• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4341 0

them and give them scope to act.51 A young American scholar, Lucien Pye, was also given access to sixty detainees. He saw them as upwardly mobile young people (their mean age was twenty-three) who were more educated than their peers. But in these uncertain times they saw their advancement in terms of aligning themselves to a group, in following opinion-makers and in each becoming ‘a party faction man’. They seemed desperate to align themselves to anyone who looked to possess power, and were hungry for any extra knowledge that might help them to anticipate how larger events might affect them. The mood of obsessive secrecy within the MCP suggested that it possessed a ‘secret doctrine’ to light the way forward. Pye saw the Emergency as a disorder of modernity, a rebellion of those who had been exposed to its upheavals, but ‘have not yet found their place in it’.52

The British, for the most part, saw the MCP’s hold on its supporters in terms of the ‘secret society complex’, and people’s motives for joining the rebellion as stemming from confusion or anomie. They tended to play down the ideological commitment of guerrillas, and this impression was reinforced by the fact that those captured tended to plead that they acted under compulsion of one kind or another. But as one woman fighter, Huang Xue Ying, was later to recall, the role of the cadres in rural communities was very wide-ranging, particularly among the young. These confident young men and women represented a dramatic broadening of horizons, in which the revolutionary mood of the times was transmitted through the villages. In the early days of the campaign the MCP placed great emphasis on political education. In peacetime this had taken the form of organized outings, night classes and public readings of newspapers and pamphlets. In Huang Xue Ying’s words:

At that time I hardly understood a word; so it was like playing music to the bull, so to speak. They taught us that women were the most oppressed class… they awakened our consciousness. They told us they wanted to improve our lives, we all had to work hard. Those with money must contribute money, those who had none, could contribute their labour… I joined the guerrillas because I knew they were good people. My family life was hard; I had no chance to study. The Communists taught me a lot. I felt that this was the path I should take to have a different future. These comrades were loving to us and very concerned about us.53

The British never really understood the village and small-town loyalties around which the MCP mobilized. Its recruits were not necessarily rejecting traditional family or community life. Often, they sought to strengthen it where it was under threat. Where families, communities and livelihoods were insecure, the tight networks of kinship and friendship in the villages and workplace took on a compelling significance, and the MCP’s cadres were able to enmesh themselves in this. The threat of coercion was never far away, but equally, by this time, two generations of squatters had identified themselves with the MCP’s resistance to the Japanese and to colonialism. This was sealed by a succession of personal tragedies as families became separated by killings, arrests and deportations.54 Now that the MCP was pushed out of the towns, and the trade unions decimated, all its hopes were placed in the squatters. The expectation was that, in the wake of guerrilla actions and government operations, production from mines and estates would begin to break down. The ranks of the squatters would swell, and so too would their support for the rebellion. Led by the MNLA, the people would then take over the industrial areas, and run them on a co-operative basis. The old practice of ‘self-tap, self-sell’ would become the powerhouse of the insurrection.55 The guerrillas believed that the first removals of squatters had played into their hands: ‘It allows the people to see how heartless government is. The bandits realise that government cannot remove all squatters.’56 This was a crucial assumption, and on this the success