REMOVE RAFFLES, COLONIAL NARRATIVE

Alfian Saat’s play attempts to liberate us from template of history

ALFIAN Saat’s Merdeka is a timely reminder for history-starved Singapore. It is about Singapore’s breaking up with the West, on why Raffles must fall. I was among the Singaporeans in October of last year. Watching the play is like digesting large chunks of texts in two hours, alerting me to the ‘emptiness’ of the island’s past identity had it not been for the peninsula and the vast archipelago in its proximity.

Merdeka, meaning independence, draws from Singapore’s past. The six characters seamlessly are all for a clean break with Sir Stamford Raffles. Or so the tension prevails. The group, taking the theme “Raffles Must Fall”, was inspired by the “Rhodes Must Fall” postapartheid movement, located at the University of Cape Town.

There, it was directed against a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, coloniser of Africa. The campaign for the statue’s removal led to a wider movement to decolonise education across South Africa and received attention around the world. That call was not the first. The 1950s saw the first demand by Afrikaner students.

Back in Singapore, the Raffles statue still exists. Some US$200 million was budgeted for Singapore’s 200th anniversary of colonialism. In their introduction to the book Seven Hundred Years: A History of Singapore, Kwa Chong Guan et al. delve into the writing of Singapore’s history. They began with historian K.G. Tregonning’s declaration that “Modern Singapore began in 1819. Nothing that occurred prior to this has particular relevance to an understanding of the contemporary scene; it is of an antiquarian interest only”.

Tregonning, Raffles Professor of History at the University of Singapore, made the declaration to a volume commemorating the 150th anniversary of Raffles in Singapore. The Tregonning remarks represent the prevailing ideology held by historians of Singapore’s past in recent times. This is the template, not only of Singapore’s history, but that of Pulau Pinang, the rest of Malaysia, and the region. In 1987, S. Rajaratnam attributed Singapore’s beginnings entirely to Raffle’s arrival: “Nothing very much appears to have happened in Singapore… before Raffles landed in this unpromising land.”

Raffles saw Singapore as the “ancient maritime capital of the Malays”, apparently abandoned for 600 years before he arrived. John Crawfurd, who became Singapore’s second resident, in his 1856 Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands & Adjacent Countries stated: “For a period of five centuries and a half, there is no record of Singapore having been occupied, and it was only the occasional resort of pirates.”

Singapore’s template into the capital of British Malaya by 1919 came to be detailed by a generation of students in the History Department of the University of Malaya, established in 1949. Tales from East India Company (EIC) and Colonial Office records were the mantra. C.M. Turnbull’s History of Singapore 1819-1975, had framed Singapore’s history as a positive outcome of British colonialism. Raffles was founding father. Fact or fiction?

Alfian Saat’s play attempts to liberate ourselves from that template. To accept that template as a fact of history itself falsifies the past. To be sure there are many roads to the past. The historical narrative is also an argument. Colonial archives are certainly biased. Alfian argues that they tend to downplay violence committed during their conquests. The rampage of Jogjakarta was under the command of non other than Sir Stamford Raffles.

Scholar and sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas debunks the ‘Great Man of History’ view. His recently republished Thomas Stamford Raffles: Schemer or Reformer? (first published in 1971) with an introduction by his son National University of Singapore sociologist Syed Farid Alatas deserves a second reading.

There is not one but two statues of Raffles standing in Singapore’s civic and heritage districts. The authors of Seven Hundred Years: A History of Singapore, rendered a long-sighted view of the past. The year 1819 still stays in Singapore colonialist view of the founding father.

This is the question of beyond the statue. Francis Light’s statue is still in Pulau Pinang. And what is Frank Athelstane Swettenham’s statue doing on the grounds of Muzium Negara in Kuala Lumpur? And the statue of King Edward VII in the same location? And this is coming to 63 years of political independence.

Colonialism is never benign. The likes of the Raffles massacre in Palembang and Banjarmasin Affair involve the criminality of the colonial state. On the former, a letter from Raffles for the extermination of the Dutch reads, “...buang habiskan sekali-kali segala Belanda dan Residentnya... Jangan kasi tinggal lagi (...must throw away, finish entirely all the Dutch people and their Residents... Do not allow them to stay).”

As per the statues in the vicinity of Muzium Negara, their presence and visibility there are partly due to our attitude towards colonialism. We have not “buang habiskan” that narrative.

The writer is a professor at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation, International Islamic University Malaysia and the first recipient of the Honorary President Resident Fellowship at the Perdana Leadership Foundation