What could have been very dry academic text is fleshed out with a bountiful crop of oral history.

LAND TO TILL: The Chinese in the Agricultural Economy of Malaysia
By Tan Pek Leng
Publisher: Centre for Malaysian Chinese Studies, 285 pages
ISBN 978-9833908042

CHOOSING to read Land to Till took a bit of deliberation. On the one hand, the book contained a lot of tables with loads of numbers. On the other hand, I knew nothing about the role of the Chinese in Malaysian agriculture, and I like learning about things, anything.

So I made up my mind to plough through this book on agriculture (yes, pun very much intended!), to start at page one and trod determinedly through a few pages a day.

I did not count on author Tan Pek Ling making the subject so interesting. Despite stumbling over and sometimes completely ignoring the tables, Land to Till proved to be a smooth and absorbing tale.
Tan begins each chapter with an overview of some aspect of agriculture in Malaysia. In these chapters she outlines the cultural background, the process (planting, growing, gathering, processing), and even the local and international socio-political events that led to the success of a certain crop.

At the end of each chapter are stories she has gathered about individual workers and landowners. Many of the people she writes about are no longer living, so she interviewed descendants, transcribing oral history that otherwise may have been eventually lost.

Many of the stories are of adventure, risk, struggle and success. A great number are of Chinese people newly-arrived in Malaysia, others of a first generation born in this country. Some are extremely rich today, while others continue to scrape by.

In one of the most riveting stories Tan allows the person involved to speak for himself. She reprints excerpts of Recollections of a Chinese Planter which was originally printed in the Malaysian Estate Owner’s Association’s newsletter and annual report. This was written by a H.L. Tang, who started out as an assistant on a British-owned estate. Although he is both hardworking and experienced, he earns a third of what is offered to British staff who “unless he had visited Kew Gardens, didn’t even know what the rubber tree looked like”. He eventually resigned after being told that even after eight years, he would not earn the same as a newly-disembarked Englishman. His “arrogance” resulted in his being blacklisted from European estates but he persisted, slowly and painfully paving the way to equality. It was a page-turner.

The chapter on research (in which the significant role of women is acknowledged) will have readers swelling with pride at local accomplishments.

Not all stories are so uplifting. Tan’s book is a valuable historical record, an education and also an impassioned plea for those who are in danger of disappearing.

Is it not always the case that we admire those who do well for themselves while those most directly involved in our survival are ignored? One cannot think of the country’s agricultural wealth without making the immediate leap to palm oil and rubber. But the farmers who put fresh, nutritious and affordable grain, fruit and vegetables on our tables work just as hard – for less return and with no secure future.

Tan not only writes about the problems they face (knowing that at any moment they can be kicked off their land is frightening for anyone, especially a farmer), she also outlines solutions to ensure that this most necessary form of farming continues.

Hip hip hurrah for the author! Long may she write.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2010/1/24/lifebookshelf/4872870&sec=lifebookshelf

Date: Saturday, 23 January 2010

Venue: SIRD/Gerakbudaya (11 Lorong 11/4E, 46200 Petaling Jaya)

Please see the flyer below for more details about Mr Salah Salah and the PFLP.

For further information, please write to msri@streamyx.com.

2010 New Year Sale
Friday, 15 January to Sunday, 17 January 2010
9:30 am to 8:00 pm

We have High-quality, Provocative, Controversial, Inspiring Books.

BIG Discounts from 30% to 100%!!

COME and BUY these stimulating books!

Books on Arts and Literature, Current Affairs, Development, Economincs, Environment, Globalization, Indigenous, Labour and Migrant Workers, Memoirs, Oral History, Politics and International Relations, Religions and Cultures, Social Science, Women and Gender Studies, and more

Books from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and other countries.

Please see the following flyer for more information.

Feel free to circulate this notice to your friends and colleagues.

Date: Saturday 9 January 2010
Time: 2.00–5.00 pm
Venue: Kompleks Penyayang, Jalan Utama, Penang (next to Governor’s Residence)
Organized by: SIRD & Sembang-sembang Forum

Programme

Welcome by Organizers

Video presentation

Official Book Launch and Presentation

Speakers

Discussion

Book sale and signing

For further details please contact: Chong Ton Sin 016 379 7231

Providing a corrective is Making and Unmaking the Asylum. At the center of Dr. Loh Kah Seng’s study are men, women and children from different ethnic groupings in Singapore and Malaysia who, as a result of being diagnosed with leprosy, ended up in sanatoriums such as Singapore’s Silra Home and the Sungai Buloh leprosarium north of Kuala Lumpur.

