In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles Read online

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF

  STAMFORD RAFFLES

  NIGEL BARLEY

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Footprints

  Names

  All Good Friends & Jolly Good Company

  Spice Invaders

  Scenes of Old Batavia

  The Great Garden

  Noblesse Oblige

  White Elephants and Other Beasts

  Hope and Glory

  Arise, Sir Stamford

  This Other Elba

  Empires of the Imagination

  Flotsam and Jetsam

  Founding Father

  Leaps and Bounds

  Dust to Dust

  Almost My Only Child

  Fame

  A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  IMPORTANT DATES

  MAP OF MALAYSIA, SINGAPORE AND INDONESIA

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  ALSO BY NIGEL BARLEY

  ROGUE RAIDER

  ISLAND OF DEMONS

  THE DEVIL’S GARDEN

  TORAJA

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Acknowledgements

  The author and publishers would like to thank the following publisher and literary representatives for permission to quote copyright material:

  Cindy Adams: to Macmillan Publishing Company, and Mrs Carlton Cole for extracts from Sukarno: An Autobiography (Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), copyright © 1965 by Cindy Adams.

  Emily Hahn: to Aitken & Stone Ltd. for extracts from Raffles of Singapore (Doubleday, 1946).

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders; any omissions brought to our attention will, of course, be remedied in future editions.

  Footprints

  ‘Raff-lesh,’ said the Javanese noodle-seller, making two syllables of it. The final s was wet and slushy, a Javanese s.

  He leaned over the wobbly wooden counter and took the Raffles cigarette packet in a slim, brown hand, cupping it tenderly in a gesture of respect as one would the frail skull of a baby. His fingertips ran lightly over the embossed, phoney crest like braille. The nails were carefully tended. That on the little finger was foppishly long. He had just used it to test my fried noodles.

  ‘Raff-lesh,’ he read again. ‘He was here, you know – in Bogor.’ He indicated the street around our roadside stall. ‘They called it Buitenzorg then – “no worries” in Dutch.’ A horse-cart rattled past, the little horse’s iron shoes slipping and sparking on the steep hillside. The driver wore the sort of peaked cap favoured by American astronauts. His face suggested he at least had worries. Round the brim was written ‘Two children are enough’, the slogan of the family-planning campaign. Perhaps that was the nature of his worries. Behind us, mountains towered up with lofty indifference into the swirls of fog where they grew tea.

  ‘His wife’s grave is there. He made the garden here – the palace garden.’ That, I thought, was untrue. It was – well – some Dutchman or German, after his time. Then, reading the packet again, ‘Virginia. Raff-lesh was an American?’

  ‘No. He was English like me … But I think this is another Raffles. This one was a –’ ‘Cat burglar’ would never go literally into Indonesian ‘– he was a thief.’

  The stall-owner pursed his lips sagaciously. For all his twenty-odd years, he was a man of the world. ‘Are not all colonialists thieves? But perhaps the English were not such big thieves as the Dutch. But I think every great family has naughty children – Raff-lesh too. So it is not strange another of the family should steal. Why, here in Indonesia, there was the case of …’

  He left the sentence unfinished, thinking better of it as a policeman strolled past, paunch and buttocks straining against the buttons of his uniform, ears visibly apout. I offered a cigarette across the hot wok and, non-smoker that I was, lit one myself and let it smoke untasted into the wind. Most Indonesian males smoke. Not to carry cigarettes is to be without the small change of friendship.

  He waved his token of friendship happily, scattering Raf-flesian ash over the noodles, pluming smoke from healthy mountain lungs.

  ‘It is good to name cigarettes after big men.’ A toothy grin crept out shyly from under his moustache. ‘We should have a Bung Karno cigarette. That would be great. You know Bung Karno?’

  I threw up a hand into the air, fingers spread, the way children do on Independence Day, five fingers for Pancasila, the five pillars of the nation. ‘Merdeka! Freedom!’ The stall rocked dangerously. We both grabbed it. ‘Sukarno?’ I asked. ‘Father of the revolution? First President? Would that be respectful?’

