Riding Si Jagur

What is the connection between the fall of Malacca to the Dutch in 1641 and the fertility of women in Jakarta?

Apparently one of the cannons captured by the Dutch from the Portuguese in Malacca was shipped to Jakarta ( then known as Batavia). This bronze cannon, affectionately known as Si Jagur has since then been surrounded by legends, and is regarded as a bit of a sacred object by the locals. Childless women used to sit astride the cannon, in the hope of boosting their fertility.

The cannon is a peculiar thing: one of its ends is sculptured into the shape of a clenched fist with a defiant thumb sticking out between the index and the middle finger (picture here). It is probably the combination of the cannon's phallic symbollism and this sexually suggestive gesture - frozen in time - which contributed to its reputation as a fertility relic.

Father Adolf Heuken's book Historical Sights of Jakarta describes an amusing anecdote about how a hopeful woman once brought her two daughters to the cannon. A year later she returned furious: only one of her daughters was pregnant - the unmarried one.

I once spent a morning trying to locate the cannon at Taman Fatahillah, in the old city of Jakarta. Though Si Jagur is well-described in every tourist guide, locating it wasn't as easy as I thought. We are told that it is situated North of the Fatahillah Square, in front of Cafe Batavia; but when one arrives at the Square, the supposedly popular landmark is not obviously evident. Only when one approaches the ramshackled stalls beside the Cafe selling tourist kitsch does one see the cannon, almost hidden by the pedlars' goods, sitting neglected like a fire hydrant.

I was glad to read a press report end of last year that Si Jagur was finally moved into the Jakarta History Museum compound - a fitting home for an object linked to so much history and legend.

I'm not sure if women still go to Taman Fatahillah to perform symbollic copulation with this giant bronze phallus. But I do know, south of the Square, in the heart of Kota, men flock to the many nightspots there to find women who would be willing to perform such acts for slightly more than a hundred thousand rupiah - without the symbollic fuss.