Malaysia’s Colonial Forever
Imagine that you are poor.
You have always been poor.
You father was poor, your grandfather was poor, and your family through the generations have always been poor. They were farmers or fishermen, or shepherds: life has never been easy: but through hard work, persistence, prayer, and not a little luck, they’ve survived down to today.
But in recent years, things have changed. Strange forces of industrialization and free flowing capital have arrived from beyond the sea, transforming your mother country beyond recognition. The land is more and more untenable, in the face of the changing climate, the demands of modern life, and political instability. You cannot find a job. You cannot support your family, let alone start a new one. You cannot even support yourself, and the times are only growing harder.
Then one day, a recruiter arrives at your village, looking for labourers to work in a faraway land. They tell you about a land of milk and honey: a peninsula of rubber, palm oil, and riches where fortunes are waiting to be made. They offer passage to this promised land: a job, a bed, and a way to support your family, in exchange for a few measly months of labour: a more than fair deal.
You accept. You make your way onto a crowded, disease ridden ship, in holds stuffed with identical, indistinguishable faces from yours. You endure the months long voyage across choppy monsoon seas, watching the others fall sick. You talk about your plans for the future. How you’ll open businesses and strike it big, or how you’ll finally be able to afford a dowry and start a new family. You dream.
Then you arrive. In this strange little peninsula, filled to bursting with Sultans and spices. You get to work, eager to build your new life. You work in construction: pulling long, difficult, dangerous hours, your body shattered at the end of every day. You consider yourself lucky. At least you’re not working in a plantation, where the risk of catching dengue or malaria would be higher. Every night, you go to sleep in a crowded room, so humid and hot that you can barely breathe.
The few measly months of work that you were bonded for turn to years. The contract grows longer as though by magic, as terms of interest and fine print extend your term with every passing day. Your pay is a fraction of what you were promised, but you dare not complain. You know that if you ask for more, you will not even be laughed at. You will simply be disposed. There are a hundred others who would happily take your place, and the only thing worse than being worked to death, is not working at all.
You send the bare scraps that you can scrounge together back home to your family, who will join you when you’ve saved enough money. The rest disappears into alcohol, as you search for some small mote of comfort in this promised heaven turned hell on earth. You tell yourself that this is only temporary. That if you work harder, for just awhile longer, the better future of which you’ve dreamed will come true.
Decades pass. The contract releases you, but the work and pay remains the same miserable pittance. Your body: which has never been healthy, wastes away from overuse and time, until it can no longer work. When you have nothing left to give to the machine, you are sent home. Squeezed of every last drop of work, exhausted in muscle and mind, you are to be cared for by whatever family you might still have, until you die, a hollow, broken shell.
This is a depressingly common story in Malaysia: the story of workers who have been fed into the economic machine,. But tell me, is this the story of a 20th century coolie from China or India, or the story of a 21st century migrant worker from Bangladesh or Indonesia?
The answer is that it is both. The British left Malaya in 1957. But their economic system never did. The modern Malaysian economy: with all its glitz and glamour, hiding an underbelly of cruelty, built upon a global network of unofficial slave labour, is a direct inheritance from our former imperial overlords.
Malaysia was a project that the British were proud of. Throughout the 20th century, there was a prevailing sentiment that they “got Malaysia (and Singapore) right”. After all, power had passed peacefully from the Crown into the hands of a multi-racial coalition of ethnic parties, who were happy to continue collaborating with Her Majesty’s government. They had even helped them deal with those pesky communist in ‘48, winning an undeclared war with hardened insurgents in that tropical battlefield. Now, Malaysia was a fellow constitutional monarchy, led by the Tunku, a Cambridge-educated Crown Prince of Malaysia’s oldest and most prestigious sultanate. And so in the face of the nasty business of decolonization elsewhere in Egypt, Kenya, or Palestine, the British consoled themselves with the idea that Malaysia, at least, had turned out alright after all.
To many in early-independent Malaysia, there was also reason to be proud. The country was well on the way to recovering fully from the Emergency and the Japanese Occupation. The sectors of rubber, timber, and oil were blossoming, as Malaysia’s economy rode a worldwide boom of economic expansion, a fact reflected in Kuala Lumpur itself. It was a modern city, growing larger and more prosperous every day as the riches of the unshackled economy flowed into its streets year by year: it was no Paris or New York, but it was well on the way to becoming an Eastern counterpart, at least. Having expelled Lee Kuan Yew and his pesky attempts to upend the ethnic contract, the social fabric was stable. It seemed to the Tunku and his compatriots among the Alliance elite that the promises of Merdeka: of a new, vibrant, and modern Malaysia, had been fulfilled.
