Jaafar Mohammad, the patriarch.
Among those credited with having built
Malaysia, three came from the same family: Jaafar Mohamed, the first
chief minister of Johor;his son Onn Jaafar, the founder of the United
Malays National Organization; and then his son Tun Hussein Onn, the
country's third prime minister.
Yet, although their
involvement in public affairs spanned nearly a century and a half from
1854 to1981, their names are not the most widely lauded. A charitable
explanation might be that Malaysians do not know their history well
enough, so that the first seems an antique and far-off figure; the
second a quarrelsome fellow who abandoned his party, thus ceding the
honor of being the leader at independence to Tunku Abdul Rahman, and
whose political career ended in failure; and the third a relatively
short-term premier whose administration appeared to be no more than a
lull compared with the rough seas successfully navigated (stirred up,
would be another way of looking at it) by his predecessor Abdul Razak
and successor Mahathir Mohamed.
Not so, says Zainah
Anwar, a respected and independent columnist and the long-time head of
the feisty Sisters in Islam group. Her handsomely produced volume aims
to give these men's achievements the weight they deserve; and as her
father was a close associate of Onn Jaafar – his private secretary when
Onn too served as Johor chief minister and the man who came up with
UMNO's name – she is in a good position to make the case.
Her
well-sketched biographies show just how far the country has come.
Although Jaafar Mohamed's family had been part of the elite who had
served the Johor royalty for generations, originally in Riau (now in
Indonesia, but which had been the capital of the old sultanate) and then
in Singapore (the seat of government only moved to the peninsula in
1866), no wealth accompanied that connection. Jaafar's father worked as a
fisherman and his mother took on embroidery jobs.
It was
when the state coffers started filling from the mid-19th century
onwards, with revenues from newly opened pepper and gambier farms, that
Johor began to develop. And men such as Jaafar who, along with other
children from the royal retinue, had received a good education in
English and Malay in Singapore, were ready to form a modern
administrative corps that was far in advance of the other Malay states
and enabled Johor to resist the imposition of British rule longer than
any other.
Three of Jaafar's sons, his stepson and his
nephew were later to follow him as chief minister – a remarkable record
of public service.
ot that this was always easy, as
the career of Jaafar's son Onn shows. Despite the closeness of their
families, he was frequently in conflict with Sultan Ibrahim, who reigned
from 1895-1959, being not only sacked on his orders in 1927 but exiled
to Singapore as well. Later they were to be reconciled, and Onn also
became Chief Minister in 1946; but more momentous events took place that
year.
The British Malayan Union plan would have reduced
the nine hereditary rulers to ciphers (not that they complained – they
all signed up to the proposal) and gave equal citizenship rights and
status to "the Chinese and other races whom the Malays regarded as
immigrants brought in without their agreement by the colonial masters".
It was Onn who led the fight and brought a hitherto unknown unity to
Malays across the peninsula, and he too who persuaded the sultans, just
as they were about to attend the installation of the first governor of
the Malayan Union, not to go.
In the event, "the only
Malay present was an officer who had been appointed as ADC to the new
governor.... It was an unprecedented demonstration of Malay resistance
and it made the Malayan Union a non-starter." For that alone, as the
spiritual father to the Federation of Malaya that gained independence in
1957, Onn deserves to be better remembered; but his later falling out
with UMNO – he left in 1951 when his suggestion that membership be
opened to other races was rejected – made his record one that the
official narrative has found inconvenient to emphasise.
The
book devotes more time to Hussein Onn than to his father and
grandfather, and is described as being the most comprehensive account of
an "overlooked and underrated" prime minister (1978-81). It is
certainly a warm portrayal of a man so painstaking and thorough that he
took eight years to pass his law exams in London, as he insisted on
answering each question so fully that he kept running out of time to
complete the others.
If Zainah does not quite rescue
Hussein from the charge that this meticulousness and caution led to
nothing very much happening during his administration (although she
points out that under his leadership the country enjoyed growth of 8.6
per cent, compared to 7.1 per cent in the preceding four years), it is,
as with much in this book, the contrast between what Hussein was, and
what others have not been, that counts. She does not labour this, but
she has no need to.
