APART HATE: HOW TREVOR NOAH MADE ME SEE INDONESIA by Kanti W. Janis, Indonesian writer, constitutional lawyer, and politician; Chair and Presidium Member of the Indonesian Women in Politics Caucus (KPPI). Written exclusively for SYFS – decolonise.scot

Editor’s Introduction

Kanti W. Janis is an Indonesian constitutional lawyer, acclaimed author, and political leader whose work bridges constitutional litigation, democratic governance, and anti-extractivist community defense. Emerging from a prominent anticolonial family of independence freedom fighters, Janis writes as a dedicated decolonial jurist embedded in the foundational traditions of Afro-Asian internationalism.

She writes from Indonesia; a global giant, the 4^th most populous nation on earth, a leading member of the G20, and the institutional capital of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the ten-nation regional bloc established to maintain regional peace, economic integration, and sovereignty free from outside interference). It was Indonesia, under the visionary leadership of President Sukarno, that convened the historic 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung; uniting twenty-nine newly sovereign states to repudiate colonialism in all its manifestations; and subsequently co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to establish a powerful, independent geopolitical bloc dedicated to universal self-determination and mutual sovereignty outside Cold War superpower hegemony.

In this essay, Janis engages with South African comedian Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016) to dissect the institutional anatomy of apartheid: racism as a coercive state architecture, language as the ultimate frontier of national sovereignty, and the unbroken solidarity binding colonized peoples across continents. We present her insights here not only because every structural mechanism she illuminates in Indonesia speaks with surgical precision to the colonial condition, linguistic subjection, and ongoing constitutional and anti-colonial struggle of Scotland against the English colonial state, but because we stand unequivocally committed to the universal project of global decolonisation. True anti-colonial solidarity requires listening across borders and learning directly from the peoples and traditions who have already broken an empire's hold. Scotland’s path to national liberation is neither isolated nor exceptional; it belongs to the worldwide struggle for self-determination, human dignity, and the dismantling of colonial hegemony in all its forms.

For readers interested in exploring these structural connections further, an optional editorial commentary follows this important essay; examining the global imperial machinery and why Trevor Noah so instinctively named Scotland as an annexed, colonised nation on international television during the World Cup.

APART HATE: HOW TREVOR NOAH MADE ME SEE INDONESIA

by Kanti W. Janis, Indonesian writer, constitutional lawyer, and politician; Chair of the Indonesian Women in Politics Caucus (KPPI)

Through his book Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016), Trevor Noah made me understand what racism actually means. Racism is not merely mockery about the colour of someone's skin. Racism is a system in which a group of human beings is not counted as human because of the identity they were born into. They are regarded as only slightly more useful than animals.

The book is his own memoir; Noah being one of the best-known comedians in Hollywood today, and four-time host of the Academy Awards. I had not expected to rate it among the finest memoirs I have read, in content and in craft alike. It is very rare for me not to want to miss a single word of a book; usually, once I can see where a story is going, I skip ahead to the next sentence. This time was different. I was able to savour every word of this English-language book. I suffered while it was unfinished; I looked forward to any spare hour in which I could read it undisturbed.

There is a great deal to be learned from this memoir. What it contains is far larger than the life story of one Trevor, who was only thirty-two when he published it. He does not include so much as a fragment about how he broke into Hollywood out of the extreme poverty he had lived in; poverty that was ninety per cent the product of apartheid. This is not remotely a rags-to-riches story; it is nowhere near that cliché. Trevor seems not to consider that part important. The attitude appears to be inherited from his mother. As he has said in several interviews, Patricia Noah took no interest whatever in her son's glittering life in the United States. None. He was raised with that mentality, by a formidable woman.

For me, this memoir is really a biography of Patricia, and a tremendous one. If I had to choose between filming Trevor's story or Patricia's, I would choose Patricia's without hesitation.

Trevor was born ten years before apartheid ended. His birth was deemed illegal, because the law of the country forbade marriage and sexual relations between Black and white people. His mother was Black, of the Xhosa people; his father was Swiss of German descent.

