Courtesy of the Mahathir Mohamad family

An Asian View of the World
I was born in 1925 in the town of Alor Setar in northwestern Malaya (as Malaysia was then called), the youngest of 10 children. My parents belonged to the lower middle-class and we lived in what would be called a slum area today. My father worked as a schoolteacher and later as a government auditor. He brought up his family to be very orthodox, very disciplined and very oriented toward education. I was rather lucky to get a good education, first in the Malay language and subsequently at the only English-medium school in town. My mother had a religious education and taught me the Koran. Although my family was not fanatically religious, we did adhere very closely to the Muslim faith. This gave me a very good starting point in life: a strong family, a solid education and a good religious grounding.

I harbored no great ambitions as a teenager. When I was in secondary school, I thought the greatest thing I could do was to join the state civil service, but I never really believed this would be possible. We had no ties to the royal family, nor did we belong to the prominent families of the state. The rich families lived in the northern part of town; we lived in the southern part. And the Europeans, of course, lived in their own quarters. They were very exclusive with their own clubs and private golf course and did not mix with the local population.

The Malay Peninsula was at that time, before World War II, under British rule. We were divided into many different Malay states, and each state had its own treaty with the British. The treaties were for British "protection," it was said, not colonization. The British were not too repressive. They could have colonized us fully from the beginning, but chose to create a protectorate image. Although the British actually controlled the administration fully, they managed to give the impression that the locals had status and authority. The Malaysian sultans were called "the rulers" by the British, although they were never really given any power to "rule." The British did not send a "governor" to our country, but an official they called a "British Adviser." In reality, however, his "advice" had to be strictly followed.

The British were extremely clever at this form of semi-colonial rule: they would call things by one name, but in reality do quite another thing. What we did get from them was a well-organized administrative system and a fairly well-developed infrastructure. What we also got, however, as a psychological burden, was the belief that only Europeans could govern our country effectively. Most of Asia in those days was controlled by the Europeans. Most Asians felt inferior to the European colonizers and rarely did we even consider independence a viable option.

Then, in 1941, the Japanese Occupation completely changed our world. Not only did the Japanese forces physically oust the British, they also changed our view of the world. It was a very frightening experience. We switched from one set of rulers to another virtually overnight. My English school was immediately closed and a Japanese school was opened in a smaller building. At first, I did not want to go to the Japanese school. I was 16 at the time, and after the English school had been closed, I was selling bananas at one of the small marketplaces in town, but my father insisted that I go to school in order to get an education. We now had to study the Japanese language, and although I did not master it very well, I did become the class prefect. I was not violently opposed to the Japanese, but I thought they should leave the country and let the British return. I yearned, not yet for independence, but for the return of the British. I had been educated in an English school, and life had seemed so much easier during the British period.

The Road to Self-Rule
The Japanese rule lasted about three years. There is no doubt in my mind that people across the Asian continent suffered immensely from the war and many were unjustly killed or captured. The initial Japanese defeat of the Europeans did, however, also have another psychological effect on many Asians. Before the war, when Malaya was under British rule, our entire world view was that we had no capability to be independent. We thought that only the Europeans could run our country and felt we had to accept their superiority. But the success of the Japanese invasion convinced us that there is nothing inherently superior in the Europeans. They could be defeated, they could be reduced to groveling before an Asian race, the Japanese.

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