THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

122 Memoirs of Mustapha Hussain
Officer) can do to me whatever he wants! I cannot bear to see my
hungry children cry!” To evade the legal regulations, the chettiars used
middlemen, other Malays, as front men for their official transactions.
The Depression forced the British to slash their administrative
expenditure by retrenching employees, freezing new recruitment, halting
programmes deemed not urgent, using envelopes several times over, and
reducing the allowances of Government Officers. The School of Agriculture
in Serdang was almost a victim; it had been built after a hard fight
and with a low budget. The British also gazetted a law forbidding Malays
from mortgaging their Malay Reservation land to non-Malays.
The political chapter of the 1930s should be opened with the Chinese
lion dance, with the aggressive dragon ready to devour a nation. It was a
time when the Malays were beginning to be, and needed to be, alarmed
by open Chinese claims for equal rights with the Malays. They demanded
greater involvement in Malaya’s administration including recruitment into
the Malayan Administrative Service. They demanded equal rights with
the Malays on the grounds that they too considered Malaya their home,
and no longer just a place where they temporarily earned a living.
Since 1920, Chinese immigrants had entered Malaya in droves
through Singapore, without restrictions by the British. When the Malay
rulers questioned the need to bring in foreign labour, the British retorted,
“They are necessary to carry out many kinds of work.” This influx was
a hot topic among the Malays. Politics had reached the kampungs at the
grassroots level.
Consequently, the number of Chinese multiplied to almost equal the
number of Malays except in the five Unfederated Malay States of Perlis,
Kedah, Kelantan, Trengganu and Johore. Some Federated Malay States
had more Chinese. The 1931 census in Selangor and Perak further
horrified the Malays. The Selangor population was only 23.1 per cent
Malay compared to 45.3 per cent Chinese; there were only 35.6 per cent
Malays compared to 42.5 percent Chinese in Perak. Naturally, discussions
among Malays in coffee shops and mosques centred on this issue.
In 1931, the Malays received a slap in the face when a Penang
Chinese, Lim Cheng Ean, loudly asked, “Who says this land belongs to
the Malays?” This highly educated and wealthy Chinese, by virtue of his
domicile in Penang, was a British subject, not a subject of the Malay Rulers.
That explained his boldness. The Malays could hardly stomach his claims,
but the British did nothing. The Malay rulers and elite who claimed the
right to administer the Malays seemed to be watching the drama with
folded arms. It was therefore up to the common Malays to unite and
pledge determination to meet all challenges presented by the immigrants.