REVISING HISTORY

http://burningrepublicstate.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/revising-history/
The legend of founding father Raffles is an integral element of our history, since it is central to the notion of Singapore being a nation of immigrants.

Despite the Raffles story being so deeply ingrained in The Singapore Story, it is not difficult to find an alternative perspective. Carl Trocki did just that in the opening paragraph of his book, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control:
There was more to the foundation of the British colony of Singapore in 1819 than a stroke of brilliance by Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is usually credited with the creation of the city. We are occasionally apt to forget that the city is located in Asia and is largely populated by Asians. At the time, it was also a vital part of the Asian maritime economy and should be seen as the heir of a long line of Asian maritime trading centres located in or near the Straits of Melaka. Singapore’s history, properly understood, can be traced back to the Malay entrepots of Srivijaya and Melaka.

The paradigm shift involved in this re-alignment of perspective is indicated on the following page where Trocki described the Riau island of Bentan as ‘the eighteenth century predecessor of Singapore’, a ‘Malay/Bugis centre … located near the the present [Indonesian] town of Tanjong Pinang. From this perspective, the Malays – who were the first to begin flocking to Singapore after 1819 – are not ‘immigrants’, as they are labeled in all versions of The Singapore Story, but are members of the Nusantara (the Malay world) relocating from one island to another, following the shifting focus of business.

Barr devotes a chapter in Constructing Singapore to analyze the revisionism of The Singapore Story, the government gospel that has special preeminence in the mainstream historical narrative. It was quite unfortunate that I never did get a chance to formally study in depth about Singapore’s history, save for a semester in Secondary Two (the teacher in question was responsible for much of my formative knowledge of alternative interpretations of local history, even if it was mostly on the side) and a very rushed and brief few tutorials in junior college.

Framing The Singapore Story as the bulkward of the Secondary Two History syllabus has the detrimental impact of focusing history as a subject of memorization, rather than as an analytical study in observation, reasoning and judgment to form alternative interpretations or conclusions.

And this is very marked for the study of local history: the dominance of the government narrative endures and is perpetuated, even if the veracity is suspect.

For example, Barr points out that in Leaders of Singapore, Melanie Chew interviewed Goh Keng Swee who revealed that the separation of Singapore had an element of premeditation – a peaceful separation was negotiated between Goh and the second echelon of the Malaysian leadership before both groups sought to convince their respective premiers of this settlement thereafter. This narrative is profoundly different from the official line of expulsion – which discounts the survival rhetoric that usually accompanies the latter.

The Singapore Story was not meant to merely be a historical narrative, but as an element of National Education, it was to imbue a sense of sensitivity to the homeland. While emotive stories of overcoming crises and challenges make for good patriotic reading, it does not make for good study of history.

These are only two examples of the Singapore Story’s distortions, and the theme of the Communist threat is another potential area of concern to relook. The convenient boogeyman, the broad brush of Communism tarred many personalities and dismisses historical nuances that provide readers and students with an uninformed comprehension. In particular, the Malayan Communist Party was virtually broken in the early 1950s, and the direction of the movement was left at the mercy of “adventurists” who were not answerable, and more extreme, than the leadership. What the Singapore Story portrays is a simplistic conflict of good against evil – the PAP being the former, and the leftist and Communist elements being the latter.

And that thematic concern glosses unfairly the contributions of the Labour Front governments, particularly David Marshall who instituted an all-party parliamentary committee for education that laid the groundwork for bilingualism, and defused the tension arising from the Chinese community who felt that their education system was threatened. Furthermore, it also obviate any strong emphasis on the lucky break that Lim Yew Hock afforded Lee Kuan Yew in 1957 after the leftist elements won six seats of the PAP central executive committee. By subsuming the Labour Front period under a generic periodization of the ‘Communist Threat’, the narrative of Lee and friends’ mastery of events is not diluted.

That Lee Kuan Yew saw it fit to appropriate The Singapore Story as the title of his autobiography reveals the conceit with which the government approaches the study of history.

There is nothing inherently wrong with Lee Kuan Yew adding his voice to the larger historical narrative, but it is troubling when his voice becomes the historical narrative – and the study of Singapore history becomes an exercise in regime legitimization.