Alfian: I agree completely. About coming to terms with our colonial legacy. Unless we are attentive to the scars that colonialism has left behind, we really run the risk of becoming an imperial entity ourselves. And I already see this happening. In terms of say, extraction of sand from other countries. In terms of how we are degrading their coastlines, disrupting fishing grounds and polluting waters. I think that, for me, is a very clear example of this imperial form of extraction and exploitation. Just to benefit our own construction industries, to expand our own coastlines, we are destroying these particular coastal ecosystems in other countries. I think this is already happening right now in Cambodia. Previously it was happening in Malaysia and Indonesia, until they instituted sand export bans, in 1997 and 2007 respectively. Which just shows you how serious the problem is.
And I think in Singapore, because we're one of the richest countries in Southeast Asia, and because we're such a centre for capital, and capital accumulation, I really worry that because of this disparity between us and our neighbours, we start doing certain things which are very colonial. And more than doing, we start to think in very colonial ways. And I think this is one of the greatest dangers, which is that being the product of so-called 'colonial enlightenment, we then believe in certain colonial ideas such as racial hierarchies of difference.
Hai Bin: And we take it to be the norm.
Alfian: So we think that oh, our Southeast Asian neighbours around us, they're not doing so well economically, because biologically, brown people are not hardworking, blah, blah, blah. Or there's environmental determinism at work, which is if you're born in the tropics, you haven't suffered hardship like cold winters in temperate climes. So you're not hardy, you're complacent, you're soft. I mean, Lee Kuan Yew thinks like this. A lot of his racial ideas are actually very, very colonial. But then mapped onto an Anglo-Chinese superiority. A neo-colonial figure.
Sometimes we feel that it's very distant, but actually it still haunts us, it's very present. The spectres of colonialism are still with us. And the migrant worker issue for me is a classic example of how we treat labour. Because there are echoes, and I think we can trace this to the British use of convict labour from India to come and build basically the entire downtown area. North and South Bridge Road, St Andrew's Cathedral, Commercial Square?-all convict labour. This was labour that you could really exploit, almost practically slave labour. But the excuse is that, these people have a debt to pay to the state because of their criminality. You put it in that framework and you extract as much forced or slave labour as possible.
It's similar with migrant workers when you put them in a framework of, "Oh, they are better off here than in their own countries where they wouldn't have found work anyway." And therefore this justifies us either giving them the minimum welfare treatment, or underpaying them, or giving them substandard housing and food. So I think the minute you frame it in certain ways… so for the British they framed convict labour as, "Oh these are prisoners, so there are certain rights they don't deserve." And for migrant workers we frame it as, "Oh these migrants have come to a better place and they can't have everything so there are certain rights that we must deny them."
But this delusion that we are doing migrant workers a favour by
'rescuing' them from unemployment, and that they should be grateful and not ask for anything else, it's a colonial way of thinking. It's how so much exploitation and theft occurred under the self-deception that colonisers were bringing the light of civilisation to benighted natives.
---"We Refuse to Recognise the Trauma". A Conversation Between Alfian Sa'at and Neo Hai Bin, from Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History, edited by Alfian Sa'at, Faris Jorami and Sai Siew Min
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