SINGAPORE: A Time of Lepers

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In the year 1703 I called at Johor on my way to China, and he [the King of Johor] treated me very kindly and made me a present of the island of Singapore, but I told him it could be of no use to a private person, though a proper place for a company to settle a colony on, lying in the centre of trade and being accommodated with good rivers and safe harbours, so conveniently situated that all winds served shipping both to go out and come into these rivers.

—Captain Alexander Hamilton

The British never really wanted Singapore, and it was only at the insistence of East India Company Merchant Thomas Stamford Raffles that a British government reluctantly established a colony there in 1826. As the China trade swelled, Singapore waxed fat, but the British were always a little tardy about managing its swarming population (now 1,100,000, mostly Chinese) and its uniquely Asian problems. In 1942 the Japanese took Singapore in a quick march, and British prestige never recovered. Last week British feet were dragging again on Singapore.

The issue was one which has brought trouble to many corners of the British Commonwealth: How far can the local population's just demands for independence be met without jeopardizing the colony's strategic value? Red China has been wooing and winning Singaporeans. Although there are only 3,000 known, hardcore Communists on the island, they maintain solid control through youth groups and labor unions. The Communists have been whooping up local demands for independence and scoring possession of the magic word merdeka (freedom).

The Parable. A year ago the British permitted Singaporeans to elect their own constituent assembly, kept control only of security (courts and police), defense and foreign affairs. The British hoped to get a democratic government with which they could make a long-term arrangement for final independence. What they got was a coalition left-wing government and a phenomenon fully representative of volatile, multiracial Singapore: Chief Minister David Marshall.

No Communist, mercurial, spaniel-eyed Marshall is no Briton either. Of Spanish origin, his family migrated from the Levant to Singapore, where his father Anglicized the Hebrew family name, Mashal (meaning parable). Born in 1908, young Marshall went to Singapore's St. David's School, suffered malaria and tuberculosis, sold automobiles, went to London to study law, and set up as a barrister in Singapore. A member of the Singapore Volunteer Force in World War II, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942; his fellow prisoners remember his determined cheeriness in a Hokkaido camp in which 40% of the inmates died. After the war he became a leading figure in the colony's criminal courts, winning acquittals for his clients and some $112,000 a year for himself. Bored with the businessman's Progressive Party, he switched to the Singapore Labor Party, vaguely socialistic and violently anticolonial. A flamboyant, pipe-smoking, bush-shirted political campaigner, he posed as the prophet of merdeka.