Intellectuals and aristocrats were the earliest nationalists, the peasants have always accepted authority in Indonesian history, no matter whose. Diponegoro, the eldest son of a Javanese sultan, would have to be the first nationalist leader. In 1825, after the Dutch had built a road across his estate and committed various other abuses, he embarked on a holy war against them. The man was a masterful guerilla tactician, and both sides waged a costly war of attrition and scorched earth policy in which 15,000 Dutchmen and 250,000 Indonesians died, mostly from diseases. At one point during this war the Dutch even considered pulling out of Java. Diponegoro fought for 5 years until he was treacherously lured into negptiating and arrested.

His face is now on coins, and street signs and an Army Division are named after him. Certainly he's become the nationalists' most important symbol. But it was the daughter of a nobleman, Raden Kartini, who first expressed publicly in the beginning of this century the right of Indonesians to have the same access to knowledge and western ideas as Europeans had. Although filled with self-pity at being a pampered princess, her Letters written to a liberal Dutch couple and first published in 1911 were sensitive, visionary and full of fire. They cause people in both Europe and Asia to wake up to the new spirit that was in the air. Indonesians knew that something was in the wind for Asia when little Japan defeated the colossus Russia in 1905. Indonesia didn't pass completely into Dutch hands until 1911, and as soon as the Dutch got it altogether, they started to lose it. In the mistaken belief that to-know-us-is-tolove-us, Indonesians were sent to Holland for education, and by providing education for Indonesians, the Dutch had made themselves redundant.