In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  It was an ingrowing sore, eating into his ankle. Scars all around it spoke of previous infections, now overcome. I sat him down and cleaned it, spread it with antibiotic cream, overlaid all with a bright-pink waterproof plaster, patted into place. He winced but made no complaint.

  ‘Have you got any pills for it?’ he asked, looking very small.

  I gave him a vitamin pill from the bottle I had brought but not bothered to take after the third day.

  He looked up with melting brown eyes. ‘Haven’t you got an injection you could give me?’

  ‘No injections.’ I felt guilty at having no injections. Why did I have no injections?

  He gave me a hug, then thanked me more formally and shook hands with great ceremony. His friends admired the big plaster as he went down the ladder, limping judiciously. They clustered round and began to exhibit wounds as claims to attention. Gently but firmly, they were repelled.

  The plaster would stick until the first time he went in the sea, which would be in about ten minutes. I had really done nothing for him, but he had offered me certain proof of my own benevolence and selflessness. Thus it was with Raffles.

  ‘Sir Stamford was anxious to do the utmost possible good for such an Island and such a people … The Court of Directors “had no hesitation in declaring that his proceedings in regard to Pulo Nias were deserving of their decided reprehension. And they were inclined to visit him with some severe mark of their displeasure for the steps he had taken,” and threatened to remove him from his government.’

  – Lady Raffles, Memoir

  Dust to Dust

  ‘God willing, we hope to depart from this for England, if not in 1823, certainly in 1824 … Neither my health nor that of Lady Raffles is very good; I never was strong and during my first residence in India, the climate made a considerable inroad on my constitution … I have seen enough of power and wealth to know that, however agreeable to the propensities of our nature, there is more real happiness in domestic quiet and repose, when blessed with a competence, than in all the fancied enjoyments of the great and rich.’

  – T. S. Raffles

  After the founding of Singapore, there was a new stress upon the pleasures of the domestic sphere. Raffles had his country plantation, Permatang Balam, ‘the abode of peace’, his four children, his wife. He shunned international politics and reverted to his favourite model of a colony as an extended gentleman’s estate, founded an agricultural society, planted coffee himself. We have glimpses of him striding the fields building a sugar refinery from drawings in the encyclopedia tucked under his arm or proselytizing his neighbours on the virtues of a new homemade fertilizer. He founded another journal, largely devoted to practical matters. British colonial administration after Raffles would always have an earnest air of applied domestic science about it, government by Women’s Institute.

  ‘Perhaps this was one of the most happy periods in Sir Stamford’s life; politically he had obtained the object that he felt so necessary for the good of his country. He was beloved by all those under his immediate control, who united in showing him every mark of respect and attachment, and many were bound to him by ties of gratitude for offices of kindness, or private acts of benevolence and assistance which he delighted to exercise towards them.

  The settlement, like many other small societies, was divided into almost as many parties as there were families on his first arrival; but these differences were soon healed and quieted and a general interchange of good offices had succeeded. The natives and chiefs appreciated the interests which he took in their improvement and placed implicit reliance upon his opinion and counsel. The consciousness of being loved is a delightfully happy feeling and Sir Stamford acknowledged with thankfulness at this time that every wish of his heart was gratified.

  Uninterrupted health had prevailed in his family, his children were his pride and delight and they had already imbibed from him those tastes it was his pleasure to cultivate; this will not be wondered at, even at their early age, when it is added that two young tigers and a bear were for some time in the children’s appartments, under the charge of their attendant without being confined in cages, and it was rather a curious scene to see the children, the bear, the tigers, a blue mountain bird and a favourite cat all playing together, the parrot’s beak being the only object of awe to all the party.

  Perhaps so few people in a public station led so simple a life; his mode of passing his time in the country has already been described. When he was in Bencoolen he rose early and delighted in driving into the villages, inspecting the plantations and encouraging the industry of the people; at nine a party assembled at breakfast but separated immediately afterwards; and he wrote, read, studied natural history, chemistry and geology, superintended the draughtsmen, of whom he had constantly five or six employed in a verandah, and always had his children with him as he went from one pursuit to another visiting his beautiful and extensive aviary as well as the extraordinary collection of animals that were always domesticating in the house.

