THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

406 Memoirs of Mustapha Hussain
Afterword – Cries of a Tormented Soul
Cheah Boon Kheng
Mustapha Hussain’s memoirs present an interesting insight into a sharp,
sensitive mind who turned to ethno-nationalism and later struggled for
moral integrity, justice and recognition.
Perak-born Mustapha, a cousin of the first President of Singapore,
Tun Yusof Ishak, was an armchair, pipe-smoking, left-wing intellectual
who taught at the Serdang Agricultural School before the war, but who
fell on hard times.
He loved to ride a fast motorcycle. He was an avid reader and a
member of the (British) Left Book Club. He might have gone through
life as a happy-go-lucky fellow if he had not been discriminated against
in the colonial civil service by white Europeans.
Life for him would have remained idyllic, being almost the equal of
an Englishman – teaching, reading and doing research, and ‘dressing and
behaving like a white man’ on paydays. But racial discrimination made
him a bitter diehard Malay nationalist, an anger that consumed his soul.
Mustapha owed his English education to his father, a land surveyor.
His socialism he attributed to a few European teachers and to books by
Gandhi, Nehru, Edgar Snow and other left-wing writers.
In 1934, he married Mariah binti Haji Abdul Hamid (formerly
Dorothy Ida Fenner). She was only 14, he 24. Once the children came,
he was anxious to further his (academic) career, but the lack of job
promotions unsettled him.
He joined other young disillusioned Malay college graduates like
Ishak Haji Muhammad and Ibrahim Yaakub, all angry young men like
himself imbued with nationalist ideals. They formed the Young Malay
Union (Kesatuan Melayu Muda) in 1938, with Mustapha as the group’s
vice president.
“KMM was founded by a group of radical left nationalists in their
twenties. Influenced by world history in general, and political events in
Turkey in particular, they desired a political body similar to the Young
Turks,” he recalls. “One bone of contention was (the) British policy of
allowing tens of thousands of ‘others’ into Malaya.”