Still at it ...

If anybody I dislike, it is those people that bring out again the subject of the Malay language (or Bahasa Malaysia), signboards in the Malay language, the position of the Malay Rulers, and a few other privileges or rights bestowed on the Malays or the Bumiputras - things already enshrined in the Federal constitution. Thus people like Teresa Kok, Ong Kah Chuan, Tan Liong Hoe, and many others including people I know, tend to question what had been agreed before by the previous generations of leaders on the conditions of granting citizenships of Malaya then.

Thus, a politician such as Teresa Kok insisted that all road signboards must be written in at least 3 languages, as though the non -Malay people cannot understand signs written in Malay. The fact that she styled herself glamorously as Teresa (definitely not a Chinese name) Kok simply escaped her.

Not to be outdone, another politician Tan Lian Hoe cried that the Malays were no more immigrants in Malaysia as the Chinese and the Indians had been, citing that the true natives were the aborigines and that the Malays here were immigrants from Indonesia, Yunnan, and even (such as the syed Malays with Arabic ancestory) from the Middle East. Another politician claimed that the Chinese had as much right to Malaysia as their kind had sacrificed 300,000 lives fighting the Japanese, forgetting that they were fighting for the British, not the Malays that they despised and looked down upon.

True, the Malays were immigrants from other parts of South East Asia but they migrated here a long time ago. They settled here and brought with them the Malay language and culture and set up systems of government centred around the Sultans. The people that settled here called themselves Malays or Melayu and, of course, spoke the Malay language, not Urdu, or Tamil, or Hokkien or Cantonese. Even the early kingdoms (or sultanates) comprised princes from India. The Malay kingdoms therefore were sovereign states in their own rights before the advent of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and finally the British. The country was referred to as Semenanjung Tanah Melayu, literally meaning Malay Land Peninsula, separate from lands later referred to as Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and so on.

The Portuguese, in their greed and later, to a lesser extent the Dutch, plundered and destroyed the most prosperous of the Malay kingdoms, Melaka. The British that took over from the Dutch recognised the sovereignities of the Malay Sultans who, they acknowledged and accepted, were the heads of the Malay people in their respective kingdoms. Hence, to this day, the system of government in Malaysia is KeRAJAan.

The British, true to their sense of good administration, unlike the greedy, unscrupulous Portuguese (who to this day are people not to be dealt with) made sure that, if they want to do anything to the states (for example, building roads and railways or planting rubber and mining for tin or introduce legislation and a system of administration), they make sure that they obtained sanctions from the respective Sultans through agreements. There were, however, exceptions.

The British brought their folks skilled in tin mining and agriculture. Thus the Cornish people from Cornwall came here to mine for tin while sons of aristocrats from the South and East of England such as Swettenham, Clifford, Birch and many others become resident advisors (in fact, governors) to the Sultans and while many others set up rubber plantations and trading centres.

In their eagerness to run the tin mines and plantations, the British were frustrated by a dearth of workers. Generally, the Malays were not interested to work for money since they were not exactly starving. Whatever industries that the Malays had set up for their own use, such as clothing, foods and agriculture, even before the advent of the colonialists, they were self-sufficient. What need for the Malays to slog in the hot sun in a tin mine or battle mosquitos in the jungle to clear the land for plantation. Indeed, what need for them to work for the British. Further, what with religion and culture, it's not in the Malay psyche to enrich themselves. The British knew the situation in India and in China where workers could be recruited at the snap of the fingers. Thus poor and starving Chinese and Indians were conscripted to work in the tin mines and the plantations and to assist the British in their trading and adminstrative posts.

Without consulting the Sultans, the British brought in droves and droves of foreign labour from China and India to such an extent that the immigrant population outnumbered the local Malay population. Complaints and protests to the British administrators made by the Sultans against the continuous influx of foreign were simply ignored by the British since they were in a hurry to extract tin from the ground, tap latex from the rubber trees, and run their trading posts.

The Malay Sultans and the Malay population that looked up to their keRAJAan to do something about the influx of people that did not look like themselves, speaking different languages and practising different customs and cultures, were really helpless to staunch the influx. As the immigrant population grew in the tin producing centres in the Klang and Kinta Valleys, the British relied more and more on immigrant workers by bringing more of them from China and India who were not exactly keen to continue living in their original countries, rife with starvation, prejudice, oppression, and many social problems.

By this time, the British system of administration had introduced land laws favouring the British, Thus swathes of land rich in tin deposits and fertile for rubber were taken by the British with impunity, by simply "gazetting" them. Thus we have the Anglo-Orientals, the Osborne and Chappels, the Guthries, the Sime Darbys, the Harrison and Crossfields, the Harper Gilfillans, the William Jacks and many, many more British-named corporations too numerous to mention. To be sure, the Malays in their villages were given Malay "reserves" and the Sultans, their own land "reserves". Lands rejected by the British were gazetted as "white land" or "international land" which can be acquired by anyone including the immigrant population. While other lands not needed by the British immediately, especially land rich in tropical timber, became "forest reserves". All other lands not gazetted simply became State Land to this day.

