Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  The Etymology of Amok and Its ‘Martial Origins’

  According to Henry Yule and Arthur Burnell’s classic, Hobson-Jobson (1886), the earliest records of European encounters of amok date to the sixteenth century in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Many of these preliminary observations indicate that Europeans understood amok as a form of martial ‘behaviour’ of some of the fearsome ‘natives’ that they encountered on their travels in Asia. Yule and Burnell note that ‘amok’ originated from the Malayalam word, ‘amar-khan’, meaning ‘a warrior’ (from the stem word ‘amar’, which means ‘fight’ or ‘war’). Amok’s martial origins or ‘military connotations’ was likewise noted by John Crawfurd , the second Resident of Singapore (1823–1826), who defined amok as the act of ‘run[ning] furiously and desperately at any one; to make a furious onset or charge in combat’. 35 Other scholars have also argued that ‘amok’ was a battle cry of pirates in the Malay archipelago, and that Malay warriors at the charge would shriek ‘Amok! Amok!’ to ‘reinforce their own courage as well as to terrify their opponents’. 36 The link between amok and the reputation of the Malays as ferocious and formidable warriors was such that Charles Buckley (1844–1912), proprietor of The Singapore Free Press, had considered and even equated ‘[t]he charge of the English at Waterloo, or the French over the bridge at Lodi […] as illustrious pengamoks [amok-runners]’. 37

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, amok’s association with ‘martial’ behaviour and ‘native’ belligerence led it to be viewed with much dread and apprehension by European traders and sailors in the Malay archipelago. Indeed, in this era, European interests prioritised the establishment of friendly and peaceful ports—a prerequisite for successful and profitable trade. As such, the popular image of ‘hyper-violent’ natives who could run amok at the slightest provocation would discourage trade, or any form of colonial consolidation or assertion of authority in the region. This image of the ‘violent native’ was further perpetuated by the observation of these early traders that Malay customs and traditions meant that ‘no Malay man was ever seen unarmed. The men usually carried from three to eight weapons, and boys of a few years old two or three.’ 38 For colonials such as Hugh Clifford , these practices created a cultural background in which acts of violence were common. Thus in 1897 Clifford warned readers in his book, In Court & Kampong: ‘in independent Malay States everybody goes about armed […] As a consequence, madmen often run âmok.’ 39

  This threat of ‘violent natives’ was made particularly real in 1875, when Malay ‘amokers’ murdered the first British Resident of Perak, James Birch . A correspondent of The Straits Times declared the amok ‘not only execrable for its treacherous atrocity, but […] unparalleled in the history of this Settlement’; an event only comparable to Syed Yasin’s amok in 1823 as discussed earlier, as this was the ‘only one instance of a British official having been attacked by a Native’ in this manner. 40 Twenty-five years after Birch’s murder, Frank Swettenham attributed the purportedly violent nature of the Malays to the lack of order in Malaya; in a land where there was ‘no fountain of justice or appeal’ and ‘in a society where might was right’, 41 Malays were thus forced to resort to arms. In his view, British intervention, which had established a justice system and brought order and peace to parts of Malaya under British control, had since reduced the inclination (or necessity) of the Malays to run amok or to arm themselves. Thus concluded Swettenham in The Real Malay: ‘The man who used to walk about with three daggers in his belt, two spears in his left hand, a sword under his right arm, and a gun over his shoulder, now goes into the jungle with only a chopping-knife; and the boy of tender years has given up his array of miniature weapons for a slate and a bundle of books.’ 42

  ‘Foredoomed to Run Amok’: A Malayan ‘Criminal Culture’?

