If they want to move us, that’s OK.”Įchoing Suharto’s transmigration initiative, Widodo’s decision to move Indonesia’s capital from the overcrowded and rapidly sinking Jakarta is aimed in part at spurring growth beyond Java, especially in the eastern parts of the archipelago.
“All of this area will be demolished for road expansion for the new capital, I heard,” she said, referring to the handful of shops, houses and rice fields lining the road. Mongabay interviewed Darna in October 2022, while she took a break from serving diners at her food stall along the main road in Sepaku. In August 2019, President Joko Widodo announced that Darna’s hometown of Sepaku in North Penajam Paser district, East Kalimantan province, would become the core zone of Indonesia’s new capital city, Nusantara.
Nearly 50 years later, Darna now faces the possibility of having to relocate her own family as part of another presidential initiative aimed at transforming Indonesian Borneo. They were among the tens of thousands of families who participated in then-president Suharto’s transmigration program, which aimed to ease crowding in Java by offering free tracts of land in other islands, less populated and developed, across the archipelago. In 1977, when Darna was about 8 years old, her family moved from Indonesia’s central island of Java to Borneo, its largest.
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