Many outside Kuala Lumpur felt differently. The rural Malays, in particular, were angry. Merdeka had been supposed to bring them prosperity. Where had that promise gone? They continued to feed the agricultural machine, languishing in an economy that offered them little opportunity for social mobility and advancement. As they had under the British, they fed the economic machine, but saw little gain for themselves as they continued to languish in rural poverty. Meanwhile, the Tunku and the elites, grew richer and fatter on the surplus of their labour. The glamour of modern Kuala Lumpur had been built on the blood of their work, and they were tired of seeing none of its returns.
In the wake of May 13 1969, these masses made their voices heard. A young, Singapore-educated doctor and parliamentary backbencher named Mahathir Mohammad, penned a scathing letter slamming the Tunku. He said that the Malays hated the Alliance for not defending their racial dignity, especially against those pendatang Chinese, and moreover, they hated the Tunku himself for allowing it to happen: for not defending the Malays. Mahathir urged the Tunku to resign, warning ominously that the Civil Service, the Police, and even the Army might not be controllable if things escalated. In response, he was expelled from the party and barely avoided arrest, but the damage had been done. Almost two years to the date of the letter’s publication, the “Father of Independence” was forced to resign.
In his place rose Abdul Razak, who represented the newly ascendant Malay bourgeois elite. Razak knew that the pre-1969 state of affairs, which had allowed the rural Malays to languish in agricultural poverty, could not be allowed to continue. In response, the New Economic Policy was introduced. Measures were put in place to carve out a Malay place in the economic sun: everything from land grants to move Malays to higher yield agricultural sectors like palm oil which held more promise for social advancement, to educational institutes that were their exclusive domain, to formal quotas all throughout the civil service, public sector, and even the stock market. No longer were the Malays to be poor and uneducated farmers. They were to be millionaires, urban middle-class professionals, or at worst, small-hold plantation owners or clerks in the civil service.
This, however, left a gap in the Malaysian economy. Who would tap the rubber? Who would operate the oil fields? Who would staff the construction sites that had sprung up across the country?
In the past, that role had been filled by the Chinese and Indians: the former, fleeing the chaos and instability of late imperial China, the latter being imported by the British to serve as a political counterweight against the former. In the colonial era, both the Chinese and Indians had represented a seemingly endless wellspring of labour, that could be exploited under a coolie system of indentured labour. Imported from Guangdong and Tamil Nadu, they were fed into the rubber plantations and tin mines. Kept in slave-like conditions under the kangani or pig-trade systems of indentured servitude, they were forced to work for pittances — barely enough to survive. Their living conditions were appalling. In some parts of Malaya, nearly one in five workers died from a combination of disease, malnourishment, or plain overwork.
No protections existed for these colonial coolies. Any worker who complained would find himself quickly removed, and replaced by another indistinguishable, even more desperate face. Attempts to organise into unions or organisations of collective bargaining were summarily crushed by the ruthlessly effective British Special Branch, in charge of suppressing any seditious activities which might threaten colonial rule. And unlike the Malays, who at least enjoyed British lip service to the rhetoric of protecting Malaya’s “indigenous races” and their “duty to the natives”, the Chinese and Indians had no local leaders to turn to. Far away from home, they had been bled for all they were worth, shoveled like so many shards of coal and wood into the furnace of the colonial engine.
But by now, that wellspring of fuel had dried up. India and China were newly independent countries, no longer feeding an endless mass of human suffering into the global diasporic machine. And the Chinese and Indians who remained in Malaysia were not the infinitely exploitable proles of yesteryear: the Chinese had embedded themselves into the structures of political and economic power, rising into the middle-classes of professionals, of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, and would no longer be so easily drawn into the industrial grinder. And while the Indians remained divided along internal ethnic lines and remained politically fragmented, they were a measly ten percent of the population: hardly enough to meet the labour demands of the whole Malaysian economy, no matter how viciously they were bled.