  He giggled and spooned out more noodles onto my plate. ‘Eat some more. It would be no problem as long as they were the finest brand. If they made people sick, that would be bad. But he would not mind. He was a friend of the people. My father adored Bung Karno. He had his picture in every room of the house. He, too, was here.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Nooo.’ He swatted at me playfully with the spatula. ‘Bung Karno.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘After the problem with the Communists when Pak Harto took over, they kept him in the palace here – the same place Raff-lesh lived. Bung Karno, Raff-lesh, perhaps it is all the same. That is history.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘It would have a Garuda bird with big claws and Bung Karno’s head like on the banknotes when I was small – wearing his songkok hat.’

  ‘What? Oh, I see. The cigarettes. But Raffles – Raff-lesh – what did he do?’

  The noodle-seller shrugged and screwed up his face as if staring into a bright light. ‘All I remember from school is he sold government land but got caught. In those days, if you sold land, everything went with it, cattle, people, women.’ He laughed and shook his head at the absurdity of it, tasting the word ‘women’ on his lips, reluctant to let it go.

  ‘He sold them as slaves?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’ He frowned in thought, then raised his clotted spatula in token of swearing an oath. ‘Yes, Raff-lesh sold off the land and made our people slaves. He was a thief.’ It seemed like the solemn verdict of Indonesia. After all, history is not what happened. It is what you remember.

  He was not giggling now. A shadow had fallen over the wok. The ghost of Raffles had come between us, abruptly chilling the noodles, filming them with fat. Was it true? Raffles a slaver, an embezzler? I did not know. I knew nothing about Raffles. But my curiosity was smouldering. I would look him up as soon as I got back to London – well, one day.

  I paid for my noodles and we shook hands. I would walk up the hill and have a look at the palace gardens.

  ‘Red and white!’ he called after me. ‘Red on top, white at the bottom, like the Indonesian flag.’

  What? Oh God. He was talking about Bung Karno cigarette packets again.

  ‘… and king-size. Bung Karno was small but he was king-size.’ There was satisfaction in the thought.

  * * *

  ‘Raff-lesh.’ The minister beamed delightedly and folded his arms with composure. He was on a flying visit to London from America on his way back to Jakarta. The real business was to talk about coffee prices but, in a free hour, he had come to the British Museum to promote general interest in Indonesian culture. As someone who attempted to speak the language, I had been wheeled out to receive him.

  Reporters milled around. He flashed an even-handed smile at them, as at unruly children. They flashed back with cameras. In the showcase before him stood a gender, a sort of traditional xylophone, shipped by Raffles from Java in 1817. The keys glowed softly with the sheen of ancient tempered metal, soaked in the dulcet tones of tinkling, classical music. The base was artfully carved and gilded with the outspread wings and
rearing beak of a huge Garuda bird. In the minister’s lapel, a discreeter gold Garuda with sharp claws offered defiance back. On his watchface, even more discreetly, gleamed the symbol of the ruling party.

  ‘Raff-lesh,’ he said authoritatively. ‘A name that recalls the enduring link between our two great countries. Raff-lesh admired the beauties of Indonesian culture. While he was Governor of Java, the Indonesian people came, in turn, to know something of that concern for liberty and progress that are characteristic of the English. Though a colonialist, he is remembered as a reformer and pioneer of social justice.’

  He flashed another ravishing smile and posed deftly on terms of equality with the Garuda, a mythical beast humbled by his personality to a mere pet. He hailed some reporters familiarly by name, rained sincere handshakes upon them and rapped out a suitably risqué joke in Indonesian and idiomatic American.

  As the laughter died down, he observed, ‘Raff-lesh, himself, promoted coffee in Java. He owned a plantation, you know. Is that not so?’ The question was addressed to me.

  ‘Er … well.’