  At four he dined and seldom alone, as he considered the settlement but as a family of which he was the head. Immediately after dinner all the party drove out and the evening was spent in reading and music and conversation. He never had any game of amusement in his house. After the party had dispersed, he was fond of walking out with the Editor and enjoying the delicious coolness of the night land wind and a moon whose beauty those only who have been in tropical climates can judge of; so clear and penetrating are its rays that many fear them as much as the glare of the sun.

  Amidst these numerous sources of enjoyment, however, Sir Stamford never forgot that the scene was too bright to continue unclouded and often gently warned the Editor not to expect to retain all the blessings God in his bounty had heaped upon them at this time but to feel that such happiness once enjoyed ought to shed a bright ray over the future however dark and trying it might become.’

  – Lady Raffles, Memoir

  * * *

  Madu ditunda, read the caption, ‘honey postponed’. The picture showed a pouty, sluttish-looking Western woman in her bra, sitting up in bed and looking annoyed. A man, his shirt open to reveal a hairy chest, sat on the other side of the bed and hung his head in shame. The flaps of his shirt hung in sympathy. The all-male crowd gaped at it in horror.

  The pedlar held the picture aloft like a priest the eucharist and turned slowly round so the people behind him could see it too.

  ‘This,’ he announced, twirling the microphone professionally like a Las Vegas crooner, ‘is what comes of sex before marriage. All you young men are threatened by male weakness. Scientific research has proved that the male should have intercourse three times a week to be healthy, but never before the age of twenty-five and never after the age of sixty. The result of excess is deformed children and impotence. You, clear off!’

  He pointed at a lad of about twelve squatting in the front row of the audience, wide-eyed, taking it all in. The boy scowled and slouched reluctantly away. Two schoolboys, a year or two older, clung to each other willowishly and basked in the implicit confirmation of their maturity.

  There followed a lengthy presentation on sexual disease, impotence, homosexuality and sterility, lavishly illustrated with photographs of hideously deformed or ulcerated white genitalia. It was accompanied with rap music fed through the loudspeakers, the whine of bony-ankled ghetto macho, over which the man shouted as if heroically defying heckling.

  ‘Europeans fornicate with their own children,’ the man declared roundly, glared at me and held up an article on child abuse, ‘which is why they have AIDS.’

  One of the schoolboys whispered in his friend’s ear, bumped his backside against the other’s groin, looked at me and giggled. His friend looked at me and giggled too.

  ‘Their women are like dogs on heat. Their men cannot control them so they become impotent …’

  The crowd looked at me questioningly, in good-natured puzzlement. Why, they wondered, did I not keep my wife in order?
Why had I allowed myself to be made impotent? I began to feel this was excessively personal.

  ‘… Which is why whites have drink and drugs. But we have none of these problems. We have Islam and these pills.’

  He held out a handful of matt-black capsules, vaguely evocative of rubber, leather and bondage, or maybe the understated power of military hardware – though perhaps such associations were only a manifestation of my own non-Islamic perversity.

  ‘These pills are compounded from over a hundred essential ingredients from the densest forests of Sumatra and the rocky coasts of Nusa Tenggara, rare sandalwood oil, seeds from the Devil’s sirihbox …’ Raffles’ grotesque parasitic flower, harnessed, then, to modern marital insecurities.

  ‘…The normal price is 2,000 rupiahs each, but today, not 1,000, not 500, only 200 rupiahs apiece! But you must promise me this …’He looked warily round the circle of onlookers. ‘…No one must take these pills till he is safely at home with his wife. The urge will be so strong, the effect so powerful, you won’t know what hit you! It will be like this.’ He pulled out a plastic model of a monk. When you pressed the top of his bald head, the robe flew up to reveal an erection. ‘Wah! There you go!’ Press, erect. Press, erect. He threw back his head and guffawed, showing broken teeth, then suddenly serious. ‘These must be used in a godly way, not for the encouragement of vice. So I won’t sell them to unmarried boys or men whose wives are dead or foreigners or transvestites.’