Modernity — and the flows of global capital — provided a solution. China and India might not be so vulnerable now, but there were still other countries that were could be offered up at the altar of global capitalism: always other countries ready to be exploited. From Bangladesh to Pakistan, Indonesia to the Philippines, new coolies were found. Under the same system of indentured servitude, working in the same, backbreaking conditions, under the same dynamics of capital and exploitation, they began to arrive en masse. By some estimates, there are as many as 4 million migrant workers in Malaysia today, more than 10% of Malaysia’s total population, and 30% of the total workforce. It is not an exaggeration to say that Malaysia’s economy largely relies on the continued existence of this bottom rung of our economic ladder: a bottom rung which is virtually identical to the colonial system imposed by the British.
Things are not exactly the same as they were. There are more controls: visas, immigration laws, passports, that necessitate the help of even more fees, agents, and recruiters to navigate. Today’s migrant workers, arriving in a newly rationalised Malaysia, often do not and cannot stay, but must return home. The fruits of their labour are not drained to faraway London, but fed into Kuala Lumpur, or Penang, or Johor Bahru, which day by day are becoming modern metropoles, more than equal to any other city in the world.
But if the particulars differ, the broad strokes are the same. Malaysia is one of the worst countries in the world for a migrant worker. Every day, two Bangladeshi workers die in Malaysia. In immigration detention centres, where workers who have overstayed their visa are kept, as many as 100 workers died in two years from a mixture of physical abuse, poor sanitation, and lack of medical attention. In 2016, more Nepalese workers died in Malaysia than Saudi Arabia or Qatar: according to the Nepalese Embassy, as many as 9 a week, although the International Labour Organisation suggests that the true number could be even higher. And if these daily deaths of neglect and abuse were not enough, Malaysia’s migrants are also the first to bear the brunt of any crisis. On May 26, of the 187 new Covid-19 cases detected in Malaysia, 173 were migrant workers, caused by cramped, unsanitary conditions, made worse by the lack of any effort by the government to improve these living and working conditions.
Malaysia’s migrants today work in the same sectors as colonial coolies did. They are brought under the same systems of indentured labour, where they are promised passage to Malaysia in exchange for a set amount of work, an amount which balloons and grows with interest, hidden clauses, and deceitful terms, until they are stuck in virtual slavery. They work, like colonial coolies, with no protection: Not from their employers, who exploit their ignorance regarding visa and work restrictions to bleed them of as much labour as possible; nor from the Malaysian government, which does not care from where the labour flows, only that the labour must flow; nor from international observers, who can only raise feeble protests that go largely unheard. Like coolies of old, they are used as easy political scapegoats: blamed for “stealing” jobs from local workers, attacked for their “ingratitude” for being allowed to work in Malaysia, and left to die when crises occur.
From construction sites, to plantations, to security guards and domestic workers, the dynamics of work have stayed the same: the only difference now being that the undifferentiated mass of exploited and vulnerable workers speak Bengali or Urdu, not Cantonese or Tamil. When these modern coolies are used up, they are, just like Chinese and Indian coolies were, sent home, broken and used-up men and women, having given all they had to give on the altar of Malaysia’s modernity.
You might expect, that today’s Malaysian Chinese and Indians, would see these parallels. You might expect that they would recognise that the migrant workers of modern Malaysia are only coolies by another name. You might expect that every Malaysian Chinese and Indian person would recognise in the exploited faces of today’s migrant workers the faces of their own fathers and grandfathers: who arrived in this country a century ago, differentiated from these modern coolies only by the language they speak and the colour of their skins. You might expect that this recognition would drive them to fight for workers rights: for protection of these vulnerable workers, who are the latest to hold Malaysia’s economy upon their backs.
You would be wrong.
Racist sentiment among Malaysians knows no colour. You will find many Chinese and Indians who are happy to demonise migrant workers as thieves, dishonest, lazy, and dirty. You will find many are happy to turn a blind eye to — or even outright defend — their mistreatment at the hands of employers. When the government, in heavy handed, brutal, and arbitrary waves of arrest and detention, round up workers, many Chinese and Indians applaud. “That’s what they deserve. That’s what we need,” the common refrain goes.