He opens with the apartheid system itself: apart hate. And that is exactly what it was: you separate a society into its various groups, then you make them hate one another, so that you can control them. That single sentence is enough to picture what kind of system apartheid was. A people divided by race and ethnicity in order to hate each other.

Sound familiar? Of course. For Indonesians, systems of racial separation are nothing new.¹ Reading Trevor's book, I realised how much our fate and that of the South African people have in common. Both formerly colonised peoples, both still carrying the post-colonial mentality.

Perhaps Indonesia is a little better off. At least we have a new language as our unifier, rather than a language left behind by the coloniser.² It was only later that I fully understood how important a unifying language is, one that is also new, for a new state of many ethnicities and races.

We have not gone through what India has gone through, where to this day there is still widespread resistance to Hindi as the official national language. That is why Indians of different ethnicities would sometimes rather converse in English, the language of their former colonisers, than concede to using another ethnic group's mother tongue.

In this book, Trevor also writes about how important language is in uniting different communities. Throughout his life he was saved repeatedly by being a polyglot, and by being coloured; in South Africa, a child of mixed race is called a coloured person.

The seeds of apartheid were sown by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as well.³ In the seventeenth century they arrived in South Africa. Precisely the same pattern: first trade, then in time colonisation, the massacre of the indigenous people, and the building of a branch kingdom.

During the period of Dutch occupation, many of their slaves and prisoners of war from other colonies were shipped to the Cape of Good Hope, the largest number of them from the Dutch East Indies. Among them was Arya Mangkunegara, father of Prince Sambernyawa.⁴ So do not be surprised to see people in many African countries wearing cloth identical to batik.⁵

Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, the English came, and the Dutch lost. The Netherlands surrendered its government of the Cape to England finally in 1814.⁶ Now, although the Dutch were no longer the rulers, the descendants of the Dutch colonisers stayed on in South Africa. They called themselves the Afrikaner community. They regarded themselves as a new nation with a right to live and to rule there.

This Afrikaner group launched a resistance against the English, through the Boer War. And here is a great irony: an Indonesian national hero, Danudirja Setiabudi, better known as E. F. E. Douwes Dekker, before Indonesian independence, deliberately sailed for months from the Dutch East Indies with his two younger brothers to the Cape of Good Hope, to volunteer with the Afrikaner community and take part in the war against the English colonisers.⁷ On his return, Setiabudi carried back a great many lessons about how to free Indonesians from the grip of Dutch colonial rule.

How does it go round like that?

Although the Afrikaners did not win the Boer War, the English colonial government eventually offered these descendants of Dutch colonisers a place in the administration. And what became of Black people? They simply remained slaves.

In 1948, the Afrikaners' National Party won the elections. Of course they won; Black people were barred from voting. Absurd, isn't it? Then in 1961, by way of a referendum in which Black people again had no part, South Africa became independent of the English Crown and became the Republic of South Africa.

And this party of the descendants of Dutch colonisers, having taken its seat as the official government, set up a special commission to study institutionalised systems of racism in the various countries that practised them; that is, in the Netherlands, in Australia, and in America. They studied which systems had failed and which had succeeded.

It is sickening. Had Indonesia not been independent by 1945, they would certainly have come to Indonesia. But we had already achieved our independence, so they went to the Netherlands to study the failures of the racial system there instead. The material gathered by that special commission was then worked up by the South African government to create the most sophisticated system of racial oppression that has ever existed on the face of the earth. The principal aim of apartheid was to make South Africa a country for white people.

There is no reviewing this book briefly. The absurdity of apartheid is a subject that would take far more space than I have here, and I have not even reached the half of it. Oh, and how alike Indonesians and South Africans are: the same inferiority before Europeans; the same education system that produces machines.

There is one line of Trevor's, outside the theme of apartheid, that struck me particularly: that nobody actually aims to become rich, they want to have choices; and if you are poor, you have no choices. A person whose money is limited has to decide whether today they eat vegetables with rice, or chicken without rice. Someone with more money can have rice, vegetables, and chicken, and drink wine besides. The more money, the more choices become available, until sometimes the choices that appear are entirely irrational.

