Bland offers his short book as ‘the first English-language political biography’ of Jokowi. As such, however, it is marred by errors and omissions. Bland, from the outset, refers to Jokowi as a ‘small-town politician’ or ‘small-town businessman’, presumably to stress his outsider status in Indonesian politics. Only on page thirty-one does he correctly describe Solo, Jokowi’s birthplace in Central Java, as a city of 500,000. Solo is in fact one of the most prestigious cities in Indonesia. It is not a ‘small town’, and Jokowi was not a ‘small-town politician’.

Lucy and Malcolm Turnbull, Joko Widodo, and Iriana at the State Palace in Jakarta for a bilateral meeting in 2015 (DFAT/Timothy Tobing/Wikimedia Commons)

Six out of Indonesia’s seven presidents have been Javanese. The Javanese have thus had a virtual monopoly on the presidency. Jokowi was socio-economically underprivileged but not ethnically so. The only non-Javanese president was B.J. Habibie who, as vice-president, succeeded Suharto automatically on the latter’s resignation in 1998. Bland’s claim that Habibie was ‘appointed as an interim president’ shows some ignorance of Indonesia’s constitution. Habibie’s presidency was short-lived (1998–99), not interim, and it was Suharto alone who made Habibie’s political career.

Bland stresses Jokowi’s ‘obscure’ roots, but he adds to the obscurity by not hunting down a lot of relevant data. Jokowi was born in 1961 as the son of a ‘petty bamboo hawker’, Notomiharjo, who managed to set up a furniture workshop. We are given Jokowi’s father’s name but not his mother’s. Bland is incurious and uninformative about all the women around Jokowi, saying nothing about his three sisters and only mentioning his wife, Iriana, when she is already pregnant. We do not learn about her background, nor when they could afford to marry.

As it happens, Solonese women are widely seen in Indonesia as capable, even feisty, and are reputed to be especially gifted at handling money. Tien, the wife of Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, notoriously earned the nickname ‘Madam Ten Percent’ from the commissions paid to her. Iriana makes only two cameo appearances in the book. Whereas her predecessor as First Lady, Yudhoyono’s wife, Ani, played a leading, if background, role in his presidency, we get no glimpse of Iriana in the presidential palace. Any purported biography of an Indonesian president should include at least a paragraph on his or her spouse.

Although Bland visited Jokowi’s furniture factory in Solo, he did not search for any former residence of his subject and fails to mention any school that Jokowi attended. On leaving high school, Jokowi surprisingly enrolled at one of Indonesia’s three top universities, Gadjah Mada, to study forestry. This was a good outcome for a former bamboo-hawker’s son.

Drawing uncritically upon Jokowi’s ghost-written autobiography, Bland stresses Jokowi’s economically deprived ‘backstory’. Yet, ten years after setting up a furniture company in 1989 and then beginning to attend international furniture expositions, Jokowi was wealthy enough to have his three children educated in Singapore. This was, in effect, Jokowi’s down payment on his entry into Indonesia’s national élite. Bland never seems to have asked Jokowi why he, a nationalist, chose to send them abroad. This was, as Bland notes, ‘a luxury beyond the dreams of most Indonesians’.

Jokowi made a further down payment in 2007 when an old school friend introduced him to his boss, Luhut Pandjaitan, a retired army general, former ambassador to Singapore, and minister for trade, who had extensive lumber assets. They became business partners and Luhut turned eventually into Jokowi’s right-hand man. He was probably Jokowi’s first contact who was well acquainted with national politics. As Bland almost never quotes his sources by name, we cannot say whether he interviewed Luhut. Yet Luhut’s views on Jokowi would be invaluable.

Once Jokowi was president, at some point an unnamed minister described him to Bland as ‘a bundle of contradictions’. This seems to have inspired Bland’s choice of title. Readers are likely to differ in how helpful they find this. Does this label usefully distinguish Jokowi from other national leaders, let alone human beings in general? Richard Nixon, for example, discussed diplomatic grand strategy with Mao but also oversaw a sordid burglary cover-up in Washington. Moreover, by looking only cursorily at Jokowi’s childhood and youth, Bland cannot tell us whether his alleged contradictions emerged at an early age. Here, some of Jokowi’s former fellow students at Gadjah Mada, or indeed some of his childhood acquaintances, might have shed some light. Did any of them see him as a young man of contradictions?

Without such data, it is reasonable to conclude that Jokowi’s ‘contradictions’ only showed themselves when he became president. For Bland, ‘by tapping into the hopes and dreams of tens of millions of Indonesians Jokowi embodies the contradictions of these people and this nation’. But they are also ‘an embodiment of the contradictions inherent in modern Indonesia’s 75 years of history’. Did Jokowi’s six predecessors also embody these contradictions? If so, did anybody ever notice this?

To this reviewer at least, it seems more plausible that much of Jokowi’s behaviour in office has shown up his inexperience in national politics and government, his lack of a stable political philosophy, and his instinctive, not reflective, approach to decision-making.

In his chapter on ‘Why we keep getting Indonesia wrong’, Bland warns against the adoption of ‘mono-causal’ theories to explain Indonesia. He claims that we need to ‘embrace the contradictions at Indonesia’s heart’. But seeing Jokowi as a man of contradictions and his country as a nation of contradictions seems like another mono-causal theory that will not prevent us from occasionally getting Indonesia wrong.