Colonialism, violence and Muslims in Southeast Asia by S.M.K. Aljunied

SYED MUHD KHAIRUDIN ALJUNIED

Colonialism, violence and Muslims in Southeast Asia: the Maria Hertogh controversy and its aftermath

London: Routledge, 2009

208 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-48594-4, hb £75

Reviewed by A.J. Stockwell, Royal Holloway, University of London

At about noon on 11 December 1950 rioting broke out in the vicinity of Singapore’s Supreme Court and spread to the area of the Sultan Mosque.  The violence lasted 48 hours and during it 18 people were killed (nine by rioters and nine by the police or military), 173 were injured and much property was damaged or destroyed including well over 100 vehicles. 

The innocent victim at the centre of the uproar was Maria Hertogh, the thirteen-year old daughter of Roman Catholic parents, a Eurasian mother and a Dutch father who before the Japanese occupation had served in the army of the Netherlands East Indies. When the Japanese invaded Java her parents were interned but Maria escaped, having been entrusted by her mother to Che Aminah binte Mohamed. The nature of this arrangement was disputed after the war, with Che Aminah claiming, and the Hertoghs denying, that Maria had been handed over for permanent adoption. In 1950, having discovered that his daughter had been taken by Che Aminah to Trengganu, Adrianus Hertogh requested the Dutch Consulate-General in Singapore to initiate court proceedings for her repatriation to the Netherlands. By this time, however, Maria had been brought up as a Muslim; she had changed her name to Nadra binte Ma’arof and was betrothed to Mansoor Adaabi. The tussle over her custody swung one way and the other. The colonial high court first ruled in favour of her natural parents, later restored Maria to her adoptive mother but rescinded that order on her marriage to Mansoor.  She was then escorted by police to a Roman Catholic convent where she remained until 12 December when she was put in a plane for Holland while Singapore burned.  Maria did not return to Southeast Asia until 1999 when she visited Malaysia in connection with the filming of a Dutch documentary about the controversy. Maria Hertogh was for ever marked by her disturbed childhood.  Marriage to a Dutch soldier brought her many children but also much unhappiness.  Acquitted of plotting the murder of her husband, she obtained a divorce and left her children for the United States. By this time she was reported to have lost whatever religious faith she may once have had. Eventually she returned to Holland where she died in July 2009. 

The Hertogh riots stand apart from other violent incidents in post-war Malaya and Singapore.   The protests that boiled over into violence in December 1950 came from Singapore’s Muslims, not exclusively Malays, and were directed against Europeans and Eurasians, not against the Chinese.  Moreover, they were not driven by the communist insurgency then raging on the peninsula.  Nor did they sit easily within the context of the island’s secular, left-wing radicalism which was associated more with labour and, subsequently, student unrest.  Perhaps it was because they appeared atypical of the threats to the colonial state during the Cold War, that the story of Maria has frequently overshadowed analysis of the riots.  In fact, however, the death toll during the Hertogh affair is estimated to be higher than that in any other tumultuous disturbance in Singapore between 1945 and 1963.  Furthermore, these riots were no mere rocket that quickly burned out but rather a warning shot that altered the course of colonial rule in Singapore, as Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied (Assistant Professor in the Department of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore) compellingly demonstrates in this revised version of his recent SOAS PhD thesis.

Deftly situating this episode in the socio-political circumstances of post-war Singapore and drawing on an impressive range of unpublished sources in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia, Holland, Australia and the United States, Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied sheds fresh light on the causes, course and consequences of the riots.  He shows how radicals within Singapore’s marginalised Muslim community were driven to protest and how protest turned to riot as a result of colonial negligence, particularly in the areas of intelligence and policing.  The largest and most original part of the book is devoted to the aftermath of the riots which had taken the colonial regime by surprise and had called into question its legitimacy.  Chapter by chapter, the author examines the strategy whereby the British strove to restore their authority. It had five features: (1) instilling fear through arrests, raids, curfews and the use and abuse of the law; (2) surveillance by special branch and other agencies; (3) self-criticism through, for example, the commission of enquiry which identified scapegoats while shielding the higher echelons of the regime; (4) reconciliation in order ‘to balance and rule, more than to divide and rule’ p.88); and (5) reform of policing, marriage policies, child adoption and education. Although the British by no means had it all their own way in any of these endeavours, by the end of 1952 they ‘had turned the aftermath of the riots to their advantage’ (p.126) This detailed and subtly argued case study is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the late colonial regime in Singapore and to the literature on riots in Southeast Asia.