Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, Barry Wain [best mystery novels of all time .txt] 📗

If his father was emotionally distant, Mahathir found love and affection among the women in the household. While his sisters indulged the last born, his mother could be counted on to provide protection on those occasions that his father lost his temper with the boy.[18] They called him Che Det, the pet name by which he would always be known to relatives and close friends in Kedah. Che is a short form of encik, the Malay equivalent of mister, while Det is a popular shortening of the final syllable of Mahathir.

Living in a traditional wooden house on stilts with an attap roof of palm fronds, the kind found in every kampung, village, Mahathir was raised in a normal Malay environment. He attended the local Malay-medium primary school for boys — barefoot because his parents could not afford to buy him shoes[19] — and took Qur'an-reading classes after school. But Mahathir was obviously different from the other kids in the area. While they ran carefree in the fields, he and his siblings were confined to home in supervised study sessions, even during holidays. Whereas Mahathir could read, write and speak English, most of the neighbourhood kids could not. They sometimes teased him and called him mamak, a term for an Indian Muslim that can be derogatory, and to which Mahathir long remained sensitive.[20] "He was nothing like us," some of the former neighbours and old friends — all fans of the retired prime minister — who attended a reunion dinner for Mahathir in Alor Star in 2006, told organizers.[21]

After completing his primary education, Mahathir sailed through the entrance examination that would enable him to enter the Government English School, founded by his father in 1908, and later renamed the Sultan Abdul Hamid College. Established for the convenience of royalty and the rich, the school had become much more egalitarian, dropping the restriction on non-Malays and admitting Chinese, Indians, Thais and others. In fact, the entrance exam was a barrier for many Malays, who lived in rural areas and either could not afford to continue studying, or did not have sufficient command of English. Mahathir felt a twinge of pride at being a cut above his former schoolmates, but knew he owed it to his father's rigorous routine: All four of his brothers already had made it into secondary school.[22]

Much to Master Mohamad Iskandar's disgust, however, none of his four daughters could attend secondary school in Kedah, as all places in the girls' school were taken by children of the elite. He was shocked when the school rejected his first daughter after she had finished primary school. Said Mahathir, "He was very annoyed because he was a government officer, and he was invited to Kedah to start the school. And yet this girls' school, which was started later on, refused to accept my sister." None of the other three girls had any better luck when their time came.[23]

Just how galling that was to Mohamad Iskandar, who was obsessed with education as a means of getting ahead, can be gauged by one measure: He had falsified the birth dates of his sons to ensure they could start the first year of primary school without any of the usual arguments about having to wait until the following intake. Mahathir's birth certificate showed he was born on 20 December 1925, and it remained his official birthday, being chosen by the government, for example, as the day on which to open his old house as a museum. But, as Mahathir discovered from notes written by his father in the back of a dictionary, he was actually born five months earlier. His father had given all the boys arbitrary December birth dates, while recording the correct dates in the dictionary.[24]

If the authorities hoped to make amends later by naming a primary school, established within the Sultan Abdul Hamid College compound, after Mohamad, their efforts went awry. They called the school by mistake Iskandar, which of course was his father's name, not his.[25] Hundreds of uniformed students from the Iskandar school and the college, girls included, marched in Mohamad's funeral procession in 1961, recognition of his contribution to education, but also a reminder of his niggling unhappiness.

Mahathir's teenage innocence was shattered by two traumatic events, which thoroughly politicized him and changed the course of his life: the Japanese occupation of Malaya from 1941 to 1945 and Britain's return after World War II with radical plans for the future administration of the country. Mahathir watched arriving Japanese troops flush a British soldier out of the local courthouse, drag him to the riverbank and bayonet him to death. His lasting memory of the Japanese interlude, however, was the exposure of Malay "backwardness and incompetence".

With the schools shut, 16-year-old Mahathir found himself on the street and trying to earn a living. He joined two Malay friends and set up a coffee stall in the local market. They sold the shop for a small profit and graduated to selling bananas and more lucrative items before the war ended. But most Malays were not so savvy or adaptable. Many, including his own brothers, who were retrenched by the Japanese from their government jobs, found it hard to make ends meet. Mahathir described their lack of knowledge of even petty trading as "pitiful". He concluded that if Malays were ever to enjoy the same living standards as Chinese, they would need extra government help.

As it happened, the returning British proposed to form the Malayan Union, which would remove the advantages the Malays had long enjoyed, while extending citizenship freely to all races. As Mahathir and others saw it, if the Malays were behind when they already received preference in areas such as employment in the bureaucracy, land ownership and educational assistance, they would suffer grievously in the open competition being envisaged with the Chinese and Indians.

Introduced in 1946 over fervent Malay objections, the Malayan Union grouped the nine Malay states, where Britain ruled indirectly through monarchies headed by