A digression: The British, unlike the Portuguese and the Dutch before them who came here to raid and plunder - but never to build - were peculiarly clever. Thus over lands that they administered, they had a penchant for classification. Thus Singapura island, purchased from the Sultan of Johore(I read somewhere that they paid 10,000 straits dollars), was called a "crown colony". Melaka and Pulau Pinang including some parts of the Peninsula opposite the island which they named Province Wellesley, were the "Straits Settlements" while 4 Sultanate States were named the "federated Malay States" and the remaining 5 became the "unfederated Malay States'. They are also referred to as "protectrates" meaning they were states or lands protected by the British - against whom, I don't really know. Regardless of whatever they were called, the British were only here to make money in a way more subtle and more "civilised" than the greedy Portuguese or the Dutch. The British administration concentrated their efforts in developing the western part of the Peninsula where the tin mines and plantations were mostly located . Remote states such as Pahang, Trengganu, Kelantan and Perlis were given less attention than the states of Perak, Selangor and Johore. In the meantime, their trading centres, such as Singapura, and Pulau Pinang were filled with immigrant workers who also took advantage of the prosperity then by enriching themselves and buying land for their own use. The Chinese and the Indians then were happy to work under the British administration. The Malays then - and even now - did not buy land in the populous and prosperous part of the country like Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Pulau Pinang, Singapura. Firstly, they had no need for extra land since thay had lands in their villages or Malay reserves and secondly, they had no money because they did not work. The money, in "Straits Dollar currency" were mostly in the British and in the immigrant hands. Of course, aristocratic Malays, such as those associated with the Sultans, ("the orang kaya and orang besar" ) and those that inherited lands located in prosperous areas, had some money. Generally, the Malay population were living off the lands of their grandfathers, obtaining enough incomes from rubber smallholders, rice cultivation, fishing, and cottage industries. They were not starving.

Then, after Malaya became independent, and later the Malays introduced policies to help them to overcome the imbalance between the Malays and the non-Malays, here came the Chinese to say that the system was unfair as they had as much right to gain privileges as the Malays, forgetting that their forefathers had agreed to help the Malays in business in exchange for the Malays granting citizenship to non-Malays. In fact, Tengku Abdul Rahman bent backwards to accommodate the non-Malays, much to the chagrin of the Malays.

Another digression: In the political fervor of the mid '50s, when my uncle was in Form V in 1956 during the formative year of Malayan independence, a class teacher asked those who were in favour of Merdeka to raise their hands. All the Malay students, 8 out of about 36, raised their hands. Not one Chinese and Indian student raised his or her hand. When asked later why they were not in favour of independence, most of the Chinese boys said, in no uncertain terms, that they preferred to be under the British ! Come 3 to 4 years later, these same Chinese students whom my uncle was later to meet during the University holidays were all talking about socialism, about Malayan politics being British influenced and so on.

Yet another digression: In order to run their administrative and trading centres, the British needed the population to be educated in English. Thus, they set up "english" schools which were of two types viz. the elite ones such as Victoria Institution, Penang Free, Raffles Institution and the Malay College and the "small-town" schools such as Pasar Road school, Kemaman School and so on. They also set up or allowed the existence of the "vernacular" schools such as the Malay schools found in all the small towns and in the bigger villages, the Chinese schools - the Chung Lings and Chung Chings - and the Tamil schools in the rubber estates. Much to their credit, the Chinese and Indian immigrant population, especially those in the towns, saw the benefit of an English education and had their children sent to the "english" schools. Most Malay children were educated in Malay schools to end up as Malay teachers or slightly further up as "trained" teachers in the Sultan Idris Teacher Training College for men and the Durian Daun College for women. That was as high up as the Malays could attain in their educational level. There was no "university" level education. In fact, no university at all. [You can't entirely blame the British for the Malays disinterest in enrolling their children in "english" schools. Because, as my uncle had said about his uncle in the 1920s being discouraged to enroll in one, his parents feared that he might end up as a Christian ! A generation later in the 1950s, my uncle was similarly forewarned by his parents and relatives when he got a scholarship to study in England. The fact that my uncle could become a communist never entered their minds]. For the Malays, university education was rare. The smarter and elite Malays, which were absolutely few in number, did somehow manage to go to Cambridge, or some red-brick universities in Britain.

Coming back to the topic that they are still at it, a generation ago it was the likes of Lee Kim Sais, the Seenivasagams and many others who attacked the "Malay" government for having policies favouring the Malays, the present politicians are harping on the same subject in spite of the fact they themselves and their kinds are prosperous right now. It won't be long before another generation would start harping on the same subject even if everyone of them has become a millionaire. The truth is they are not satisfied with what they have. What they really want is to rule Malaysia, just as Lee Kuan Yew had achieved in ruling Singapore. To them the Malays whom they despise and look down upon are lazy, inefficient, and corrupted, and only fit to become drivers. Only then would they achieve Malaysian Malaysia.

Update 09/10/2011 Sunday: After reading again today, I would not retract a single word on the piece that I wrote for it is the truth.

to be continued ..