Si Pitung was Jakarta's own colonial-era Robin Hood, a legendary thief who raided the ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and redistributed the wealth to the city's poor. Si Pitung hailed from the hard-scrabble neighborhood of Marunda, North Jakarta—then a swampy coastal village filled with mangrove forests. His legend still looms large over the community—a house bearing his name sits in a swamp—as does his fighting spirit.
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The men and women of Marunda practice their own version of pencak silat—traditional martial arts—learned from "watching monkeys fight with monitor lizards." Yeah, seriously. The masters say their moves were first perfected by the neighborhood monkeys that are now long gone. They also told us that the ghost of Si Pitung still haunts the area, offering his helping-hand to those in need. You can't really prove any of this, but we're going to go with the classic advice from the Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
