Multatuli

Eduard Douwes Dekker, better known by the pen name Multatuli, was a Dutch writer of the nineteenth century. Born in Amsterdam in 1820, he is today regarded as one of the Netherlands' greatest authors, above all for his satirical novel Max Havelaar (1860), which exposes the abuses of Dutch colonial rule in the Dutch East Indies, today's Indonesia. The pen name comes from a Latin phrase, multa tulī, meaning roughly 'I have suffered much'. He used it to refer both to himself and to the victims of the injustices he had witnessed.

He came from a Mennonite family; his father was a sea captain. After a limited schooling, he went to work young, and in 1838 he sailed to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. Over the following two decades he held a series of posts in the colonial administration, though he disliked financial work. In 1843 he was made comptroller in Natal, on the west coast of Sumatra, where a deficit in the accounts, partly linked to his own ambitious plans, brought a sharp reprimand from General Andreas Victor Michiels. The insult wounded him deeply. Later postings took him to Menado, Ambon and Lebak. In Lebak, in the late 1850s, he began to protest openly against the colonial system, and he resigned and returned to Europe.

Back in the Netherlands he turned to writing in order to expose what he had seen. Max Havelaar appeared in 1860 and caused a scandal: Dutch society reacted with outrage and questioned his testimony, yet the book circulated widely across Europe. His output afterwards was large and varied, including satires, the fictitious letters of Minnebrieven (1861), and the long series of volumes called Ideën, seven of which appeared between 1862 and 1877. His style is biting, ironic and combative, with a strong vein of social, political and religious criticism. He also tried his hand at the theatre, and one of his plays, The School for Princes, was a notable success when it was finally staged.

His private life was unsettled. Gambling debts and money problems followed him for much of his adult life, and he separated from his wife, Tine van Wijnbergen, with whom he had two children. He stopped writing abruptly in 1877, settled in Germany near Mainz, and died there in 1887.

His legacy is considerable. Sigmund Freud counted him among his favourite writers, and in 2002 the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde named him the most important Dutch writer of all time. Max Havelaar is still read as one of the great indictments of colonialism, and his memory is kept alive by museums in Amsterdam and in Indonesia.