  ‘Quite so,’ he resumed smoothly. ‘Raff-lesh means coffee.’

  Then the talk seemed to turn all by itself to the price of beans and the reasonableness of Indonesian hopes that it would rise at a forthcoming meeting. The reporters, entranced, wrote down everything he said with panting fervour. It would appear in a dozen newpapers the next day. Suddenly he was gone, trailing an after-whiff of devastating charm, as the Devil is said to move in fumes of sulphur.

  * * *

  ‘Hrraffle.’ It was like a clearing of the throat or the noise of disapprobation made by retired colonels in comic strips. We had paid our entry fee to Westminster Abbey and the man from Guinea was determined to have his money’s worth of the infidel faith. It was his first visit outside his Marxist-oriented homeland, and I was his guide. He stared at each statue in turn, read the inscription, checked its significance with me. He had not liked the excessive praise heaped on William Wilberforce and the abolitionist movement by the monument next door. He would not like Raffles.

  He pouted peevishly. ‘Hrraffle was the man who instituted the fascist, racist clique in Zimbabwe.’

  ‘No. I think you must mean Rhodes. This is Raffles – Asia,’ I added vaguely. ‘Quite different.’

  A group of tiny, be-denimed Japanese waited politely behind us to take their photographs. He glared at them. He had not finished. He wanted to read the inscription. He was no mere tourist; he had serious work to do.

  ‘Selected at an early age to conduct the government of the British conquests in the Indian Ocean, by wisdom, vigour and philanthropy, he raised Java to happiness and prosperity unknown under former rulers.’ His voice became increasingly sneering as he progressed.

  ‘How can people write such nonsense? “After the surrender of that island to the Dutch and during his government in Sumatra, he founded an emporium at Singapore.” What is an emporium? Is it a polite word for imperialist exploitation?’

  ‘No. It’s more a place of trade, a sort of big shop.’

  ‘Capitalism?’

  ‘Yes … sort of.’

  ‘Exploitation, as I said.’

  The Japanese had despaired of our moving and were trying to sneak their lenses under his armpits.

  ‘Go away,’ he said loudly in French and waved his floppy raincoat at them. The label read ‘Fabriqué en URSS’.

  They cowered back. He bent to read further. ‘Ha! Listen to this … “where he established freedom of person as the right of the soil and freedom of trade as the right of the port.” Nothing but bourgeois false consciousness of the self.

  ‘He “secured to the British flag the maritime supremacy of the Eastern seas.” Imperialist mystification.

  ‘“Ardently attached to science, he laboured successfully to add to the knowledge and enrich the museums of his native land.” That, surely, is social reproduction through ideological suppression.

  ‘“In promoting the welfare of the people committed to his charge, he sought the good of his country and the glory of God.”’ That was beyond all comment.

  He straightened and stared triumphantly up at Raffles, content at having seen through the lies of convention in which national heroes are wrapped. Raffles looked back, serenely but not unkindly, the whisper of a smile upon his lips, one finger raised pensively to his brow. He looked about to speak. Just so, he must have regarded the natives ‘committed to his charge’.

  I wondered, not for the first time, what he was like, what he must have thought and felt, straining to insert myself into the inert stone and see through those blank sockets. A colonialist, he himself had been colonized by so many others – appropriated, the Guinean would say. He was cigarettes, coffee, a thief, an oppressor, a champion of freedom. In my own childhood he must surely have been included in those pre-Mao, pious little red books we had read on the founding fathers of the Empire. He was great, therefore good.

  We were not here by chance. I had been reading about Raffles recently and felt a need to sidestep the shortcomings of the literature by some sort of direct, personal experience. The literature was not impressive.

