THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

William R. Roff – Afterword 411
the Japanese regime in the peninsula, and how one might justify or defend
it, has seldom been much of an issue in Malaysian historiography – as it
has been, for example, in the Philippines. Mustapha’s memoir, however,
with its repeated reflections on ‘guilt’ and the need to expiate this or
explain it away, suggests that this is not at all a simple matter.
To the detached observer, there seems no need to excuse Malays, in
pursuit of nationalist ends, for assisting either Japanese rule or the British
rule that preceded (and indeed followed) it. Clearly, Mustapha, strongly
aware of active and armed (mainly left-wing) anti-Japanese resistance
from the jungle, did not see it quite like this. Along with the repressive
British security apparatus after re-occupation, this clearly undermined his
capacity, and perhaps that of others, to play a fuller and more open part
in the independence struggle.
But there are other questions here too. It seems possible that Mustapha
was a good deal further to the left in his allegiances than emerges here
(the repeated appearance in the text at crucial junctures of his selfconfessed
‘mentor’, the Indonesian ‘Trotskyist’ Sutan Jenain, rather
suggests this). If so, and given the obloquy attaching in Malaya from
1948 to communism, Mustapha’s problems in finding a satisfactory
identity and navigating a course for himself among these perilous shoals
– collaboration on one bank, communism on the other – come more
clearly into view. These cannot have been problems for him alone.
Thirdly – and this stems in part from the previous argument –
Mustapha’s memoirs are eloquent testimony to the tremendous damage
that the colonial relationship and its inequalities does, both to individuals
and to the societies of which they are a part. The petty humiliations and
indignities to which many aspirant Malays were subject (as Mustapha
details for himself); the relative immiserisation of a patronised Malay
peasantry; the denial of the right to determine, or even to discuss in any
radical way, the future of one’s own people: all speak to the vitiating and
ultimately destructive effects of colonial rule. If these are lessons we still
have to learn at the outset of the 21 st century, Mustapha Hussain speaks
to them.
Above all, his is an intensely human account of one man’s life and
concerns, testimony to a long personal struggle for justice and freedom.
Small wonder that he and many of his audience were in tears as he ended
its initial recital.
Note
1. Ahmad Boestamam. Carving the Path to the Summit. Edited with an Introduction
by William R. Roff (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1979): xv.