The Informal Apartheid

Imagine you are a stranger to my college, KMYS, someone who has just arrived in Malaysia. You walk into the impressive and beautiful campus with modern facilities. In the students you see an eagerness in their eyes to be part of the Malaysian vision. These are the boys and girls who will play an integral part in Malaysia’s future nation-building. However, you notice that something was not right. Well, you may have imagined it.

So you end up walking into the rectangular orange-tiled building where all the students have their meals, the Dining Hall. It looks pleasant and clean enough from the outside, but you step in, and now it is all too clear.

The Informal Apartheid in Malaysian society, is right here and alive in a microcosm of the country’s people, KMYS.

What do I mean by the Informal Apartheid?

As many of you probably know, apartheid is the policy of racial segregation practiced in South Africa from the post war era up to the 1990’s. The word is taken from the Afrikaans’s word for ‘separateness’. When the policy was in place in South Africa, everything was done separately for the races, much for the benefit of the whites and the detriment of the blacks.

While that apartheid was officially sanctioned, Malaysia, despite wanting to be a harmonious multi-racial nation, is suffering from an informal apartheid. While outwardly the people of this country live in peace and harmony, beneath this superficial surface lurks suspicion, distrust and disunity amongst the different races, and this is a recipe for disaster for the country’s future. The racial tragedy in Kampung Medan shows how fragile our so called Bangsa Malaysia is.

The best example is not far from us, taking a look at the KMYS Dining Hall is a good illustration on this Informal Apartheid. Without anyone’s orders, without any formal rulings, there is a Malay side, and a Non-Malay side. This is not simply confined to the Dining Hall, but in general life, inside and outside KMYS. Racial polarisation is ever evident in the country. Malays mix only with Malays, Chinese with Chinese and Indians with Indians. While there are exceptions, particularly in the urban middle class, the majority of Malaysians live in different worlds.

The Informal Apartheid is a dangerous cancer that our generation is inheriting. First moulded by the British colonialists of the past through the policy of Divide and Rule, this disease has not been successfully eradicated to this day. Historically, the British sought to ensure that the three major races of the country would have minimal contact between one another so that a truly united anti-colonial movement could not be forged. The Malays lived in the kampungs and had an economic role mainly as paddy planters and fishermen. The Chinese lived in the urban centres where tin-mining was the livelihood, with some indulging in business. The Indians meanwhile were confined to plantations due to their main occupation as rubber-planters.

This has greatly changed, partly due to the New Economic Policy undertaken by the government following the race riots of May the 13th 1969. There is less occupational identification with race, but at the same time, this created new problems.

We are born equal and colour-blind. While scientists do acknowledge that different races have some different genetic attributes, the issue of intelligence and IQ for example are more attributable to environmental factors rather than our DNA. In New Scientist, William Dickens and James Flynn questioned the infamous Arthur Jensen mathematical model that touched on why the American blacks recorded lower IQ scores compared to whites. They argued the existence of ‘social multipliers’ that greatly magnified the effects of the environment on human beings and thus explains why different ethnic groups have different average IQ scores.

I am blessed to have been in different environments in my life. I had a multiracial urban mix during my primary school years – my friends included the children of middle-class families living in huge bungalows in Subang Jaya- to those who come from the squatter colonies such as Kampung Medan (where the tragic racial riots recently occurred). While the consciousness of being Malay for me was there, we mixed with relative ease with each other.

Later I was selected to attend a fully-residential school where all the students are Malays, but they come from a variety of backgrounds, not only from KL and PJ but also from the East Coast, Sabah and Sarawak. It was here when the issue of race was strongly driven into our young minds, where we were trained to look at the other races as threats to our survival.

Before coming to KMYS, I went to another private college and I was the only Malay boy in my class. It was a good experience that opened my eyes to the Malaysian reality, that there are other races in Malaysia and that we can live with each other in relative harmony. Contrary to some people’s belief, I managed to be good friends with them at that time, and yet they respected our differences. They respected that I was a Muslim and frequently I would challenge them to intellectual jousts on the issue of race.