The book closes with a miracle. Patricia Noah was shot in the head at close range by her ex-husband, Trevor's stepfather. The bullet missed her vital organs; it merely passed through. She was rushed to hospital, and within seven days that woman of steel was back at work.

When I hear the stories of so many women, and of mothers especially, I do not understand where the narrative came from that women are weak, that women are less intelligent than men, that women are passive and cannot lead; and that such a narrative is still accepted as the common view. I have heard, read, and seen far too much of the strength of women. Look at our mothers, our grandmothers, the women around us. They are human beings who will do absolutely anything for the people they love. Kepala jadi kaki, kaki jadi kepala. Head becomes foot, foot becomes head.

Book reviewed: Noah, Trevor (2016). Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. New York: Spiegel & Grau / London: John Murray.

Notes

1. Under Dutch colonial rule (Wet op de Staatsinrichting van Nederlandsch-Indië), the population of the Netherlands East Indies was strictly segregated into three legal racial castes: Europeans (Europeanen), "Foreign Orientals" (Vreemde Oosterlingen, chiefly Chinese and Arabs), and indigenous "Natives" (Inlanders); each subject to separate legal jurisdictions, civic rights, and residency restrictions.

2. Bahasa Indonesia was formally adopted by the nationalist youth movement during the historic Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda) on 28 October 1928, seventeen years before independence. It was a standardized development of Malay, the maritime trade lingua franca of the archipelago, deliberately chosen over the majority Javanese language to avoid ethnic hegemony and unify hundreds of distinct linguistic groups.

3. The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) was chartered in 1602. In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established the VOC victualling station at the Cape of Good Hope to service Dutch ships traveling between Europe and Batavia (modern Jakarta), initiating the Dutch colonial presence in southern Africa.

4. Prince Arya Mangkunegara was a Javanese royal of the Mataram Dynasty exiled to Ceylon and later to the Cape of Good Hope by the VOC in the 1730s. His son, Raden Mas Said (Pangeran Sambernyawa), waged a sixteen-year guerrilla war against Dutch forces, leading to the establishment of the Mangkunegaran princely state in 1757. The author, Kanti W. Janis, is a direct descendant of this lineage.

5. Batik, the traditional Indonesian wax-resist fabric dyeing technique, was introduced to southern Africa both through exiled Southeast Asian political prisoners (the Cape Malay community) and 19th-century maritime trade routes. Its influence became deeply embedded in African textile culture, culminating in Nelson Mandela's iconic "Madiba shirts", which were custom-made from traditional Indonesian batik presented to him by the Indonesian government after his release from prison. Mandela wore them every day.

6. Under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1814), the Netherlands formally ceded sovereign control of the Cape Colony to Great Britain following the Napoleonic Wars.

7. Danudirja Setiabudi (Ernest Douwes Dekker, 1879-1950), grand-nephew of Eduard Douwes Dekker (author of the anti-colonial masterpiece Max Havelaar), volunteered on the Boer side during the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Captured by the English, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ceylon before returning to Java, where he co-founded the Indische Partij in 1912; the first political organization to openly advocate complete independence from Dutch rule.

OPTIONAL EDITORIAL COMMENTARY

Ms Janis wrote the essay above exclusively for Still Yours For Scotland - decolonise.scot, examining a South African memoir from her own vantage in Indonesia. She was given complete freedom of focus and makes no mention of Scotland anywhere in it. That is precisely why we wanted it.

What follows is not a commentary on her argument, which stands complete and formidable on its own terms. It’s an account of why a Scottish decolonisation blog commissioned an Indonesian constitutional jurist and political leader to write on Born a Crime by South African Trevor Noah; and a mapping of the structural mechanisms, archival resonances, and shared colonial architecture that connect the Java Sea to the Cape of Good Hope and the Firth of Forth.

