THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

70 Memoirs of Mustapha Hussain
reputable background? He pretended not to know our heritage! Do we
not come from very fine families? Would you believe that he had said,
“A ‘C’ is always a ‘C’” (‘C’ referring to a commoner).
But my father did not and would not understand. He insisted, “Our
family has the means. I am willing to pay whatever it takes to get Ahmed
a place. How come the College accepts sons of commoners from Negeri
Sembilan and Pahang, but not my children?”
My father went into a deep gloom for weeks, as if he was the one
who had been declined a seat. It was the last straw in his attempt to get
my brother Ahmed, a very talented student, into the Malay College.
The Newspapers
My active association with newspapers began when I was just 14, as an
errand boy for my father. Every afternoon, he asked me to carry the
Malay newspapers he had already read to the Matang Mosque to be read
by Muslims in between the five daily prayers. As I mentioned earlier, he
felt that reading newspapers was better than aimless chatter. I did that
diligently until I was sent home by a religious official who warned, “Tell
your father and all his newspaper-fan friends that they are satans.”
After that most unfortunate incident, my father diverted the newspapers
to the home of his brother, Tok Ngah Mansor. But before I did
that, it was my duty to translate the editorials from Malay into English
so that all of us could expand our English vocabulary and improve our
command of the language. It was a difficult task, but I did not dare refuse.
For this purpose, he bought a very expensive dictionary, but again, to my
father, the value of the book lay in its content.
A playful teenager with small powers of concentration, I was initially
uninterested in editorials from Saudara, Edaran Zaman and Al Ikhwan,
let alone to translate them! But after some weeks, I learned to enjoy its
hidden messages and its constructive content so much so that I began to
translate them without pulling a long face.
These Malay editorials harped on Malay poverty, backwardness and
weaknesses, especially in education, business and economics. They called
for more educational opportunities and facilities for Malay youths, and
insisted that no others (non-Malays and colonialists) should administer
the country. But they were extremely careful not to be too direct; they
could not afford to, for fear of closure. Editors often ended their pieces
with some kind of declaration of allegiance to the authorities.
From reading and translating these biting editorials, my political
consciousness began to grow, first, in my thinking, and then, in my entire