Who Exactly Is a Londo Ireng?
A colonial-era phrase has returned to Indonesian politics. The history of londo ireng, its evolving meaning, and why it matters again in 2026.
There are certain occupational hazards one comes to expect when writing about economics, geopolitics and public policy. Your analysis will inevitably be accused of being too optimistic by those convinced the apocalypse is scheduled for next week, and hopelessly pessimistic by those who believe GDP growth is simply a state of mind. You will occasionally upset markets, activists and academics. Such is the price of having the audacity to suggest that reality is more complicated than political slogans would have us believe.
What generally isn’t on the job description is being retroactively enlisted into the Dutch colonial administration.
Yet that, in essence, is where we found ourselves last week. Speaking at the anniversary celebrations of Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB), the President criticised what he described as persistent pessimism about Indonesia’s future, suggesting that some journalists, NGOs, analysts and commentators had become so negative that they resembled the londo ireng of old.
The reaction was predictable.
Journalist associations condemned the remarks as an attempt to delegitimise critical reporting.
Civil society organisations argued that questioning government policy should not be conflated with questioning the nation itself.
Supporters, meanwhile, insisted that the President was merely highlighting a genuine problem: that parts of Indonesia’s public discourse appear more comfortable amplifying stories of national failure than recognising stories of national progress.
It was, in other words, exactly the sort of argument democracies are designed to have.
What made this episode different was the historical metaphor chosen to frame it. By invoking londo ireng, the conversation shifted from a debate about policy into something far more emotionally charged.
Criticism ceased to be merely criticism; it became disloyalty.
A discussion about economic strategy found itself framed as colonial collaboration.
The thing is that many (young) Indonesians, had barely encountered the phrase before it exploded back into public consciousness. Outside academic circles, its origins have long since faded from popular memory, even though its emotional resonance clearly has not. Which raises a rather obvious question.
What exactly is a londo ireng?
And more importantly, why has Indonesia suddenly rediscovered one of the more obscure expressions in its colonial vocabulary at precisely the moment it is trying to redefine its place on the global stage?
Blame the Dutch
History has an irritating habit of refusing to stay where politicians leave it. Just when one imagines the colonial era has been filed away beneath museum exhibits and commemorative speeches, it wanders back into contemporary politics.
The story of londo ireng begins as an administrative solution to a military problem.
The Java War, fought between 1825 and 1830 under the leadership of Prince Diponegoro, was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of Dutch colonial rule. Although the Dutch eventually prevailed, victory came at an extraordinary cost. Tens of thousands of Javanese lost their lives, thousands of colonial troops were killed, and the financial burden on the Netherlands was immense.
Convincing young Dutchmen that the pinnacle of military adventure involved several months at sea followed by tropical disease and a determined local resistance movement was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not proving an overwhelming success. The colonial administration therefore looked elsewhere within the empire.
Its answer lay on the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana.
Beginning in the 1830s, several thousand West African soldiers were recruited into the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, or KNIL. Officially they became known as the Belanda Hitam, the Black Dutch, serving alongside European troops throughout the Dutch East Indies. In Javanese, the phrase gradually evolved into londo ireng, literally “Black Dutchman”.
Originally, there was nothing metaphorical about it. It described exactly what people saw: African soldiers wearing Dutch uniforms in service of the colonial state.
As the decades passed, the Ghanaian recruits disappeared from living memory, but the phrase survived. Detached from the people who had first embodied it, londo ireng began to accumulate new meanings. Gradually it ceased to describe ethnicity and instead described allegiance. The emphasis shifted from who someone was to whose interests they were perceived to serve.
This transformation is hardly unique to Indonesia. Languages are littered with words that outlive the circumstances that created them. Historical references lose their specificity but retain their emotional force, becoming political shorthand long after their original subjects have vanished. Few people who describe someone as a “quisling” pause to think about wartime Norway, just as few Indonesians using londo ireng today are consciously referring to nineteenth-century Ghanaian soldiers.
Here's the Interesting Bit
The revival of londo ireng tells us far more about Indonesia in 2026 than it does about Indonesia in 1836.
The phrase has resurfaced at a moment when Indonesia is undergoing a subtle but unmistakable shift in how it understands its place in the world. That observation is neither praise nor criticism; it is simply difficult to look at the trajectory of recent policy without concluding that the country is becoming more assertive in defining its own economic and geopolitical direction. The emphasis on:
Downstream processing of natural resources,
Food and energy resilience,
Strategic industries,
Critical minerals,
Sovereign industrial policy, and
Participation in institutions such as BRICS
…all point towards a government increasingly comfortable with the language of strategic autonomy.