The book examines how a “high modernist” development ethos impacted on the history of leprosy in colonial and postcolonial Singapore and Malaysia. As defined by social scientist James Scott, cited by the author, this is “a self confidence about scientific and technological progress.”

The ideology and practices that grew from this have had, according to Dr. Loh, paradoxical outcomes upon the management of leprosy in the two countries. On the one hand, the high modernist state’s will to clean up social ‘messiness’ — combined with the coercive powers to do so — led to the segregation of people affected by leprosy and near-total control over them by the state, which sought to protect society from an imagined social danger.

On the other hand, the author documents how the high modernist logic was subverted, or at least resisted, by the very people it sought to dominate. The majority for whom the asylums became their permanent home devised strategies to salvage their ‘bad’ lives. They formed friendships, married, practiced their religion and put on cultural performances. Some joined secret societies, gambled, smoked opium, trafficked in contraband items, and partook in riots and strikes. In so doing, they sought to contest and remake the terms of their confinement.

What this thoughtful and discerning study underscores is the need to be mindful of how people are treated, or mistreated, in the campaign against infection. Leprosy may be an old disease compared with modern pandemics, but the lessons it teaches are no less relevant for it.

Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in Singapore and Malaysia by Loh Kah Seng (SIRD, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, 2009).

AUTHOR: Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied is a lecturer in the Malay Studies Department of the National University of Singapore.

WHO Goodwill Ambassador’s Newsletter
No. 41 December 2009: 5
http://www.nippon-foundation.or.jp/eng/2jcahj000005bps8-att/8f0j6k000006tuct.pdf

Dear Friends,

Strategic Information and Research Development Centre and Youth for Change cordially invite you to a Public Lecture by the well-known public intellectual, Dr Jomo Kwame Sundaram of the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Details of the lecture are as follows:

Title: When will we ever learn? Has Malaysia learnt the correct lessons from past crises?
Date: Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Hotel Singgahsana, Persiaran Barat, off Jalan Sultan, 46760 Petaling Jaya (next to Taman Jaya LRT Station)
Admission: FREE

The Topic
The world is still struggling to emerge from the longest and deepest financial crisis in six decades. For every piece of optimistic news about recovery there are stories of setbacks and worsening downturns. Asia has been here before. A decade ago, the Asian financial crisis swept across the region. It not only prompted some rethinking of how to ‘manage’ financial crises but also stimulated some serious rethinking about the character of the development model in Asia. Lessons were learnt and new policy and institutional frameworks were put into place. But the severity of the current crisis begs a question: did politicians and policymakers really learn the right lessons from ten years ago? This is the burning question that is addressed in Jomo’s important public talk.

The Speaker
Jomo is one of the world’s leading thinkers on questions of development — not just development economics but also the policy commitments and institutional frameworks for international cooperation that are necessary to deliver both reform and sustainability. From his position at the United Nations he is able to shape debates and influence their outcomes. At the same time, he remains profoundly committed to building longstanding solutions to the most pressing problems that face the world today - environmental degradation and climate change, financial disorder and continuing uneven development. Come and listen to him offer important reflections on what has gone wrong and what might be done to advance a progressive agenda.

Feel free to circulate this invitation and notice to your colleagues and friends.

书名：满楼风雨霹雳天
编者：唐南发
出版：燧人氏
年份：2009年11月
ISBN：978-983-2197-32-4
页数：87
售价：RM 16.00

2009年2月，霹雳州风雨交加，民选政府被推翻，爆发宪政危机，以致纷争迭起，众怨难平。

从议员变节、王室介入、官僚僭越，到官方挡议员、掳议长等事件，国政的夺权过程不但违背民意，而且挑战议会民主、侵蚀宪政根基，更在司法权间僭侵立法机关下破坏三权分立体制，同时民间抗争也屡遭打压，民主化前路可谓风雨如晦。

本书按此主轴收录十位作者的十六篇评论，从多重角度提供不同诠释，并佐以大事纪、大选图表、彩图述事及纪录短片，解说事件前后的风风雨雨，希望能作为政治改革的参考资料，也为我国这重要历史章节留下草稿。

Programme

Welcome by Ismail Gareth Richards

Video presentation

Speakers

Discussion

The Editors’ Response

Official Book Launch and Presentation

Light refreshments will be served

Book sale and signing

For further details please contact: Chong Ton Sin 016 379 7231 or Clare 019 227 4473

Living with stigma of leprosy
Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer
899 words
(c) 2009 Singapore Press Holdings Limited

LOCATED on the eponymous isle that flanks Penang Bridge, the Jerejak Rainforest and Spa is an idyllic retreat hugged by thick Malaysian jungle.

