Ren writes

In 1965 a central government minister came to visit Maumere, a small town on the island of Flores, and a demonstration gathered during the visit. The people in it had come for one man. They were Jan Djong's supporters.

He was removed from his office the next day.

To understand what that cost, you have to know he had done this before, and that it had worked. Twelve years earlier, in June 1953, Djong organized the first political demonstration Maumere had ever seen. The fight was a school: the raja of Sikka, Don Thomas, held direct control over a newly built one, and Djong marched against it. Don Thomas relented. Djong was appointed chairman of the school's board. Within three months the office of raja itself was abolished.

A demonstration, back then, was a tool that opened doors.

Johanes Djong was born in 1917 in the village of Hewokloang, and the strange part of his story is where he came from: his father descended from the Raja of Kanga'e, a territory split off from the Kingdom of Sikka and later swallowed back. Aristocrat blood. He spent his life leading protests against the aristocracy.

The career in between was a seesaw. Clerk for the Dutch colonial office. Then the Japanese occupation made him a kapitan, an executive officer, over the traditional district around his home village. When the Dutch returned, they fired him for having worked with the Japanese. In May 1948 he was arrested for leading a protest against the raja's restoration and got six months. After independence he agitated rural farmers against the raja's authority; in some villages it went as far as the homes of raja officials being torched, whole villages turned into no-go zones for local officials. In 1957 he was sentenced to three years over looting and violence connected to protests he led. In 1959 a presidential pardon, lobbied by a local political leader, let him out early. In 1961 he was sworn into Sikka's Regional House of Representatives. In August 1962 he was appointed district head of Kewapante.

A district head is expected to be apolitical. That is the rule, written somewhere in the paperwork of being a civil servant, that his own supporters walked him straight into. The demonstration during the ministerial visit was their loyalty, loud and public and on his side.

The next day it cost him the job.

Then the country turned. After the 30 September movement in Jakarta, the killings came to Flores too. Local commanders arrested PKI leaders, then some National Party members. Djong was arrested in late January or early February 1966. He was tortured in prison and paraded through Maumere wearing only his underpants. Close to the end he asked for a priest, for a confession and last rites, and the request was refused; one jailer reportedly urinated on his face. He died of his wounds on 1 March 1966. He was forty-eight. His body was buried just outside the prison grounds. Between 800 and 1,500 people were murdered across Sikka alone in those months.

In 2012, sand miners found two skeletons. One was thought to be Djong's. Local officials reburied them quickly, afraid of further controversy. His family did not pursue the matter.

A demonstration is a public thing. It forces a town to look at something it had agreed not to see. He forced the first one his town ever had, and it won him a school. The last public thing his name was allowed to do was a crowd gathered for him, and it cost him everything that was left. In the end the country buried him the way officials bury a controversy: quickly, quietly, and outside the fence.

Fact receipts: Wikipedia, “Jan Djong” (1917 to 1966), drawing on the 2019 account by Dutch anthropologist Gerry van Klinken. First demonstration June 1953 over the school; supporters' demonstration during a ministerial visit in 1965; removal the following day; arrest early 1966; death 1 March 1966, buried outside the prison grounds; 2012 skeletons reburied. Every fact above is real. The ordering and the last line are mine.