She Is Naming Her Own Family

Read again the passage where she describes the Dutch East India Company (VOC) deporting enslaved persons and political prisoners of war from the East Indies to the Cape of Good Hope, naming Arya Mangkunegara among them.

Kanti W. Janis is a royal of the Mangkunegaran dynasty of Surakarta and a direct descendant of Mangkunegara VI. Arya Mangkunegara was her own direct ancestor, exiled into the Dutch maritime penal network in the 1730s; his son, Raden Mas Said (Pangeran Sambernyawa), waged a sixteen-year guerrilla war against Dutch colonial forces before compelling the colonial power to recognize his sovereign princely house in 1757. She mentions him in a passing subordinate clause as a historical illustration, moving on without fanfare.

The lineage continues into the 20th-century anti-imperial war. Her grandfather, General Yonosewoyo, commanded the Tentara Keamanan Rakyat (People's Security Army) in the fierce urban defence during the Battle of Surabaya in November 1945; the crucible in which Indonesian sovereign independence was defended against English imperial divisions, marked annually as Indonesia's National Heroes' Day (Hari Pahlawan). Her father was the distinguished democratic reformist politician Roy B. B. Janis.

When she writes of families crossing oceans to resist imperial conquest, she is writing from within a dynastic line that has spent three centuries fighting it. But Janis does not merely inherit history; she practices its modern legal and political defense:

In constitutional and environmental litigation: An international jurist trained at Atma Jaya, with an LL.M. in public international law and international organisations from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, she has litigated landmark constitutional challenges before Indonesia’s Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi), including the successful review of Law No. 17 of 2014. As founder and partner of Robean-Janis & Associates, she has stood as counsel for indigenous and rural communities fighting corporate and state extractivism; defending the karst ecosystems of the Sedulur Sikep Samin farmers in Kendeng, safeguarding the islanders of Save Sangihe against gold mining concessions, and litigating customary land rights in Rantau Bakula.

In national democratic governance: She served as Head of Secretariat in the Office of the Presidential Special Staff (2016–2019) and has sat since 2016 on the Central Research Board of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the political party rooted in President Sukarno’s anticolonial doctrine. Leading from the forefront of political equality, she serves as Chair and Presidium Member of the Indonesian Women in Politics Caucus (KPPI) and directed the Women's Empowerment Directorate for the national presidential campaign team in 2023–2024.

In literature and cultural sovereignty: A novelist nominated for the prestigious Khatulistiwa Literary Award and an alumnus of the University of Oxford’s creative writing programme, Janis understands narrative as a terrain of struggle. As Chairperson of the Indonesian Writers Cooperative and founder of the Baca Di Tebet public library and cultural salon in Jakarta, her policy advocacy successfully secured statutory tax protections and intellectual property classifications for Indonesian authors.

Whether litigating before the Constitutional Court against extractive corporate power, leading the political mobilization of women across the archipelago, or building independent literary institutions, Kanti W. Janis operates as an authentic modern embodiment of the anti-colonial Bandung tradition. When she examines a colonial empire, she examines it with the sharp, forensic eye of someone whose family has spent generations breaking its machinery.

A Colonised Scotswoman on the Indonesian Revolutionary Airwaves

In the autumn of 1945, the English colonial state was the overt, armed enemy of the young Republic of Indonesia. Operating under an Allied mandate, English imperial commanders moved decisively to extinguish Indonesian sovereignty and enforce European imperial control. The resulting assault on Surabaya was an act of overwhelming colonial violence. Royal Navy warships in the Madura Strait laid down punitive coastal bombardments, RAF Thunderbolts and Mosquitoes launched indiscriminate airstrikes on urban neighborhoods, and heavy tank divisions leveled entire districts. Tens of thousands of Indonesian defenders and civilians were killed in a matter of weeks as the English colonial army attempted to bludgeon the republican movement into submission.

In the very weeks of November 1945 that General Yonosewoyo’s republican units were fighting street by street against English forces, the English-language radio voice broadcasting the Indonesian Revolution to the world, smashing the English military information blockade, was K’tut Tantri, known across global newsrooms as Surabaya Sue.

