Havelaar is the assistant governor in Lebak, a district in the Javanese province of Bantam. With his slightly fiery temper and lively imagination, he is reminiscent of Don Quixote. He is sincere, compassionate and generous and does not tolerate injustice. Scarfman, who is actually Max Havelaar, is the protagonist and the exact opposite of Batavus Drystubble. Stern becomes one of the narrators of the novel and the audience (the Rosemeyers family) are deeply impressed by the stories. But when he looks through the articles in “Scarfman’s parcel”, his commercial sense tells him that he could profit from the writings and so he gives the intern, Ernest Stern, the task of editing the manuscripts. When an impoverished old school friend who, lacking a coat, only has a scarf wrapped around him, hands him a parcel of manuscripts in the hope that Drystubble will help him to get them published (to make some money), Drystubble finds this inconvenient. His book is the bible but he has no qualms about using the word of God to his own advantage. He has an aversion to literature because stories are full of untruths, and poetic words can arouse unwanted emotions. In 1999, the famous Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer called Max Havelaar ‘the book that killed colonialism’.The coffee-broker, Batavus Drystubble, is the embodiment of the devout hypocrite, a small-minded yet pompous bigot who prioritises his own profit over the welfare of his fellow man. Indonesian nationalist figures such as Soekarno, Hatta, Sjahrir, Ahmad Soebardjo and Kartini read Max Havelaar and were inspired to join the anti-colonial movement. The book displayed in this online exhibition is a rare first edition copy of the French translation, dating back to 1876. The English language version of the book was translated in 1927 by Willem Siebenhaar, a social activist and writer from Western Australia. It has been translated into 40 languages. This book was influential beyond the Dutch East Indies and helped fuel the anti-colonial movement.
People from across the country read the book and it generated debate in schools, homes and universities about colonial rule. A month after its publication, Max Havelaar caused an upheaval throughout the Netherlands. In 1859 in a boarding house in Brussels, Belgium, Dekker wrote Max Havelaar.
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