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Singapore The Malays
The Malay made up 15 percent of Singapore's population
and
were, like the Chinese and the Indians, descendants of
immigrants.
They or their ancestors came from peninsular Malaya,
Sumatra, Java,
and the other islands of the Indonesian archipelago.
Throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Java was much more
densely
populated than peninsular Malaya, and its people had a
significantly lower standard of living. From the
mid-nineteenth
century to the period just after World War II, many
Javanese
migrated to Singapore, attracted both by urban wages
offering a
higher living standard and by freedom from the constraints
of their
native villages, where they often occupied the lower
reaches of the
economic and social order. Singapore Malay community
leaders
estimated that some 50 to 60 percent of the community
traced their
origins to Java and an additional 15 to 20 percent to
Bawean
Island, in the Java Sea north of the city of Surabaya. The
1931
census recorded the occupations of 18 percent of the
Malays as
fishermen and 12 percent as farmers; the remaining 70
percent held
jobs in the urban cash economy, either in public service
or as
gardeners, drivers, or small-scale artisans and retailers.
The
British colonialists had considered the Malays as simple
farmers
and fishermen with strong religious faith and a "racial"
tendency
toward loyalty and deference; they preferentially
recruited the
Malays to the police, the armed forces, and unskilled
positions in
the public service. In 1961 more than half of Singapore's
Malays
depended on employment in the public sector. Although the
colonial
stereotype of the Malays as rural people with rural
attitudes
persisted, Singapore's Malay residents were for the most
part no
more rural than any other residents. Malay identity was
couched in
religious terms, with Malay being taken almost as a
synonym for
Muslim, and most Malay organizations taking a religious
form.
After independence, the government regarded the Malay
preponderance in the police and armed forces as
disproportionate
and a potential threat to security and acted to make the
security
forces more representative of the society as a whole,
which meant
in practice replacing Malays by Chinese
(see Public Order and Internal Security
, ch. 5). The government's drive to break
up
ethnic enclaves and resettle kampong dwellers in Housing
and
Development Board apartment complexes had a great effect
on the
Malays. Evidence of the convergence of Malay patterns of
living
with those of the rest of the population was provided by
population
statistics, which showed the Malay birth and death rates,
originally quite high, to be declining. In the 1940s,
Malay women
had married early, had many children, and were divorced
and
remarried with great frequency. By the 1980s, Malays were
marrying
later, bearing fewer children (2.05 per woman for mid-1986
to mid-
1987), and divorcing less frequently. By the 1980s, a
large
proportion of Malay women were working outside the home,
which was
a major social change. Many young women in their late
teens and
early to mid-twenties were employed in factories operated
by
multinational corporations, which, unlike the small-scale
Chinese
shops and workshops that had dominated the economy into
the 1960s,
paid no attention to ethnicity in hiring. Even Malay
fishing
communities on the offshore islands, which appeared to
preserve the
traditional way of life, were in the 1980s losing
population as
young people moved to Singapore Island, attracted by urban
life and
unskilled jobs that offered higher and more reliable
incomes than
fishing.
Although very much a part of Singapore's modernizing
society,
the Malays conspicuously occupied the bottom rungs of that
society;
their position illustrated a correlation between ethnicity
and
class that presented a major potential threat to social
stability.
With the lowest level of educational attainment of any
ethnic
group, the Malays were concentrated at the low end of the
occupational hierarchy and had average earnings that were
70
percent of those of Chinese. Malays had a higher crime
rate than
other groups and in 1987 accounted for 47 percent of the
heroin
addicts arrested. The 1980 census showed that 86 percent
of the
Malay work force was in the clerical, service, and
production
sector; 45 percent of all employed Malays worked on
assembly lines,
largely in foreign-owned electronics factories. Only 8
percent of
all professional and technical workers (including
schoolteachers),
and 2 percent of all administrative and managerial
personnel were
Malays. Malays dropped out of the competitive school
system in
large numbers, and those who continued past primary school
were
concentrated in vocational education programs. In 1980
they made up
only 1.5 percent of all university graduates and 2.5
percent of
students enrolled in higher education.