  During the period of Birch’s murder in the later half of the nineteenth century, colonial opinions on amok were also informed by ‘scientific’ approaches such as racial anthropology. These approaches to amok and to the understanding of the ‘Malay race’ also ran parallel to the beginning of colonial psychiatry in Malaya. The following opinion expressed by a correspondent in The Straits Times in 1874—a year before Birch’s murder—is particularly revealing of the connections and conclusions that some drew concerning the ‘Malay character’, their equatorial environment, and amok:The nature of the Malays of our island is not unlike their clime. Beneath their civil and apparently gentle surface fierce passions smoulder, which require but a spark to kindle into a devastating flame. Maddened by jealousy, or some real or fancied wrong, the ordinary mild Malay becomes a demon. Then his eyes glare like those of a wild beast, out leaps his kris (ceremonial knife) or parang, and he rushes on the amok, smiting every one he meets. 43

  Such environmentally deterministic theories of ‘the Malay character’ persisted into the twentieth century. As one Straits Times reporter noted in 1911, ‘[t]he East is remarkable for certain forms of crime which hardly find any parallel in other parts of the world […] the hot weather, the ascending climax of heat, tedium and discomfort brings with it an outburst of homicidal crimes distinguished generally by their suddenness and the slightness of the provocation.’ 44 These observations led some to imagine that the ‘gentle and tragic Malayan, victim of racial hysteria’, was ‘foredoomed to run amok towards an inevitably violent end’. 45 The inevitability of this ‘condition’, according to some European observers, was due to the fact that ‘Malays have been here so long [in the Peninsula] that the climate has by this time done its worst […] their doom is sealed […] they will survive only as objects of scientific interest to the ethnologist and the historian. 46 ’

  The reputation of Malays as being ‘foredoomed’ to violent behaviour also led colonial policemen to employ a contraption known as a ‘mantrap’ for the purposes of apprehending ‘amokers’. According to the Dutch Admiral Johan Stavorinus, these weapons were also used in the neighbouring colony of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where local ‘officers of justice were provided with a pole, ten or twelve feet in length, at the end of which there was a kind of fork made of two pieces of wood, three feet long, which was furnished within with sharp iron spikes. This was held before the wretched object of pursuit, who in his frenzy, ran into it and was thus taken prisoner.’ 47 In British Malaya, the nineteenth-century writer-explorer Isabella Bird affirmed that she had ‘even seen the two-pronged fork which was used for pinning a desperate amok runner to the wall’, 48 while her contemporary, the medical doctor W. Gilmore Ellis, claimed that the terrifying contraption was only used by policemen ‘in the more uncivilised parts of Malaya’. 49

  ‘Civilising’ Amoks: Diagnosing Violence

  From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, archival sources further suggest that European residents and officials in the colony were of the opinion that amok was a psychiatric condition—in other words, that it was not a pre-meditated crime. 50 In this regard, the private records of the Colony Coroner and those of the police are particularly helpful in pinpointing when and how the shifts in opinion about amok as an act of crime or a psychiatric condition came about. As a case in point, the sources indicate that one of the earliest coroner’s records, which listed amok as a possible cause of death (accidental or otherwise) is an entry dated 2 January 1911, when Colony Coroner Alexander Gentle inspected the corpse of Si Wan, a Malay woman in her late thirties who was the victim of the amok of a Riau Malay, known as Salleh. After the post-mortem of Si Wan’s ‘fearfully hacked about loins, legs and body—entrails protruding’, Gentle wrote: ‘This seems to be a case of “amok” and this behaviour of the murderer, on the passage from Johore to Singapore and after the fatal assaults when he tried to stab himself—raises the suspicion that he was temporarily insane. 51 ’ Gentle’s notes suggest that by 1911, the term ‘amok’ was accepted as a cause of death (used inter-changeably with ‘murder’), and more tellingly, that it was linked to the possibility of mental illness.