The visitor is greeted by glossy darkwood floors, intricate wood carvings adorn its walls and the linen is spotless white-and-blue. But for those old enough to remember, from 1871 till World War II, this was a fearsome no-go area that served to isolate leprosy patients

It was, in fact, colonial Malaya’s first such colony, to be followed much later in 1930 by the Sungai Buloh leprosarium set up in Selangor.

In Singapore, from where the British governed the rest of Malaya, there were holding areas for leprosy sufferers only in Kandang Kerbau Hospital and then McNair Road. Eventually, such patients were sent to Pulau Jerejak for good.

What a world away Jerejak’s Balinese body scrubs, steam baths and jacuzzis seem from the frightful 4,000-year-old disease whose name comes from the Greek word lepis for scale.

Since 1873, leprosy has also come to be known as Hansen’s Disease, after Norwegian scientist G.H. Armauer Hansen, who first discovered that it was caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae.

Up till the early 20th century, leprosy was thought to be incurable, but a cocktail of drugs proved to be effective in stamping out this badly disfiguring and nerve- deadening disease that often results in the loss of sight and limbs.

Unfortunately, it was often confused with syphilis and thus erroneously thought to be highly contagious when, actually, scientists have since found that 95 per cent of people are immune to leprosy.

All this makes the disease’s tortuous and sometimes callous course in Malaya all the more tragic.

It was only in 1949, after three British nuns from the Catholic order of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood settled down here and agreed to nurse leprosy and tuberculosis (TB) patients, that the British authorities were willing to set up a leprosarium proper, the Trafalgar Home in Woodbridge.

Such things are all but forgotten these days, but local historian Loh Kah Seng has just launched his book, Making And Unmaking The Asylum: Leprosy And Modernity In Singapore And Malaysia.

The book tracks how the British authorities were bent on compulsory segregation of all sufferers, which in effect rendered anyone stricken by leprosy effectively a walking corpse.

It was from late 2004 that Dr Loh had been researching the history of leprosy in Malaya for the International Leprosy Association’s Global Project. His core finding is that, in banning leprosy sufferers from mingling with the rest of society as a means of minimising the risk of contagion, Singapore’s early governments prioritised the control of society for economic progress and modernisation above the needs of individuals.

Dr Loh, who has also studied the effects of the Great Depression in 1930s Malaya, points out that even so, the British were selective in how they regarded leprosy sufferers in their colonies. For example, he argues, because Singapore was important to them economically, they made it illegal not to confine institutionally anyone with leprosy. In India, under its 1898 Lepers Act, by contrast, only paupers had to be segregated.

While the colonial government pursued compulsory segregation on the grounds that leprosy was highly infectious, Dr Loh points out that they backslid badly when they were short on funds. In 1937, when the Great Depression squeezed budgets and housing people became a great cost, the British government in Malaya admitted that leprosy was only ‘very slightly infectious’ and that compulsory segregation was ‘unnecessary and costly’.

His book abounds with examples of the British taking a sledgehammer to flies in dealing with the hundreds of leprosy sufferers, especially considering that TB was vastly more contagious but patients were allowed to roam freely.

Dr Loh records former leprosy sufferer Kuang Wee Kee as saying that, of the most-feared diseases in mid-20th century Singapore, ‘leprosy, TB and mental illness were the three brothers. Mental illness was…the little brother. Second brother was TB. Leprosy was the big brother. These were the three big clans’.

Once segregated, however, the leprosy sufferers were well fed and encouraged to be active in the open air as much as possible. They even grew vegetables and tended livestock, albeit within the confines of their delineated compounds.

Many gave up the struggle against the hopelessness to which society had consigned them. Many thus became incorrigible gamblers, instigating fights and killing themselves.

Yet many other leprosy sufferers ‘unmade the asylum’, as Dr Loh puts it, by founding musical troupes, writing and performing plays, and publishing inmates’ stories in magazines for sale.

Unfortunately, the push of progress continues to belittle their efforts to live with self-respect. In September 2005, residents of the Singapore Leprosy Relief Association had to move from their leafy premises with generous spaces to a flatted factory-like building. There, even for married couples, privacy is no priority. Finding their own digs is often a pipe dream given the stigma that still sticks to the disease.

Noting how contagious diseases are rearing their ugly heads these days, Dr Loh muses: ‘We have a social duty to be mindful of how ordinary people are treated, and mistreated, in the campaign against disease and infection.’

suk@sph.com.sg