Then I came to KMYS. A significant number of the Malay students here come from residential schools that have either a hundred percent Malay population or a largely Bumiputera surrounding. There are also Chinese students who had spent a good deal of time in Chinese schools. Probably due to these differences in our experience, we see a visible Informal Apartheid in our life in the College.

One night I chatted with a fellow student, a Chinese girl from Kuala Lumpur. Somehow or rather, we started to talk about the issue of ethnic polarisation in our College. She came from an urban national type school in Damansara, not different from my primary school, and she said at that school people were less race-conscious. The moment she stepped into KMYS, she said the matter of being Malay, Chinese or Indian became highly important. The Chinese students would hang around among themselves during break-time, the same goes to the Malays, though it is not so apparent among the Indians because they are not too many of them!

I must say that I myself am not immune from the Informal Apartheid. Most of the time, I conform to the invisible divisions that exists in KMYS, although I have tried to challenge it a few times. There are some students, from all races, that continuously ignore these rules, but generally they are those students who come from daily schools in the cities and have a middle-class background.

How can we overcome this problem? It must be contented that to fight it right now at our level is a difficult task, as the problem has its roots deep since we began our life as Malaysians, and does not start in KMYS. This is just like the suggestion from the government not so long ago to make it compulsory for university students to stay in mixed-accommodations so that racial integration can occur. How can they expect any student to be comfortable with their counterparts from other races if they have been brought up by the system, environment and culture to have racial blinkers? Mixing them around when they are already adults would not effectively solve the problem; it might even aggravate racial tension.

Just look at the system that shaped us. In every form, every statistic, ethnicity seems to be an important component. Sometimes I feel the cheek simply to right Malaysian at the blank area for Keturunan. The existence of vernacular schools, whether we want to accept it or not, is a major hindrance towards the birth of One People. Greg Sheridan, the author of Asian Values Western Dreams wrote in his book, “…Preserving Tamil schools, while useful for Indian politicians in that it preserves their support base, tends to ghettoise the Indians, narrowing their horizons and limiting their opportunities.” Indeed, even the Indian leaders are not to keen to send their children to Tamil schools, preferring to send them to national-type schools where the language of instruction is in Malay. At the same time, the government seems to have not being able to implement properly the Vision School project, which as an idea is good, that led to the controversies surrounding it.

The action of taking the crème de la crème of Malay students into residential schools with a mostly Bumiputera student make-up also has serious repercussions towards nation building. The paradox is that in order to help the Malays, we do not expose them to the real competition outside, and only by realising the different habits of other races, for example, can they significantly improve. Generally, the future Malay leaders come from this group of people, and if for a crucial period of their lives these group of Malays are segregated from the Malaysian reality, how can you expect them to deal with the issue effectively when they lead the nation in the future?

Most of us would be furthering our studies to the United Kingdom or Australia. While now we have familiar faces all around us to make us feel at home, living and studying abroad would take away this security blanket. We would be in an alien environment, and we would be small minorities in the universities there. Hopefully, for all of us who are so conscious about the issue of race, we can now learn and appreciate our similarities rather than looking at our asphyxiating differences.

We are the future of Malaysia. Each and every one of us, regardless of our race and religion, should play an important role in reforming the system so as to make it possible for a truly united Bangsa Malaysia to be born. At a time when people are talking about globalisation, communalism seems to be an outdated ism. Being open minded to the realities of the world does not mean that we should forget our roots. We should all appreciate the different heritages that we have, but we should not look at our different cultures as being barriers, but as being opportunities for us to learn from each other. Taking Thomas Friedman’s analogy, we should all get the benefits of the Lexus while not abandoning our Olive Tree. Our religions, our culture have always acknowledged the meeting of different cultures and civilizations, and they do not stop us from learning to live as one people. I maybe gauche in writing this essay, but I do hope that all of you would accept it with an open mind and an open heart.

24/07/10

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