  There was stolid, patriotic Boulger, who bristled with rage when his sources criticized Raffles, come to the subject after a semi-mystical encounter with a Raffles relative in a London fever hospital. There was the dourly self-effacing Memoir of Sophia, second wife and widow, who doggedly referred to herself as ‘the Editor’ and mentioned the first wife, only once and in a footnote, as one of her husband’s ‘dearest and closest connections’. Many of the expressions of the Abbey inscription echoed hers. Perhaps she had written it herself. Then there was Hahn, slaphappy-American-wisecracky, and Wurtzburg, studiously archivistic. There were many, many others all drawing on the same few primary sources, quoting and repeating each other in a false, antique-dealers’ economy that lent a spurious solidity to a rickety framework of knowledge, resting on firm ground at a few points only.

  ‘Marble,’ said the Guinean looking down the line of ossified white figures that constituted the British national past. Crowded together, they formed one of those absurd crowds you saw in paintings of the French Revolution, each person totally irrelevant to the pose and bearing of his neighbour, gesturing emptily into space, expending untold benevolence and mute eloquence upon walls and ceilings.

  ‘Marble,’ he announced with finality, ‘was taken from Africa.’

  ‘Surely not. Italy. Other places as well. Anyway, it’s not all marble. It’s too white for that.’

  ‘No. Marble from Africa. I have seen it. It is –’ he drew a deep breath and flapped his francophone raincoat in frustration – ‘a … a scandale géologique!’

  Raffles looked on unmoved. About his feet lay scrolls in stone – not marble. That would be his adding to the knowledge of his native land. Or perhaps he was trampling on them, engaging in social reproduction through ideological suppression. At this distance in time it was hard to tell.

  As we moved away, the Japanese swarmed in, the children of the Rising Sun filling the void of another abandoned outpost of Empire and automatically forming grinning groups of five in front of the statue, obliterating Raffles’ inscription in a production-line of souvenirs. Maybe winners never have self-doubt. They are too busy being winners to worry about the value of what they are creating and destroying. They live happily in the present and the future, not the past. But Raffles had not been like that.

  He would have been surprised by the Japanese, having had views about them. I recalled that he once wrote a paper about their national character. But for him they were primarily a natural market for British woollies. They just needed to be opened up. Well, they had been.

  In common with all those muted, pigeon-spotted statues that stand about – like flashers – unregarded and embarrassed in the parks and piazzas of the world, Raffles looked as though he still had something to say, as though he was straining against an imposed silence. It was hard not to feel a sort of pit
y for him. It was a good face: open, eager to learn, humane, wryly optimistic. There was no veneer of prettiness. It was a face with the certain strength of mahogany furniture with solid brass fittings. It would always be comfortable and reliable, a face that would wear well and take on the patina of age without shoddiness. But he had had no chance to age – dead in his forties. And it was only a public face.

  In that instant, I knew what I would do. Perhaps there was still one way to put myself in his skin. I would go to the places that were important to him, the places that he had invented or transformed. I would look for his traces in the stones and the memories of the East, follow his tracks from Penang to Singapore. Then, I would come back and see him again.

  Names

  It is Captain Francis Light, founder of Penang, and not Raffles, whose statue was made to stand on the waterfront of the town that brought him fame. Originally, Light pointed his plump behind at this small island – Prince of Wales Island as the British would have it – off the western coast of Malaysia. His face stared with manic vision out on an empty sea, declaring the immutability of history through the permanence of stone. But in the East, the permanence of stone, like the facts of history, has always been precarious and negotiable. During the war, the Japanese prised him loose, dumped him contemptuously in a warehouse and, with blatant symbolism, stole his sword. Nowadays he stands outside the museum amongst a red pillar-box, a defunct carriage from the funicular railway and a pot of ferns, a relic of potent Empire reduced to a harmless item of garden furniture. The Malaysians have never been moved to give him his sword back.

  Penang does not, of course, mean ‘Prince of Wales’, it means ‘areca nut’, the chewing-gum of the East. But nations come together only to misunderstand each other. The Malays have always named islands by what they look like on a map rather than by what they produce. So there is little areca nut grown here and this was just the first of many misunderstandings that marked the relationship between the East India Company and the natives.