Her birth name was Muriel Stuart Walker, born and raised in Glasgow; she adopted the name K’tut Tantri after being formally adopted into the royal household of Anak Agung Nura, the Prince of Bangli in Bali. She had sided with the colonised people against the Dutch and English colonisers.

K’tut Tantri was herself a daughter of a colonised Scottish nation, a woman whose historical memory carried the realities of peripheral subjugation, cultural displacement, and colonial metropolitan domination. That indigenous, anti-colonial consciousness explains why she instinctively rejected the colonial machine of her birth, identified completely with the Indonesian struggle, and threw her lot in with the republican revolution.

A Glasgow woman sitting behind a clandestine microphone in East Java denouncing the imperial violence of the English Crown, while a Javanese general commanded the anti-colonial frontline against English troops in the streets below. Two individuals from nations subject to the same metropolitan center, meeting in the same theater of conflict, standing in active solidarity against the exact same colonial apparatus. This is not an archival curiosity, but the living reality of global anti-colonial resistance.

Kok Muter Gitu, Ya? The Transnational Circulation of Colonial Practice

A striking moment in Janis’s essay is her sudden exclamation of astonishment: Kok muter gitu, ya? How does it go round like that?

She traces Danudirja Setiabudi (E. F. E. Douwes Dekker) sailing from Java to the Cape of Good Hope to volunteer alongside the Afrikaners in the Boer War against the English, returning with operational methods he would later deploy against the Dutch to found Indonesia's first pro-independence political party (Indische Partij). Techniques of resistance circulate across borders; and so do techniques of imperial, colonial domination. As Janis highlights, the South African apartheid regime dispatched a formal commission abroad to inspect and synthesize the institutionalized racial segregation models of the Netherlands, Australia, and the United States.

European colonialism, and English imperial expansion in particular, operated as a standardized transnational apparatus whose coercive doctrines were field-tested on the Celtic periphery before being deployed across the globe. From the post-Culloden martial terror, Highland Clearances, and engineered famine of the 1840s to statutory linguicide against Scots Gaelic, Scotland served alongside Ireland as a primary domestic laboratory for counter-insurgency, asset-stripping, and asymmetric incorporation; prefiguring the Alien Act mechanics reused in Ireland in 1800 and the corporate fiscal extraction codified in Bengal in 1765. These identical doctrines reached directly into the Indonesian archipelago; from the 1811-1816 English occupation of Java under Raffles to the autumn of 1945, when English colonial forces unleashed naval bombardments, airstrikes, and tank divisions in the Battle of Surabaya in a brutal bid to crush the newly proclaimed Republic and restore European imperial subjugation.

Janis, looking out from Indonesia, witnesses the exact same imperial/colonial wheel turning. Her colloquial question, How does it go round like that?, captures the structural reality of the global colonial continuum with surgical clarity.

Racism as Institutional Architecture

In her opening sentences, Janis establishes a foundational principle of decolonial critique. Racism is not individual prejudice or interpersonal insult but a statutory, systemic architecture designed to categorize a targeted population as sub-human, stripping them of juridical agency in order to facilitate territorial and economic extraction.

This structural definition cuts to the heart of the Scottish condition. In 1616, the Privy Council explicitly codified Gaelic in statutory decrees as "one of the cheif and principall causes of the barbaritie and incivilitie of the inhabitantis of the Heylandis and Ilis"; a diagnostic racialization crafted to legitimize English colonization and linguistic erasure. Scotophobia was clear. The Act of Proscription 1746 criminalized an indigenous society's national dress, weapons, and music under penalty of forced overseas transportation. As the sociologist Robbie McVeigh demonstrated in his analysis of the English state, the colonial Union was a racialized project from its inception, engineering a rigid constitutional hierarchy through the supremacy of the English language, English common law, and the Anglican establishment.