In some ways, this is eminently understandable. Chinese and Indian positions in modern Malaysia are, in their own way, tenuous and uncertain. Nationalist rhetoric by extreme Malay voices remains powerful. Ominous threats to “Remember May 13” are trotted out any time minority voices get too loud for the political establishment. At every political juncture, those who survived 1969 urge their children to stay at home. They stock up on food supplies and watch the news with bated breath. And if nothing happens, they send messages to family Whatsapp groups, reminding everyone not to attend protests or to get involved in politics. Malaysia has not fallen to explicit racist violence — thankfully enough — but its specter still haunts all of Malaysian politics.
In this atmosphere of fear, empathy can be hard to come by. When you are fearful of your own life, it is easy to see the poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free not as fellow victims of the neo-colonial order, but as competitors and enemy. Enemies who do not demand our solidarity and support, but who represent yet another threat to us, to the place that we have carved out for ourselves in society. It is easy to believe that they do not deserve “our” protection, that their lives do not matter, when “our” social and political lives are at stake.
It is easy to believe that. It is also wrong.
In a literal, non-euphemistic, non-rhetorical way, the lives and struggles of these migrants are also our struggles. Let us, for the sake of argument, put aside the fundamental moral obligations that we have to our fellow human beings. From a purely Malaysian self-interested perspective, the appalling conditions which today’s migrant workers labour under is a threat to the national order.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated in Singapore, and as is gradually becoming evident in Malaysia, the problems that afflict migrant workers easily spill over into the national mainstream as well. If migrant workers fall sick, and plagues take root and fester in their community, we will suffer as well: Disease does not abide by the same arbitrary distinctions of “migrant” and “local” that humans and our governments do. If migrant workers, underpaid and exploited, are forced to turn to crime as a last resort to survive, it is Malaysians who will be robbed, and Malaysians who will be robbed and burgled. If migrant workers are forced to protest and fight for better working conditions and to not be exploited, it is Malaysians who will be inconvenienced and troubled. Those who advocate harsher laws and greater oppression of our migrant workers must understand: cruelty is not synonymous with pragmatism. Brutality does not equal efficiency. Treating migrant workers with the barest minimum of decency, empathy, and kindness, is not only the moral thing to do, it is the right thing to do: for the sake of our country’s stability and continue prosperity.
My grandfather was a coolie. He was fleeing the Japanese invasion of China, treading coral reefs in the middle of the night to dodge Japanese bayonets, the soles of his feet cut to ribbons. When he came to Malaysia, he could only find work as a construction worker, where brick by bloody brick, he worked himself to the bone to support himself, my grandmother, and my mother and her three siblings.
My mother tells me that he used to be taller. Years of hard, brutal work have left him a very old man. His hearing is gone. His back is hunched. He is strong, still, and active, playing Chinese chess almost every day, but he is tired. Very, very, tired.
But he was lucky. He didn’t arrive under the pig trade system. He didn’t fall sick from dengue, malaria, cholera, or the billion other diseases that ran rampant through Malaya in those years. He wasn’t killed or crippled in a workplace accident caused by careless foremen with orders to work faster, and damn the workers. He survived. How many others didn’t? How many never got the chance to be fathers and grandfathers?
When I think about today’s migrant workers, I think about my grandfather. I think about how I have migrant blood in me. I think about how if nothing else, we have a moral responsibility to all the migrants who died building our country. We owe it to them to take care of their counterparts today: the coolies of the 21st century, to make sure that they don’t suffer unnecessarily the same cruelties and injustices that our ancestors did.
Malaysians are a proud people. We are proud of our culture, our history and heritage. We are proud of our Merdeka.We are proud of that we threw off the British yoke of tyranny and oppression to claim our country for ourselves. But we still cling to British model of labour exploitation and oppression. There is a straight line between the evils of the colonial economy and the Malaysia of today: the British pioneered and built the machine of evil, and we have continued using it.
It is time we fixed that.
Sources:
https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:13100:0::NO::P13100_COMMENT_ID:3330953
Michael Stenson, Class, Race, and Colonialism in Peninsular Malaysia, A Political History of Malaysian Indians, Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, Vinlin Press, Puchong, Print.
CF Yong, The Origins of Malayan Communism, Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, Vinlin Press, Puchong, Print.
Donna J Amoroso, Traditionalism and the Ascendancy of the Malay Ruling Class in Colonial Malaya, Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, Vinlin Press, Puchong, Print.