Whether one agrees with those choices is almost beside the point.
Modern political debate often struggles to distinguish between describing a trend and endorsing it. To contend that Indonesia is becoming more economically nationalist is no more an endorsement of economic nationalism than to contend that Britain drives on the left is an argument against roundabouts. But description and prescription are not the same
This matters because democracies are supposed to change direction.
Elections are not elaborate administrative exercises designed to ensure that absolutely nothing ever changes.
Governments campaign precisely because they wish to implement different priorities from those that came before.
Sometimes those priorities prove successful, sometimes they prove misguided, and more often than not they prove to be an mixture of both. The point is that democratic mandates are intended to produce movement, not permanent equilibrium.
Indonesia’s current trajectory reflects that reality. The country is placing greater emphasis on:
Capturing value from its natural resources rather than simply exporting them,
Strengthening domestic manufacturing capacity,
Diversifying strategic partnerships, and
Pursuing a foreign policy that sits within neither the traditional Western orbit nor China’s sphere of influence.
It is, in the language favoured by diplomats, attempting to navigate an increasingly multipolar world without becoming excessively dependent upon any particular pole.
That is a perfectly legitimate strategic choice.
It is also one that invites scrutiny.
Every significant policy shift carries trade-offs.
Downstreaming promises industrial development but raises questions about efficiency and competitiveness.
Resource nationalism strengthens domestic leverage while simultaneously altering relationships with international investors.
Pursuing greater strategic autonomy may increase policy flexibility while requiring a more delicate balancing act between competing global powers.
None of these observations are inherently hostile. They are precisely the kinds of questions investors ask before allocating capital, economists ask before building forecasts, journalists ask before publishing investigations and citizens ask before returning governments to office.
Some supporters of the current administration understandably see persistent criticism as evidence that parts of Indonesia’s political class, media or international commentariat remain psychologically attached to an older model of development, in which validation from Western governments, financial institutions and international media was treated almost as a prerequisite for domestic legitimacy. That perspective is not entirely without foundation. For much of the post-Reformasi period, Indonesia deliberately integrated itself into global markets, embraced international investment and sought recognition as a stable democratic success story. Those choices helped underpin two decades of remarkable economic progress.
But history has not stopped since then.
The world has become less globalised, more fragmented and considerably more competitive.
Supply chains have become strategic assets.
Critical minerals have become geopolitical leverage.
Middle powers increasingly seek room to manoeuvre rather than choosing permanent allegiance to one bloc or another.
Indonesia is hardly unique in adapting to that reality.
What would be unfortunate, however, is if recognising those changes became confused with unquestioning acceptance of every policy undertaken in their name. Democracies are healthiest when they permit citizens to support the destination while arguing over the route. Believing Indonesia should become more prosperous, more influential and more strategically independent does not automatically answer the complicated question of how best to achieve those ambitions.
Funny Thing About Confidence...
There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, and it has little to do with one particular speech or even one particular President. The question is why governments, particularly those that perceive themselves to be entering a new chapter of national development, become so tempted to frame criticism as evidence of something more sinister.
Countries that grow in economic strength or geopolitical importance often undergo a psychological transition. They stop asking whether they deserve a place at the top table and begin asking why everyone else hasn’t noticed that they are already sitting there. The conversation shifts from seeking approval to demanding respect. It is an entirely understandable evolution. Nations, like people, develop a sense of identity, and identity inevitably shapes how criticism is received.
A government embarking upon an ambitious national project naturally wishes to cultivate optimism. It wants investors to believe, citizens to believe, and perhaps most importantly, it wants to believe itself. Long-term industrial strategies, strategic autonomy and nation-building require public confidence because they ask societies to endure short-term uncertainty in pursuit of longer-term gains. It is hardly surprising that leaders become frustrated when every announcement is greeted with predictions of imminent collapse or declarations that the country is somehow heading in entirely the wrong direction.
That frustration is understandable.
However, once criticism becomes evidence of disloyalty, governments acquire a convenient superpower. Every uncomfortable question may simply be dismissed by questioning the motives of the person asking it. Unfortunately, reality has never shown much interest in participating in that arrangement.
Inflation ignores patriotism.
Bond markets remain indifferent to nationalist rhetoric.
Economic outcomes continue to be measured by arithmetic.
History offers no shortage of examples.
India periodically rediscovers the label of the “anti-national”.
China frequently attributes uncomfortable narratives to “foreign forces”.