Hussein was not avaricious, had no
cronies, and was so scrupulous in avoiding any appearance of favouritism
that on becoming deputy prime minister in 1973 he "issued instructions –
in red ink – to department heads that any proposal from his family
members for government contracts should not be entertained." His sister
Azah was particularly badly affected by this, as a licence she already
had to import rice from Thailand was terminated as a result. Later she
submitted a paper to set up a car assembly plant to his office, only to
discover that her brother had thrown it into the bin without even
looking at it.
Hussein's relatives were actually
disadvantaged by his stance – they were not granted the consideration
that others enjoyed - as he discovered in retirement when he asked Azah
how she, a divorcee with seven children, had managed. "I told him I
robbed a bank. He apologised and said he didn't know I had suffered,"
she said.
It goes without saying that such Puritanism is
virtually unknown in Malaysian politics today. But this is just one of
many examples in which the characters and times of these three men could
serve not just as an inspiration to their countrymen, but also as a
very stern reproach. When Onn Jaafar, for instance, was made a Dato
(sometimes spelled Datuk) in 1940, Zainah writes that it was "then a
much-honoured title, limited to only 28 recipients at any one time in
the state of Johor."
The elaboration left implicit is
that while there are still some who do that title equal honour, the
numbers of those thus elevated have become so large that it is hardly
surprising the currency has been devalued, to put it politely.
The
relationship to and the standing of the sultans is another area in
which the lives of Jaafar Mohamed and Onn Jaafar, in particular, are
instructive. Today, the very mildest criticism of a ruler carries the
risk that some ardent Malay chauvinist will threaten legal action. But
Jaafar, that most loyal of royal servants, would have disagreed. He told
his children before his death that "all his life he had believed and
acted in accordance with the Malay adat that to go against the sultan
constituted menderhaka or treason. But after his death, he said, the
next generation must be brave enough to oppose the Raja. If the Raja was
cruel or did anything that was not right, the people must speak out."
His
son took this to heart with gusto, frequently acting in a manner that
would surely later have had him locked up under the ISA in a trice. But
Onn knew, not least because of the Johor constitution of 1895 that his
father had helped draft, that obligation went both ways between the
rulers and their subjects. Their agreement to the Malayan Union was, as
Zainah writes, a "betrayal of Malay rights". He told them in the
showdown before the governor's installation that if they did not change
their minds, "their rakyat would withdraw their support and loyalty."
On
a note of personal behaviour, some may also find a more contemporary
echo to a 1929 letter by the then British High Commissioner, Sir Hugh
Clifford, about Sultan Ibrahim of Johor: "He occasionally forgets the
dignity due to his position so far as to stoop to acts of personal
violence."
If Zainah Anwar makes a good defence of
Hussein Onn (father of the current Home Minister, and uncle of the Prime
Minister), particularly over his disgust with a political culture that
could see a man imprisoned for corruption – former Selangor Chief
minister Harun Idris – elected to UMNO's supreme council while still in
jail, it is Onn Jaafar who emerges as the real hero of the book. He may
well have been too unbending for his own good and capable of massive
miscalculation when it came to his own political career (his formation
of the Independence of Malaya Party in 1951 was a disaster that
consigned him to the wilderness), but he was also prophetic about the
necessity of overcoming divisions rather than entrenching them.
He
looked forward to the day, he told a British official in 1949, when no
citizen would say "I am a Malay" or "I am a Malayan Chinese", but would
instead declare "I am a man of Malaya".
Change Malaya
for Malaysia and Onn would still be waiting. "Legacy of Honour" is
valuable not only as the history of three men whose lives should be
better known, but as a mirror to those aspects of the country for which
they strove that have not met their expectations. Many Malaysians may
wish that, like Dorian Gray, they had a picture in the attic to save
them from the reality of what that looking glass exposes.
Sholto Byrnes is a contributing editor of the New Statesman and divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and London
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