a movement led by the wives of the aristocracy and elite, but Khatijah now drew in the commoners. She learnt that they feared the word Merdeka [freedom]: ‘Perhaps someone will say to you: ”Whoever says Merdeka will go to jail, or will be beaten,”’ she told them. ‘But I have just said Merdeka very loud and very clearly, and the police are there, yet they are not arresting me.’ She taught, in the manner of the Indonesian revolution, the cry Merdeka to the mothers, and for the mothers to pass it on to their children. Yet many in the party mistrusted her and the Tunku warned her not to be so free with the word. She noted that the Malays ‘even softened the word Merdeka itself into Merde-heka, making it longer and softer, unlike Merdeka, which is short and sharp’. When she began to campaign for more representation for women within the party, she was expelled from UMNO. ‘They only wanted independence slowly and gently, and perhaps did not really want to be so independent at all.’35 Her political journey would eventually lead her into the Islamic opposition, but it too was an uncomfortable home for her. By the mid 1950s the various aliran, or streams of consciousness, within Malay radicalism had begun to drift apart. In the wake of religious riots, an Islamic Party was founded by leading ulama who felt that the mainstream national leaders had failed to defend the Muslim community. It drew in many who supported the Hizbul Muslimin in 1948, but also began to recruit from the more traditional religious schools and bureaucracies of the impoverished rural heartlands of northern and eastern states, peasants and village religious leaders. Shortly after his release from detention in 1955 Dr Burhanuddin looked to realize his Islam-centred philosophy of nationhood by taking up the leadership of the party. After seven years in prison Ahmad Boestamam formed a new secular, socialist party, the Partai Rakyat and there was a further attempt to rally non-Malay support for a ‘democratic, secular state’ in a new Labour Party.36 But Boestamam and other survivors of the non-Malay left never regained the political prominence they had achieved from 1945 and 1948, nor did they build a trans-ethnic movement that was able to compete with the support mobilized on racial lines within the Alliance. When the first federal elections were held in 1955 the Islamic Party won the only opposition seat. Candidates of the UMNO–MCA Alliance – now extended to included the Malayan Indian Congress – were returned for the remainder on a landslide. Onn was defeated in his native Johore. People were casting their vote for freedom. It was an overwhelmingly Malay election. Of the 1,280,000 registered to vote, 84 per cent were Malays, 11 per cent Chinese and 5 per cent Indians. Of the 600,000 Chinese eligible to register, only 140,000 did so: one eighth of the total Chinese population. Nevertheless, under the alliance formula, seventeen non-Malay candidates were successful and it won an overwhelming 79.6 per cent of the popular vote.37 Tunku Abdul Rahman now formed a ministry, if not a government.
The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely. What redeemed it, in the eyes of the British, was the idea only. In their vision for Malaya they looked to atone for the humiliation of 1942, and they saw late-colonial rule as ‘the completion of a stewardship’. But they failed in the core objective that had shaped policy since 1942: to form a ‘Malayan’ nationalism that was organic and multiracial. In asking, ‘Who are these “Malayans”?’, Tunku Abdul Rahman gave a different answer. Whilst there could be a Malayan nation based on clearer defined citizenship rights for non-Malays, the core of the nation, the bearers of its original sovereignty, were the Malays. The British now prepared to devolve power to a coalition of ethnic parties. This was a long way from what they wanted to see. But it was a political solution they were willing to take. In any case, Malcolm MacDonald’s idealism now had a less receptive audience in the Conservative government in London; it was felt