Russia has institutionalised the language of “foreign agents”.
Turkey has often framed criticism through the prism of external conspiracies.
Even the United States has spent much of the last decade arguing over who qualifies as “un-American”, while political opponents have cheerfully accused one another of being “enemies of the people”. Apparently no nation, however powerful, is entirely immune from the seductive appeal of explaining criticism by questioning the critic rather than confronting the criticism.
The irony is that truly confident countries rarely demand unanimous enthusiasm because they understand that disagreement is not necessarily evidence of weakness. Quite the opposite. One of the defining characteristics of mature democracies is their ability to accommodate competing ideas without assuming that every dissenting voice is secretly taking instructions from somewhere else. Confidence is demonstrated by the ability to withstand criticism.
None of this is to suggest that foreign influence never exists. It does. Governments, corporations, media organisations, advocacy groups and intelligence agencies have attempted to shape political narratives beyond their borders for as long as politics has existed.
The mistake is in assuming that because some criticism may be externally motivated, all criticism therefore becomes suspect.
Nations become influential precisely because they are willing to chart their own course. Yet the more confident they become in choosing that course, the more important it becomes that they preserve the very institutions willing to question whether they are still heading in the right direction.
So... Am I One?
Having spent several years writing about Indonesia, I suppose I should probably ask the obvious question.
Am I one?
It’s an unsettling thought. I have:
Written enthusiastically about Indonesia’s economic resilience,
Admired its remarkable recovery since the Asian Financial Crisis,
Argued that it is increasingly becoming one of the world’s more consequential middle powers, and
Suggested that its downstream industrial ambitions may ultimately reshape regional manufacturing.
I have also:
Questioned fiscal assumptions,
Examined demographic challenges,
Wondered aloud whether particular policies will deliver what their architects promise, and
Pointed out that governments are capable of making decisions which, with the benefit of hindsight, may not age especially well.
This is generally known as analysis.
It is not, despite recent suggestions to the contrary, an undercover operation on behalf of the Dutch East India Company.
The consequence of labels such as londo ireng is that they gradually cease to describe a specific type of behaviour and begin describing a state of disagreement.
Yesterday’s collaborator becomes today’s sceptic.
Today’s sceptic becomes tomorrow’s economist.
Before long, anybody asking for a second set of assumptions in the budget forecast begins attracting curious glances, as though requesting additional sensitivity analysis were somehow the first stage of recolonisation.
There is an important distinction here that is worth preserving.
Analysis is not advocacy.
Questioning is not sabotage.
Thinking is not disloyalty.
Indeed, one might even argue that the opposite is true. Countries worthy of serious analysis are precisely those important enough to deserve it. Nobody spends thousands of words examining the long-term industrial strategy of countries they regard as irrelevant. Scrutiny, if anything, is a compliment. It suggests that what Indonesia chooses to do increasingly matters: to Indonesians, to investors, to neighbouring countries and the wider international community.
If asking balanced questions about public policy is sufficient to qualify as a Black Dutchman, then the definition has expanded so dramatically that it eventually risks including anyone who has ever opened a spreadsheet.
Which would certainly make next year’s economics conference considerably more interesting.
Perhaps the revival of londo ireng ultimately tells us something important, although not necessarily about the people to whom the label has been attached.
It tells us that Indonesia is changing.
The country is becoming more economically ambitious, more strategically assertive and more comfortable articulating its own vision of national development without waiting for external validation. Whether that vision centres on downstream industrialisation, food security, resource nationalism, strategic autonomy or a more multipolar foreign policy is, in many respects, a matter for Indonesian voters to decide. That is, after all, the entire point of democracy. Elections are not ceremonial endorsements of continuity. They are mechanisms through which societies choose different priorities, different leaders and occasionally entirely different directions.
But democracy does not end once the votes have been counted.
It requires:
Critics as well as supporters,
Journalists alongside ministers,
Researchers alongside policymakers, and
Opposition voices alongside governing ones.
Not because criticism is inherently virtuous, nor because governments are inherently mistaken, but because every administration, benefits from institutions willing to ask awkward questions. History suggests that governments become most vulnerable not when confronted by critics, but when surrounded exclusively by admirers.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of londo ireng. The original Black Dutchmen served a foreign empire. Today’s journalists, economists, researchers and commentators are not arguing about whether Indonesia should have a future, they are arguing about what kind of future it should have. Those are profoundly different conversations.
Confusing the two may make for an effective political slogan. History, however, has an unfortunate habit of suggesting that it rarely makes for particularly good governance.
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