On the last day of Hive-Fest Kuala Lumpur I visited Malaysia's national history museum specifically to find out how the museum represented Malaysia's colonial past, from the arrival of the Portuguese, the British Empire, the Japanese occupation, to the Malay Emergency.
I was especially interested in how they treated the Malay Emergency, which lasted from 1948 to 1960, because my father was posted to Malaya with the Royal Engineers during the 1950s and told me stories about his time in Malaya when I was boy.
However, I was in some doubt as to whether I would ever find my way to the museum because, like much else in Kuala Lumpur, the directions seemed a bit sketchy and I got lost in yet another shopping mall as I tried to work out which exit from the main station would get me to the museum... It turned out that directly exiting the station was a mistake as the way to the museum was via one of the KL Sentral Station platforms and out the exit on the other side which takes you along a walkway to Muzium Negara station.
And so, here I am at last, at the entrance to the National Museum:
The museum consisted of four galleries on two storeys. I headed upstairs to Gallery C, which dealt with the colonial era.
The Portuguese were the first European colonizers. They captured the Malacca Sultanate on the second attempt in 1511. Intermittent warfare continued between the Portuguese and their local allies and various Malay sultanates for the next 130 years.
Then, in the early 1600s, along came the Dutch, who allied with the Sultan of Johor and fought the Portuguese but without success. The Dutch finally conquered Malacca with the help of local allies in 1641.
In 1786, the Sultan of Kedah leased Penang Island to the British East India Company, and so began the British colonial presence in Malaya, which lasted until 1957, apart from the three years of Japanese occupation during the Second World War.
But why was Penang leased to the British East India Company?
Because the Sultan of Kedah wanted both an annual payment and the guarantee of British military protection as he feared an attack from Siam (Thailand), and needed a powerful ally.
I forgot to take any photos of this section of the gallery, but the textual commentary made it clear that the Europeans were not the only ones wanting a slice of the Malay pie.
Let's head through this mock-up of a colonial era archway and check out a Malay keris (dagger)...
Keris Semenanjung
The keris (or "kris") is a highly prized asymmetrical dagger often with an undulating cast iron blade. This particular keris has an ivory hilt in the form of a long-nosed demon.
The Semenanjung kris is a type of dagger often found in Peninsular Malaysia. The blade is forged by a technique known as "wrought Melaka" which dates back to the time of the Malacca Sultanate before the Portuguese arrived.
Okay, let's see what's on the other side of the next replica archway...
There were several exhibits about the colonial exploitation of the land. Perhaps the most well known cash crop to be extracted from colonial Malaya was rubber. However, rubber trees are not an indigenous species. Rubber seeds were, ahem, "secretly exported" from Brazil by an enterprising British chap and some of them were planted in Malaysia, where they flourished, and so began the rubber plantations of colonial Malaya, just in time for the invention of the motor car and rubber tyres.
The new industry caused the British to bring in a new wave of immigrant labour from southern India to tap the rubber.
I found the commentary on the plaques to be even-handed and quite objective in tone. For sure, verbs such as "interfere," "exploit" and "suffer" were justifiably deployed, but with remarkable restraint.
The Japanese Occupation (1941-1945)
I was quite surprised at how small a space was devoted to the Japanese occupation and also at how restrained the language was. Just consider the two middle paragraphs of the panel, below:
During the entire Japanese occupation, the people experienced misery because of the shortage of food supplies, medicines and daily necessities. Numerous infectious diseases such as malaria spread. The economy weakened as a result of the 'scorched earth operations' carried out by the British before their withdrawal from Malaya. To make matters worse, uncontrolled distribution of Japanese paper money caused very high inflation.
The panel describing the Japanese occupation is notable less for what it says than for how it says it. Suffering is acknowledged, but only in carefully managed terms: “misery,” “shortages,” disease that “spread,” and inflation that “occurred.” The language is restrained, impersonal, and largely passive, presenting the occupation as a period of hardship rather than one of coercion and violence. It is history rendered administratively, with human experience compressed into neutral outcomes.
The only "disease" that is specifically named is "malaria" - no mention of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases as a result of mass rape, and no mention of "comfort women." This paragraph could have been written by a Japanese museum curator!
Okay, the next paragraph does provide a bit more info about the horrors of the occupation:
During those times people lived in fear of the 'Kempetai' (Japanese Secret Police), who arrested, interrogated and killed anyone suspected of being opponents to them. Houses were raided and food supplies seized. There are those who were caught and forced into labour and sent to build the railway on the Burma-Siam border. Japanese policy differences affected all people and damaged the relationship between the races in this country. Compared to the Malays and the Indians, the Chinese were treated very badly because of the war between Japan and China.
