of Singapore prosperity has lengthy distinguished it from many different former British colonies. There’s one other distinction: Singapore has caught to honoring its former colonial ruler — and desires to proceed to take action.
Particular recognition went to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is taken into account the founder of recent Singapore within the early 1800s. For many years, Singaporean textbooks credited Raffles with remodeling the island from a “sleepy fishing village” right into a thriving seaport. He’s the central character in a bigger official narrative that claims imperial Britain set Singapore up for fulfillment as an impartial nation.
Dedications to Raffles dot Singapore’s panorama. A enterprise district, colleges and dozens of different buildings bear his title. Two eight-foot likenesses of the person stand tall in downtown Singapore.
However a brand new statue of Raffles, positioned in a park in Could, has revived the talk in regards to the legacy of colonialism in Singapore. On the one hand is the broader institution that maintains British colonial rule positively. On the opposite facet are those that desire a nearer examination of the empire that Raffles represented and the racial inequality he left behind whilst Singapore grew wealthy.
This division has appeared earlier than, maybe most clearly a couple of years in the past when Singapore celebrated the bicentenary of Raffles’ arrival on the island. Now the brand new statue has sparked a brand new debate, with critics mentioning that different nations have taken it down for years monuments of historic figures related to slavery or imperialism or each.
“The factor about Raffles is that, sadly, I feel it has been handed off as hagiography, not simply historical past,” mentioned Alfian Saat, a playwright who needs the Raffles statues destroyed. “It is so unusual – the concept that somebody would defend a colonial apply. That is opposite to what’s occurring in lots of elements of the world.”
The brand new statue of Raffles stands subsequent to a statue of his good friend Nathaniel Wallich, a Danish botanist, in Fort Canning Park. Tan Kee Wee, an economist who raised $330,000 along with his siblings to fee the statues, mentioned he needed to commemorate the couple’s position in founding Singapore’s first botanic gardens, which have been typically his childhood haunts. He donated the sculptures on behalf of his mother and father to the Nationwide Parks Board.
Opponents additionally criticized the federal government for permitting the statue to go up within the park as a result of it was the tomb of pre-colonial Malay kings. The parks board mentioned it took the historic significance under consideration when putting in the sculptures.
Questions in regards to the statue have been even raised in Singapore’s parliament. In June, Desmond Lee, the nationwide improvement minister, responded to 1 by saying that Singapore doesn’t have fun its colonial historical past. On the identical time, Mr Lee added: “We shouldn’t be afraid of the previous.”
The plaque on the Raffles statue explains how Singapore’s first botanic gardens “cultivated crops of financial significance, particularly spices”. Critics mentioned it was a euphemism for his or her actual goal: money crops for the British Empire.
Mr Tan defended the legacy of Singapore’s British colonialists, saying they “didn’t come and kill Singaporeans”.
He added: “Singapore was handled nicely by the British. Then why all this bitterness?’
However colonial Britain was removed from benign. For instance, it treats non-white Singaporeans as second-class residents. Raffles created an city plan for Singapore that separated folks into completely different racial enclaves. And he didn’t work together with the locals, mentioned Kwa Chong Guan, a historian.
“He was a really company man, simply involved with what he assumed have been the pursuits of the English East India Firm,” Mr Quah mentioned.
Raffles landed in Singapore in 1819 when Britain needed to compete with the Dutch within the Straits of Malacca, a key waterway to China. On the time, Singapore was below the rule of the Kingdom of Johor in present-day Malaysia. Raffles uses an inheritance dispute in Johor to safe a treaty enabling the East India Firm to ascertain a buying and selling submit in Singapore.
Inside a couple of years, Singapore formally turned a British territory. Convict labor, largely from the Indian subcontinent, was essential to its financial improvement. So have been the Chinese language immigrants, amongst them rich retailers and poor laborers.
Singapore achieved self-government in 1959, then briefly joined Malaysia earlier than changing into an impartial republic in 1965. Since then, it has constructed one of many world’s most open economies and amongst its busiest ports, in addition to a vibrant regional monetary heart.
Lately, the federal government has acknowledged, to some extent, the necessity to increase the narrative of Singapore’s founding past Raffles. Textbooks now replicate that the island was a thriving heart of regional commerce tons of of years earlier than Raffles arrived.
In 2019, officers designated the commemoration of Raffles’ arrival as a celebration of others who constructed Singapore. A statue of Raffles was painted as if to vanish into the background. Positioned subsequent to him, if solely at some point of the occasion, have been four other sculptures of early settlers, together with that of Sang Nila Utama, a Malay prince who based what was referred to as Singapura in 1299.
For some historians and intellectuals, such gestures are merely symbolic and ignore the reckoning that Singapore will need to have with its colonial previous. British rule launched racist stereotypes of non-whites, corresponding to that of “lazy” Malaythe native group in Singapore that has a long-lasting impact on public attitudes. Colonialism led to racial divisions which in some ways persist to today within the city-state now dominated by ethnic Chinese language.
“If you happen to solely deal with one particular person and the so-called benevolent facet of colonialism and do not attempt to affiliate or take into consideration the unfavourable half an excessive amount of, is not {that a} type of blindness or willful amnesia?” mentioned Sai Xu Min, an impartial historian.
Race relations performed a job in Raffles’ rise to Singaporean custom. Quickly after Singapore turned impartial, the ruling Individuals’s Motion Social gathering – which stays in energy a long time later – determined to formally declare Raffles the founding father of Singapore. Years later, S. Rajaratnam, who was then Overseas Affairs Minister, mentioned that anointing a Malay, Chinese language or Indian as its founder could be harmful.
“So we put an Englishman – impartial, so there will probably be no disagreements,” Mr Rajaratnam said.
The choice was additionally meant to indicate that Singapore stays open to the West and free markets.
In a 1983 speech, Mr Rajaratnam acknowledged that Raffles’s angle in direction of “the non-white races was that with out British rule the native inhabitants wouldn’t have mattered a lot”.
Critics of Raffles’ statues additionally argue that his legacy ought to replicate his time on the island of Java. Whereas Raffles banned slavery in Singapore, he allowed the slave commerce in Java, together with youngsters as younger as 13, in accordance with Tim Hannigan, who wrote a ebook about Raffles.
The brand new statues of Raffles and Wallich have been created by Andrew Lacey, a British artist. The sculptures evoke the 2 males as apparitions – symbolism which Mr Lacey mentioned represented the world’s evolution away from the West.
Mr Lacey mentioned he had “handled” the general public backlash towards his sculptures and had no qualms if Singaporeans needed to take them down, destroy them or change their heads with the Malay gardeners who contributed to the botanic gardens.
“I used to be conscious of the complexities of making a lifeless white man,” he mentioned of Raffles. “I wasn’t conscious of the extent of complexity surrounding it.”
