📍Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia
1901 – 1967“I was born Kusno Sosrodihardjo on the 6th of June 1901 in Surabaya, East Java, and became Sukarno — the first President of independent Indonesia. I studied engineering, became a nationalist organiser, was imprisoned by the Dutch twice, and proclaimed Indonesian independence on the 17th of August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender. Indonesia was the world's largest archipelago nation — seventeen thousand islands, three hundred languages, the fourth largest population on earth — and holding it together as a single state was the work of my presidency. I was the great orator of Asian nationalism, the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement with Nehru and Tito and Nasser. I was deposed in 1967 by Suharto and died under house arrest in 1970. Surabaya, Java, the Indonesian archipelago — these were the country I built.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Adams, C. Sukarno: An Autobiography (1965), Bobbs-Merrill; Legge, J. Sukarno: A Political Biography (1972), Allen Lane