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policemen referred to Burhanuddin in Mustapha’s hearing as ‘the Gandhi of Malaya’. His Special Branch codename was ‘“Sparrow”, a tiny bird that could take over huge buildings by setting up giant colonies’. At the meetings, the youths of API, in their homemade uniforms, would run alongside the cars carrying loudspeakers, and Ahmad Boestamam would rouse them to a frenzy. The tour culminated in Penang, at Balik Pulau, where, in Mustapha Hussain’s words, ‘a host of weathered jalopies decorated with red and white flags were already waiting… these ancient cars looked like blemishes against Penang’s lovely buildings and mansions, all belonging to non-Malays’. Mustapha and Rashid rode in silence past the dilapidated huts of the Malays.84

The MNP conference in Malacca was crowned by the marriage of Ahmad Boestamam and Shamsiah Fakeh. They had been travelling together as the heads of API and AWAS. ‘I suppose’, Shamsiah reflected many years later, ‘I married Boestamam because I was eager for his assistance in improving my understanding of political struggle.’ Her political goals and personal feelings converged. The marriage failed, but it was an object lesson in the choices for women at this time, many of whom, like Shamsiah in marrying Boestamam, were entering into a polygamous union.85 As the young Indonesian activist Khatijah Sidek said of her marriage to a politically active Johore doctor: ‘I did it because in our society, one has no standing if one is unmarried, especially for the women; marriage was a sort of vehicle.’86 The war had opened up new challenges and opportunities, and the public role and strident rhetoric of women like Shamsiah and Khatijah were deeply challenging to conservative opinion. Yet, in many cases, the wider role for women was defended on the grounds that it was an expression of women’s rights under existing Malay adat, or custom. As Ibu Zain, a pioneer educator, told the Asian Relations Conference: ‘Malay women are the most “free” in Asia. They have not known the purdah system. They work alongside their menfolk, in the paddy-fields in the villages; they trade in the “weekly markets”…’87 Added to this, a new generation of young women had been educated in progressive religious schools, of which Shamsiah Fakeh and Khatijah were themselves graduates. Within the nationalist movement itself, AWAS was a potent challenge to the masculinity of the pemuda. In a famous incident on a march to a rally in Perak, the women invited the men to swap clothes when their enthusiasm flagged.88

The British were beginning to close in on the Malay left. At Malacca, Ahmad Boestamam’s API had formally separated from the Malay Nationalist Party. This was recognition that it was now a force in itself. But it was also a form of political insurance so that if, or more likely when, it should collide with the British, the main party organization might survive. API became increasingly militant and martial. Its followers gathered for drills, often in places that been centres of Japanese youth training, such as Malacca. They dressed, like the Indonesian pemuda, in a motley of military styles: bluish RAF-type forage caps, white shirts and trousers with red shoulder tabs. But the sight of Japanese boots and leggings was deeply offensive to British observers. The Security Service believed that there were a variety of secret cells within API. Boestamam himself did little to dispel this impression, and a diagram found in a raid on MCP offices seemed to confirm it. The name itself, it was said, conveyed a secret meaning: apuskan perentah inggeris, ‘obliterate English rule’. There were even semut api – literally ‘fire ants’: a biting local pest – organized among children in the Malay schools.89 The military began to vet its Malay recruits, and the police feared that API was infiltrating Boy Scout troops.90

On 1 April Ahmad Boestamam was arrested for sedition. His public trial was one of the few attempts by the British to convict an opponent on a politically related charge. In most other cases – including Boestamam’s own several months later