Okay, this paragraph does go a bit further, explicitly naming the Kempeitai, arrests, killings, house raids, and forced labour, including deportation of Malays to the Burma–Siam railway. Yet even here the violence is acknowledged but not dwelt upon; suffering is mentioned almost in passing. The harsher treatment of the Chinese is noted, but in the passive voice with no clarification as to what "very badly" entailed - mass murder.
And now we arrive at my favourite exhibit of the whole museum, a surprisingly tall, singularly ineffective and un-Japanese looking mannequin soldier. In spite of his two swords, he wouldn't harm a fly!
I paused as I crossed the balcony on my way to Gallery D to take this photo of the main hall. As national museums go, this one was quite compact and not overwhelming. Mind you, that might be because allied aircraft bombed the shinola out of the previous national museum that once stood here, destroying it and everything in it. (I don't know if that is mentioned anywhere in the museum, but I only learnt about it while doing some research for this blog post...)
The Malay Emergency (1948-1960)
The Malay "Emergency" was a civil war in all but name between the mainly Chinese Communists in the north against the British Commonwealth and Malayan Federation.
It was called an "Emergency" by the crafty British government because Lloyds and other insurers would not pay out if plantation owners property was damaged as a result of civil war - and damaged many were.
The framing of the "Emergency" by the first panel is interesting:
... the Emergency... was [a] difficult period in the history of the country. Today however, the people enjoy a peaceful and prosperous life thanks to the foresightedness of leaders from various ethnicities and political parties at that time who had struggled and succeeded in liberating the country from British colonial rule and gone on to govern it peacefully thereafter.
The Emergency is framed not as a period to be examined, but as a difficulty already resolved. It is described in abstract terms and immediately folded into a narrative of far-sighted leadership, ethnic cooperation, and successful self-government. Where the Japanese occupation is rendered as hardship endured but not too closely looked at, the Emergency becomes a story of political maturity and national achievement as Malay history moves purposefully toward peace and prosperity.
Here are two Malay soldiers, one from each side, both looking equally soldierly and dignified - far more so than the effete Japanese guy we met earlier - even though neither is armed against the other.
Nevertheless, the commentary on the panels makes clear that the Communists were "terrorists" who destroyed much of the infrastructure and economy of the emerging republic. Although the war was over by 1960, the rump of the Communists retreated to the borderlands and only gave up their weapons in 1989 - nearly three decades later!
It also takes pride in the birth of the Malaysian Army and the opportunity the Emergency gave to bring it to something like maturity.
The Emergency was treated in more detail than the Japanese occupation and again, while the language was restrained, it did emphasize that the Communists were "terrorists" without stigmatizing the whole Chinese population.
The British army considered the "Emergency" to have been a counter-insurgency success story, especially when compared to the American debacle in Vietnam.
The good old British innovation (back in the Boer War) of creating civilian concentration camps - oh, let's not use that distasteful term after what the beastly Germans did - was deployed in Malaya as "New Villages" to segregate and guard about a million rural civilians.
The British were the first to use Agent Orange - in Malaya, though less efficiently than the Americans in Vietnam due to short purse strings:
The original intention was to crop spray but even this was deemed too expensive by the protectorate authorities (helicopters were used and 88 suspected CT cultivations were sprayed). Eventually someone struck on the idea of simply hosing the jungle from the back of bowser trucks and this is what the British did, in limited areas and to no great effect. This happily amateur effort at chemical warfare undoubtedly saved future British governments from the litigation suffered by post-Vietnam US governments.
Source: https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/malaya-the-myth-of-hearts-and-minds
So what was my late father up to in Malaya with the Royal Engineers?
His job seems to have been more about building airstrips in the jungle and although he was armed, I suspect that his main weapon of war was a typewriter.
And so I emerged from Gallery D and made a swift tour of the ground floor hall and galleries.
Here's a display celebrating the visit of the Japanese Crown Prince Akihito to Malaysia in 1978, when he did a bit of ceremonial rubber tapping. By 1978 Japan had become a big importer of Malaysian rubber to supply its expanding motor industry.
And finally, in Gallery B I guess, I came across a fine selection of keris:
In short, I spent an enjoyable and educational two hours wandering around the galleries of the Malaysian National Museum. It is a nicely sized museum that does not overwhelm you, but rather draws in to examine various aspects of the Malay story.
I felt (as a teacher of "intercultural communication") that the museum’s restrained language reflects a communication culture in which meaning is often conveyed indirectly. Difficult history is acknowledged, but without confrontation, detail, or emotional emphasis. What is left unsaid is as important as what is stated.
The cultures that make up the bulk of the Malay population - Malay, Indian and Chinese - are all relatively high context communication cultures, and so I speculate that in this multicultural context, the desire for social harmony is prioritized, whereas in the North American experience, people from all sorts of different backgrounds contributed to developing the opposite mode of communication, a much more "low context" mode in which much more is stated than left unsaid.
Cheers!
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