Janis arrives at this systemic conclusion through Trevor Noah’s revelation in Born a Crime that the architects of apartheid formally studied Jim Crow America, Australia’s reservations, and Dutch colonial rule to engineer South African segregation. Linking his account directly to the history of the Dutch East Indies, she shows how this architecture remains uniform across continents because it was drafted by the same imperial mindset.

Language as Sovereign Statecraft: The Lesson of Sumpah Pemuda

A profound constitutional lesson in Janis’s essay lies in her observation on language. She notes with justifiable pride that Indonesia established a newly standardized national language as its unifier, rather than adopting the tongue of its Dutch colonizer.

This was a masterclass in decolonial statecraft. At the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda) of 28 October 1928, seventeen years before the declaration of independence, the Indonesian anti-colonial movement consciously rejected Javanese (the language of the demographic majority) to avoid imposing internal ethnic hegemony. Instead, they adopted and standardized Malay, the egalitarian maritime trade lingua franca of the archipelago, transforming it into Bahasa Indonesia: a shared national medium that belonged equally to all ethnicities and was bound to no pre-existing feudal hierarchy.

Consequently, an archipelagic nation of seventeen thousand islands and over seven hundred indigenous languages conducts its democratic discourse and constitutional jurisprudence in an indigenous medium that is not the language of the colonizer.

Compare this to Scotland. Scotland possessed two historic national languages, Scots Gaelic (Gàidhlig) and Scots, and suffered the systematic epistemic suppression of both. Under English domination and pressure, Gaelic was reframed as foreign (Erse) and barbarous long before the penal statutes of the 18th century sought its eradication. Scots was never formally proscribed; it was demoted within the colonial education system to "slang", "vulgar dialect", or grammatical error; an insidious form of epistemicide that leaves no statute to repeal, convincing the colonized population that their native tongue is an intellectual deficiency.

Today, the Scottish body politic debates its own constitutional future almost entirely within the linguistic framing and legal vocabulary of the colonial state that annexed and colonised it.

The Subconscious Imperial Geography: Kerajaan Inggris

There is an unintended linguistic artifact within Bahasa Indonesia itself that illustrates the global scale of English colonial narrative control.

In Bahasa Indonesia, the term Inggris (derived from the Portuguese Inglês) serves indiscriminately across everyday speech and official state vocabulary for England, Britain, the United Kingdom, and the English language: Kerajaan Inggris (the English/British Kingdom), Bahasa Inggris (the English language). The distinct sovereign and constitutional existence of Scotland, Wales, or Ireland is largely extinguished in the vernacular and institutional lexicon by this totalizing shorthand.

This erasure was neither accidental nor confined to Indonesia. As documented in our wider research on global linguistic erasure, the English colonial diplomatic corps and Foreign Office systematically projected this metropolitan nomenclature across the world for centuries; naming Scotland out of constitutional existence for over three billion people across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. By establishing "English" as the universal proxy for the Anglo-British state, the London metropole extracted and weaponized Scotland’s human, military, and economic resources while completely absorbing its distinct national identity into an English imperial core.

A nation like Indonesia (or at least its truly anti-colonial citizens), which recognized at the Sumpah Pemuda in 1928 that naming is the ultimate act of sovereignty, will instinctively understand how state-sanctioned semantic erasure operates as a primary instrument of colonisation and empire.

The Geopolitical Horizon: From Bandung 1955 to the UN Docket

It is vital to state clearly the geopolitical stature of the nation from which Janis writes.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, the largest archipelagic state on earth, a leading member of the G20, a member of BRICS Plus, and the institutional home of the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta. Long before European merchant-capital penetrated Southeast Asia, the thalassocracies of Srivijaya and Majapahit commanded global maritime trade routes that colonial historiography deliberately obscured.

Crucially, it was Indonesia that convened the historic Asia-Africa Conference at Bandung in 1955, gathering twenty-nine newly sovereign nations and liberation movements notably from North Africa to declare colonialism in all its manifestations an evil that must be eradicated. Bandung then helped give birth to the Non-Aligned Movement and established the international legal momentum that produced UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), the foundational charter of global decolonization.

