ON Sept 16, 1963, I was 13 years old and in Form 1 at St Thomas’ Secondary School in Kuching, about a month away from sitting for my yearend school examinations.
I remember well that it was a most eventful year and a tumultuous time in my life – I had just landed myself in puberty and officially became a full-fledged teenager. It was the time of raging hormones and a shock entry into the world of being an almost-adult. It was a brand new era and an age of self-discovery and facing the unknown – of forbidden yellow culture – literary works like ‘The Collector’, ‘The Group’, and ‘The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea’. There were banned and forbidden magazines with names like ‘Sexology’, ‘Playboy’, and ‘Parade’. (The first issue of ‘Penthouse’ was just two years away in 1965.)
In the field of popular music, we had just left behind Pat Boone, Nat King Cole, and Connie Francis; I was already into Elvis, Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield, and Sandie Shaw; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had just released their first singles that year.
Among some of the popular movies we watched that year were ‘Cleopatra’, ‘The Birds’, ‘The Pink Panther’, and ‘From Russia with Love’.
In the political arena, the Brunei rebellion which happened in December 1962 was quickly quelled. The Indonesian confrontation ignited by President Sukarno was about to begin in March the following year with the formation of the Sarawak People’s Guerrilla Force in West Kalimantan.
When we were told in school at morning assembly about the formation of Malaysia, whereby Sarawak together with Malaya, Singapore, and Sabah would be joined to become one federation, most of us were delighted with the prospect of becoming part of an enlarged nation and thus becoming brethren with those strangers from the mainland, the little island of Singapore, and our neighbour Sabah. The thing which puzzled us then was – why had Brunei turned us down and not become part of this new and exciting nation as well?
Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin was at the helm. He was, as history has shown, a very wise ruler. Quoting a Wikipedia source, “A breakthrough came in the 1960s when technological advances made offshore oil and gas exploration feasible and the South West Ampa gas field was discovered in 1963, 13km off Kuala Belait.” As hindsight would have it, his son, the current Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah – was in 2011, according to Forbes Magazine, the second richest monarch in the world with a personal wealth of at least US$20 billion.
Imagine if he had joined in the formation of Malaysia in 1963 – all that personal wealth would have been diverted to the federal government’s coffers with only a small portion returned back to them.
In those days, we were just simple teenage school boys, with very limited exposure to the world of politics and whatever world news delivered to us was via the Radio Sarawak 8 O’clock evening news and the collective print media of The Sarawak Tribune and The Vanguard locally, and Straits Times and Star from the peninsula, and other assorted vernacular newspapers. We were not kept very well informed of the many opposing voices being made then – and the debates of the pros and the cons of becoming part of this new federation of Malaysia. As they still say, ‘Ignorance is bliss’.
Most of us students had rather liked and respected the fatherly image and demeanour of Tunku Abdul Rahman; and we had held high regard for Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew as well as North Borneo’s (now Sabah) Donald Stephens. Our own local Sarawakian political leaders were also seen as benign and trustworthy – although truth be told some of us had certain reservations on one or two of the personalities. However, that was to be expected of budding young minds undergoing their formative years.
I had known then that my uncle Ong Kee Hui and his party comrade Stephen Yong Kueh Tze (who founded Sarawak’s first political party – Sarawak United People’s Party – in 1959) had very strong reservations about going straight from being a British Colony to become part of a new federation. They had wanted Sarawak to gain its own independence first and then go through a public referendum to assuage whether its people wanted to form Malaysia.
History now showed that it was only in 1969, six years after the formation of Malaysia, that SUPP changed its mind and supported the Malaysia we know today – a turnaround which is still being debated today.
Thinking back, I remember that at 13 years old I was very excited at the prospect of Sarawak becoming a part of a bigger new nation – although I was deeply puzzled then of the rejection by the Sultan of Brunei. In my idealistic youthfulness, I had also wondered why the Tunku had not made overtures to Kalimantan Borneo as well, not knowing then that was truly “an impossible dream”!
The two furthest thoughts from my mind then were on the most sensitive and prevalent subjects bugging us today – that of race and religion.
In 1963, where I lived and played, went to school to study and learn, and among all the people I knew or met – my family members, friends, strangers and visitors – the furthest thing on our minds when we communicated, spoke to, played with, or simply dealt with – were the twin issues of “What race are you?” and “What religion do you practice?”
It’s true to say that since birth, we were all colour blood to each other’s race and culture; and totally tolerant and respectful of each other’s religion. There weren’t any ‘sensitive’ words, subjects or lifestyles deriving from either race or religion, and we were fine with that. We played together, ate together, went to each other’s houses without notice, and it was really quite the utopia then.
That was then – but what is happening now? When did it all change? Why did it all change? How did it all change?
I put the blame squarely on our politicians, the slow but sure disintegration of our ‘one’ Malaysian society – in my opinion the rot started not long after the 25th anniversary of Sarawak’s 1963 forming of Malaysia – and has continued to deteriorate in the last 25 years that now we find ourselves – 55 years later, at the crossroads of potentially either ‘a failed nation’ or a ‘brave new Malaysia’.
Can our new Pakatan Harapan government at the federal level be our new hope – harkening to a return to the utopia that we had enjoyed then and am now dreaming of restoring. Is there still hope?
Dum spiro spero.
Comments can reach the writer via [email protected].
IN response to some points I raised on the work at the Sarawak General Hospital last week, a spokesperson for Asaljuru Weida Sdn Bhd – the main concessionaire for the project – has shared the following information: No renovation is being done to the present buildings. Three buildings will be newly constructed – a daycare and diagnostic complex, a medi-hotel cum multi-storey car park, and a multi-storey carpark. There are some shops in the meditel block – one food court and nine commercial outlets. Thank you very much for sharing this information with our readers.