  These opinions from th
e Coroner’s Court and the judiciary on amok and its ‘nature’ as a medical (or psychiatric) condition were echoed in the medical articles of colonial doctors. For instance, Dr. Ellis emphasised in his articles that amok was a mental condition: ‘the impulse to amok is sudden and uncontrollable […] [it is] a peculiar condition of mind Malays get into’. 52 Thus Dr. Ellis argued that since ‘those who amok from a sudden impulse are […] unable to refrain from obeying that impulse, and moreover are unconscious as to what they do whilst obedient to their impulse’, these amokers ‘therefore should not be held responsible for any action they may commit during their paroxysm of mania—a mania that would even come under the definition of insanity as held by lawyers’. 53 Yet another Colonial Surgeon, Thomas Oxley, postulated in 1846 that Malay ‘amok-runners’ were ‘labouring under some gastric disease or troublesome ulcer, and these fearful ébullitions break out upon some exacerbations of the disorder’. 54 Similarly, one of his colleagues, a certain Dr. Fox, described amok as a ‘peculiar and almost unique form of racial psychosis […] the man (it is never a woman) seizes a weapon, generally his kris, runs into a house or street and attempts to kill the first person, usually his best friend or his wife, who crosses his path’. 55

  Even though cases of amok also involved non-Malay perpetrators, 56 doctors, writers and colonials attributed amok to Malays largely based upon their assumption that ‘the Malay character’ was fundamentally violent. In comparison, they believed that other non-indigenous ‘Asiatic peoples’ in Malaya were supposedly ‘of a different temperament from the Malays’. 57 As a journalist of The Singapore Free Press remarked in 1912, ‘[t]emperamentally all the Malay races are exceeding highly strung and nervous’. 58 For Frank Swettenham , this volatile and violent nature of ‘the real Malay’ led him to declare and conclude with remarkable confidence that: ‘I believe that about sixty per cent of the Malays who meng-amok [run amok] are mentally diseased, usually from inherited causes. 59 ’ In many ways, these opinions on amok and ‘native violence’ were also informed by contemporary environmentally deterministic theories which posited that the oppressing Malayan climate had ‘foredoomed’ the Malays to run amok. For instance, in 1923, Colonial Surgeon Wellington blamed the equatorial climate of Malaya for the ill mental health of its inhabitants. According to him, Malaya’s ‘continual summer’ was ‘enervating and bad for the nervous system […] The tissues become lethargic and muscles and brain refuse to act with the vigour natural in a temperate climate. 60 ’ Similarly, Kenneth Black, Professor of Surgery at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore, added in 1933 that the ‘noxious stimuli’ in the tropics would ‘culminate in irritability, memory loss, poor concentration, impaired self-control, alcohol abuse, mental breakdown, insanity, and suicide’. 61

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial administrators in Malaya were confident that amok had ‘almost ceased’ due to one ‘simple explanation’; as colonial intervention in Malaya had brought ‘hospitals, lunatic asylums, and a certain familiarity with European methods of treatment, the signs of insanity are better understood, and those who show them are put under restraint before they do serious damage’. 62 This emphasis upon the fruits of the ‘civilising mission’ in Malaya was already apparent in Swettenham’s writings as early as 1895 in his book, Malay Sketches, in which he triumphantly declared:Malaya, land of the pirate and the âmok, your secrets have been well guarded, but the enemy has at last passed your gate, and the irresistible Juggernaut of Progress will have penetrated to your remotest fastness, slain your beasts, cut down your forests, ‘civilised’ your people, clothed them in strange garments, and stamped them with the seal of a higher morality. 63

  In a similar vein, the narrative of the ‘civilising mission’, which was used to make sense of amok, was also frequently couched in a parent-child dichotomy. More precisely, while colonials presented or considered themselves as playing a parental role in the guiding, disciplining and ‘civilising’ of their native wards, the local and indigenous populations of Malaya were often portrayed as helpless, infantile subjects in need of protection and guidance. Indeed, in the words of a correspondent of the Glasgow Evening Times who had been confronted by an amok-runner in Singapore, ‘[i]t is highly complimentary to the white man that, whatever the natives may say about him, they always flock to him in times of danger. My presence seemed like a protecting wall to them […] “Tuan, Tuan” [Sir, sir], they howled. “Amok! Amok!” 64 On the other hand, colonials described Malay ‘amokers’ as wild, primitive or savage children lacking any self-control over their emotions and bodies. As one colonial surgeon at the Government Lunatic Asylum in Singapore put it, a Malay ‘amoker’ was akin to ‘an ill-tempered child that breaks out into a storm of temper without rhyme or reason’. 65