In sharp contrast to neighboring Malaysia with its
policies of
affirmative action for the Malay majority, Singapore's
government
insisted that no ethnic group would receive special
treatment and
that all citizens had equal rights and equal
opportunities. The
potential threat, however, posed by the overlap between
Malay
ethnicity and low educational achievement and occupational
status,
was clear. Demonstrating the Singaporean propensity for
discussing
social affairs in terms of "race," both government
spokesmen and
Malay intellectuals tended to attribute the Malays'
economic
position and educational performance to something inherent
in the
Malay personality or culture, or to their supposed "rural"
attitudes. The ways in which lower income and ill-educated
Malays
resembled or differed from the very many lower income and
ill-
educated Chinese, who had very different cultural
backgrounds, were
not addressed.
In 1982 the prime minister defined Malays' educational
difficulties as a national problem and so justified
government
action to improve their educational performance. The
colonial
government had provided free but minimal education, in the
Malay
language, to Malays but not to Chinese or Indians, on the
grounds
that the Chinese and Indian residents of Singapore, even
those born
there, were sojourners. In the colonial period most
English-
language schools were run by churches or missionaries, and
many
Malays avoided them for fear of Christian proselytization.
Although
after independence schooling in Singapore was not free
(fees were
generally low, but the government felt that people would
not value
education if they did not pay something for it), Malays
continued
to receive free primary education. In 1960 that benefit
was
extended to secondary and higher education, although the
free
schooling was offered only to those the government defined
as
Malay, which excluded immigrant Indonesians whom the
Malays
regarded as part of their community. Throughout the 1960s
and most
of the 1970s, most Malay children continued to attend
schools that
taught only in Malay, or, if they taught English at all,
did so
quite poorly. Opportunities for secondary and higher
education in
the Malay language were very limited. Although many Malays
were
employed in the public service or as drivers or servants
for
foreign employers, in almost all cases the language used
at work
was the grammatically and lexically simplified tongue
called Bazaar
Malay.
Throughout the 1970s, relatively few Malays knew
English, a
language that became progressively more necessary for
high-paying
professional and technical jobs. Substantial numbers of
the Chinese
knew no more English than the Malays, but they found
employment in
the extensive sector of Chinese commerce and small-scale
industry
where hiring demanded command of a Chinese regional
language and
personal recommendation. The former Malay economic niche
in the
military and police forces was eliminated in the late
1960s and
1970s, and the large number of Malays who had been
employed by the
British armed forces at British naval and other military
facilities
lost those secure and well-paying positions when the
British
withdrew from Singapore from 1970 to 1975. Such factors as
poor
command of English, limited availability of secondary and
postsecondary education in Malay, and the loss of
public-sector
jobs accounted for much of the low economic position of
the Malay
community in 1980.
In 1981 Malay community leaders, alarmed by the results
of the
1980 census that demonstrated the concentration of Malays
in the
lower reaches of the occupational hierarchy, formed a
foundation
called Mendaki, an acronym for Majlis Pendidikan Anak-anak
Islam
(Council for the Education of Muslim Children). Mendaki
(ascent in
Malay), devoted itself to providing remedial tuition
classes for
Malay children in primary and secondary school, offering
scholarships for living expenses and loans for higher
education,
attempting to encourage parents to take a more active role
in their
children's education, and holding public ceremonies to
honor Malay
students who excelled in examinations or graduated from
academic
secondary schools or universities. Government support for
Mendaki
took the form of financing the organization through a
special
voluntary checkoff on the monthly contribution of Muslim
workers to
the Central Provident Fund, and through unspecified other
public
donations.
Throughout the 1980s, both the number of Malay students
in
selective secondary schools and institutions of higher
education
and the proportion of Malays passing and scoring well on
standardized examinations slowly increased. As with the
changes in
birth rates, it was difficult to separate the effects of
such
government-sponsored programs as those of Mendaki from
other
factors, including increased female participation in the
work
force, residence in apartment complexes rather than
kampong
housing, exposure to television and radio, smaller family
size, and
better teaching in the schools.
The use of a voluntary checkoff on the monthly Central
Provident Fund contribution as a means of raising Malay
educational
funds was characteristic of Singapore in the 1980s.
Malays, like
other Singaporeans, were assumed to have regular
employment and
salaries, and their distinctive Malay and Muslim concerns
were
efficiently and equitably addressed through a computerized
government program.
Data as of December 1989
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