“For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn’t actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren’t backwards either. I had always been told, and even thought, that we were very stupid Indonesians who didn’t know what we were doing, trying to build a country without any education or resources,” she said. She was now almost forty years old. “We played our own sports, put on our own dances. This was really an awakening for us. It felt like this was what the