The historic ties Janis notes between Indonesia and South Africa run directly through this anti-colonial lineage. Sheikh Yusuf of Makassar, exiled to the Cape by the VOC in 1694, established the first Muslim community in South Africa and is revered as a national hero in both republics. When Nelson Mandela made traditional Indonesian batik his signature attire on the world stage (the Madiba shirt), it was an explicit visual declaration of anti-colonial solidarity with the Southeast Asian archipelago whose sons and daughters had been shipped to the Cape in chains.

Kepala Jadi Kaki, Kaki Jadi Kepala: The Unwritten Women of the Resistance

Janis concludes her essay with the extraordinary resilience of Patricia Noah, surviving a bullet to the head and returning to work within a week, followed by an uncompromising refusal to accept the myth of female passivity.

Kepala jadi kaki, kaki jadi kepala. (Head becomes foot, foot becomes head: turning oneself upside down, working beyond endurance for the survival of the community.)

Every colonised society depends upon this female endurance while every imperial historiography systematically writes it out.

In Scotland, women stood at the center of the petitioning networks in 1706, signing their dissent in rural parish rolls against the colonial Treaty of Union. Following Culloden, Highland women bore the brunt of Hanoverian martial terror, scorched-earth starvation, and systematic sexual violence; testimony that the official military archive deliberately suppressed. In 1915, Mary Barbour and the working-class women of Glasgow organized the rent strikes that broke the wartime landlord cartels and forced the imperial state to capitulate.

Janis serves as Chair and Presidium member of the Indonesian Women in Politics Caucus (KPPI). She did not need to advertise her own leadership in her essay; her analysis speaks from the frontlines of feminist political assertion.

The Circle Closes: Trevor Noah at Foxborough

There is a striking geopolitical convergence that underscores the timeliness of this text.

During the 2026 World Cup taking place in the USA, Canada and Mexico, Trevor Noah, the subject of Janis’s review, was asked what possible connection could exist between the national teams of Scotland and Haiti. Without hesitation, Noah answered on USA television in the popular show Men In Blazers:

"In an arena where we talk about people who hate colonisers... that's probably an arena where the Scots and the Haitians would walk off the pitch and be like: Hey, what do you think of the British? What do you think of the French? Well, look at that. What do you think of the English? What do you think of the French? Oh, well, look, we got all of these connections. I think they have a lot more in common than people think." See the video on X.

A man born a crime under South African apartheid, speaking on a major international broadcast, identified Scotland as an annexed, colonised nation without blinking; correcting himself mid-sentence from "the British" to "the English", instantly stripping away the colonial veil of "Britishness" to name the true metropolitan English coloniser in a way most Scottish journalists still fail to do.

An Indonesian constitutional jurist reads Trevor Noah's memoir and sees the colonial anatomy of Indonesia. Noah looks at an international football fixture and recognizes the colonial status of Scotland. Published here on SYFS - decolonise.scot, the international decolonial circle closes.

We extend our deep gratitude to Kanti W. Janis for writing this exclusive essay for decolonise.scot. It stands as an enduring reminder that nations that have dismantled a colonial empire possess an instinctive ability to recognize an unrectified colonization elsewhere in the world.

Terima kasih.

Merdeka!

(Merdeka means freedom and is the Indonesian watchword of absolute national freedom and self-determination. It resonates with identical moral force across seven thousand miles. It directly echoes the ancestral cry of Scottish liberation embodied in the seal of Willelmus Filius Alani Walais (William Wallace, son of Alan Wallace), whose historic emblem anchors SYFS / decolonise.scot, and whose lifelong conviction was recorded in the timeless maxim: "Dico tibi verum, Libertas optima rerum" (Freedom is best, I tell thee true, of all things to be won). From the revolutionary frontline of Surabaya to the sovereign reclamation of Scotland, the demand of every colonised nation remains singular, unbroken, and indivisible: the total restoration of its liberty.)