  Such an interpretation was also common elsewhere in the Malay archipelago, such as in the Philippines, where colonials regarded amok as a phenomena ‘revealing a combination of infantile misjudgement, deficient self-control, and primitive reflex’. 66 In Malaya, medical professionals such as the psychologist F.H. Van Loon also postulated that the mentalities of ‘all primitive races resemble very much the psyche of children […] The higher a people (or individual) is civilised, the better it learns to control its affective reaction.’ Thus argued Van Loon: ‘The peculiar psychic nature of the Malay is responsible for the symptoms which render this syndrome [amok] entirely different from similar ones in Europe. 67 ’ In the eyes of colonial administrators, education, civilisation and moral discipline—introduced as a result of colonial rule—were necessary and decisive in altering the nature of the Malay with ‘amazing quickness’, converting Malays who were ‘blood-thirsty and lawless in the extreme’:The metamorphosis has been extraordinary, for in the place of the wild, uncontrolled savage there is now the lazy, listless Malay who seeks only to live a quiet life with as little trouble as is possible […] in an incredibly short time Malaya has been transformed from a land of impenetrable jungle peopled with ferocious savages into a prosperous country of rubber, tin, coconuts and other products […]. 68

  Colonial narratives on ‘native violence’ and amok thus reveal how colonial administrators, law-enforcers, and medical professionals contributed towards the assembling of ‘knowledge about “indigenous psychologies” that facilitated rule’. 69 Their negotiations on controlling amok illustrate ‘the ambitions and the methods of an encompassing imperialism’, 70 while highlighting the instrumentality of culturally-sanctioned acts of violence in a colonial-ordered world.

  Notes

  1.‘Terrible Case of Amok’, The Straits Times, 4 June 1901, 2.

  2.Ibrahim’s actions were not unique. Rather, his case was one amidst many similar cases of ‘amok’ which took place around the turn of the twentieth century. See the discussions in the following news articles: ‘A Terrible Case of Amok’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 11 May 1901, 2 and ‘A Terrible Amok’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 4 June 1901, 2. For a comparison of similar cases before 1900, also see ‘Amok in Perak’, The Straits Times, 27 December 1898, 3; ‘An Amok at Penang’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 19 April 1899, 2; ‘Two Dutch Extradition Cases: The Amok of Amang and Mat Salleh’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 22 July 1899, 3 and ‘Another Amok Case: Tragic Affair at Tanjong Rhu’, The Straits Times, 26 June 1900, 2.

  3.Frank Athelstane Swettenham, The Real Malay: Pen Pictures (London: John Lane, 1900), 232–257.

  4.‘Correspondence: Amok’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 7 June 1901, 2.

  5.‘Correspondence: Amok’, 2.

  6. ‘Correspondence: Amok’, 2.

  7. Amok was a practice unique to Muslims in the eyes of certain members of colonial society. Thus Q.E.D. wrote of the necessity to ‘disabuse their minds and also that of the prisoner, of any false notions of courage, heroism or self-devotion which Muhammadans might possibly, but Muhammadans alone of all mankind, could ever atta
ch to such base, cowardly and brutal murders, which none but the devil himself, the “father of lies”, could ever have inspired’. Ibid.

  8.Syed Hussain Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16 to the 20 Century and its Function in the Ideology of Capitalism (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 128.

  9.Editor’s reply to ‘Correspondence: amok’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 7 June 1901, 2. Jehannam refers to the fires of purgatory.

  10.‘Amok: To the Editor’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 10 June 1901, 3.

  11.‘Amok’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 11 June 1901, 3.

  12.‘Amok Running’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 9 August 1901, 3.

  13.‘Amok Running’, The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 9 August 1901, 3.