In Memoriam DD, Daniel Dhakidae

Last week, Thursday 22 April, I had the rare experience of a succesful webinar. Elga Sarapung and Dian/Interfidei in Yogyakarta held a memorial for Daniel Dhakidae. DD was born on 22 August 1945, only five days after the declaration of Independence of Indonesia. He passed away on 6th April 2021. After a traditional youth (born in Ngada, Flores) of minor seminary in Mataloko, about 2,5 years of major seminary in Ledalero, he moved to UGM in Yogyakarta, where he obtained his BA in Ilmu Administrasi Negara: insight in the government administration, while he since then would work as support vor non-Governmental 0rganizations, NGO. First (1976-1984) he was with the journal Prisma and LP3ES, founded by Dawam Rahardjo (and also publisher of my doctoral dissertation on Pesantren). In the mid-1980s he moved to Cornell where he wrote a prize winning dissertation The State, the Rise of Capital and the fall of journalism in Indonesia where he argued that the Soeharto government  had killed the free press and it lively debate on the state of Indonesia, by its policy that only the New Order style of 'development' should be presented. After returning to Indonesia he became active in the newspaper Kompas as chief R&D, Litbang from 1995-2005.

The webinar was interreligious as usual with DIAN: opened by Machasin from UIN and Depag, anthropologist  Laksono had a nice story about Flores where the penjajah was absen and therefore people never feeled colonised. Noorhalis Majid from Banjarmasin,  Muhammad Taufik from Padang: the work of DD for Prisma (1975-1984) and Kompas (after his Cornell period).  Zakaria Ngelow from Makassar saw him as a cendekiawan with a social commitment. He was not a man of agama or the  bureaucracy of religion, but rather of personalised iman. All speakers had five minutes. Inevitably, I also had  to add something and I praised Ritapiret and Ledalero for  their cosmopolitan education, especially  the basis for classical and modern (Western!) languages.