![]() ![]() But his grades are poor, and he is expelled from medical school. They marry, and when Mei dies after a severe bout of malaria, Minke forms an embryonic nationalist organization. Still drawn to politics, he meets beautiful Mei, who is working to establish Chinese self-help organizations in the Indies and urges him to do something substantive for his people as well as become a doctor. Minke soon realizes he is not cut out to be a doctor-especially a native one, who must work for the colonial rulers at a fixed low rate. There he is expected to wear indigenous, not European, dress: The Dutch colonial powers in the early 1900s are as ethnically doctrinaire as their Afrikaner cousins in South Africa. ![]() Minke, the series' protagonist, who has dabbled in journalism while wanting to become a doctor, is finally accepted at the medical school for ``natives'' in Batavia. Also like its predecessors, unfortunately, it is a clumsy mix of earnest political reportage and often lyrical personal detail. Like Toer's previous books, Footsteps was first composed orally while the author was a political prisoner he remains under house arrest in Jakarta, and his books are banned in Indonesia. From noted Indonesian dissident Toer (Child of All Nations, 1993, etc.), the third novel in an ambitious but flawed quartet continues the story of Javanese patriot Minke, who now takes up the anticolonial fight in earnest. ![]()
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