these site visits are very elaborate but
because of the costs and the long distance between the Netherlands and the
East Indies these visits were few. The instruction in 1862 to three missionaries
of the Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging, about to depart to West-Java to start
the mission among the Sundanese Muslim population, contained two articles
prescribing the obligation to send in monthly reports or even bimonthly reports
and to keep a diary.34 The monthly report had to consist of two copies: one to
TON KAPPELHOF ARCHIVES OF DUTCH DHRISTIAN MISSIONARY ORGANISATIONS AND MISSIONARIES
INFORMATION POWER - FROM HAGIOGRAPHY TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
30 De Jong, Nederlandse zending op Zuid-Sulawesi, 122.
31 Van den End, Gereformeerde Zendingsbond, 531.
32 Van den End, Nederlandsche Zendingsvereeniging West-Java, 110.
33 This kind of conference has to be distinguished from field conferences of missionaries belonging to diffe
rent missionary societies in a certain area. The idea to convene regularly came from the Baptist missionary
William Carey who wrote about it to a friend in 1806. The first conference of this type was organised by
Carey and held in Bombay in 1825. The idea spread rapidly over all important mission areas. See: Hogg,
Ecumenical Foundations, 17-35.
34 Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations, 93.
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