  A sizeable number of men seemed not to fall in any of these categories and pressed forward waving money. They emerged from the scrum triumphant, secreted the pills in their trousers and sidled off in search of honey to be now more promptly delivered.

  * * *

  It was all too good to last. Quite suddenly, Leopold, the adored eldest son, was dead. In the space of six months Raffles lost his three eldest children. He and the Editor were gravely ill. They were frantic to preserve the life of their youngest child. Raffles declared himself almost mad with grief, heartbroken. As the doctors slowly poisoned him with mercury treatments, only two concerns could even momentarily hold his attention: Singapore and the collection of plants and animals to be shipped to England. He packed off his infant daughter to England post-haste, together with a shipment of Bengkulu spices, both fragile tokens of hope for the future. But the decision was taken. He must return to England or die. Only then did he realize that he was a sort of prisoner. To resign he needed the approval of at least thirteen of the Court of Directors of Calcutta.

  * * *

  Raffles’ house is still there, down the hill from the fort at Bengkulu. At least they tell you it was his house. It is not an obviously English structure, but perhaps a century of earthquakes and Dutch rebuilding can change a house considerably. An added complexity is the existence of two Government Houses in the town. But still they tell you this was Raffles’ house and a sense of history, like a lost puppy, will attach itself to any minimally acceptable object.

  The walls are massive stone, mocked by the intrusive roots of creeper that tunnel and split their solidities. Natural History is reclaiming it. Outside the door, where carriages once wheeled to a halt sit Bengkulu labourers, faces wrapped in cloths like steamed puddings. The coach–houses to either side have become salt warehouses, gudang garam – the name – not Raffles brand – of the clove cigarettes I offer them. The irony is not lost. It must be, to them, an old joke but they are polite enough to laugh at it. Gudang Garam, yes, yes. A sign declares the property to belong to the Indonesian Department of Justice.

  ‘You cannot come in,’ says an officious foreman with a clipboard. ‘Government property.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ says one of the labourers with a flexing of authoritative shoulder muscles. ‘Come and sit by me.’ He digs me in the ribs. ‘The house is full of priceless antique furniture. He does not want you to see it.’ We laugh. A glance at the interior shows collapsing roofbeams, no stairs, rusting ironwork, cartoons of human figures engaged in fumbling sexual acts, a smell of urine. Someone has planted orderly rows of maize inside what must have been the dining room, now open to the sky. Raffles was always for encouraging agriculture. Was this the place that was the haunt of tiger and parrot and Mr Silvio, the pet monkey who sported trousers?

  ‘Do you want to buy the house?’

  ‘You would have to do it up a little first.’

  He looks at the house with a long appraising glance and puffs on his cigarette. ‘No,’ he says, shaking his head and looking along the line of blind, gaping windows, ‘it’s not a house to live in any more.’ He shivers. ‘Too many ghosts. Even this time of day you feel it.’

  * * *

  ‘Whilst the Editor was almost overwhelmed with grief for the loss of this favourite child, unable to bear the sight of her other children – unable to bear even the light of day – humbled upon her couch with a feeling of misery, – she was addressed by a poor, ignorant, uninstructed native woman of the lowest class (who had been employed about the nursery), in terms of reproach not to be forgotten. “I am come because you have been here many days shut up in a dark room, and no one dares to come near you. Are you not ashamed to grieve in this manner, when you ought to be thanking God for giving you the most beautiful child that ever was seen? Were you not the envy of everybody? Did anyone ever see him, or speak of him, without admiring him; and instead of letting this child continue in this world till he should be worn out with trouble and sorrow, has not God taken him to heaven in all his beauty? What would you have more? For shame, leave off weeping and let me open a window.”’

  – Lady Raffles, Memoir

  That window was, more and more, to be Singapore, a city named after the Singha or lion, initially without lions but cursed with a plague of rats. They killed the rats and there was a plague of poisonous centipedes. No one worried about biblical precedent.

  Bengkulu was now a sub-plot. The real story lay elsewhere. Bengkulu was Raffles’ penance, but he would not leave it as he had found it. He had set up schools for the local children. There had been a reform of the administration. While in Java, Raffles had chiefly reduced power, here he determined to bolster it.

  ‘In order to render an uncivilized people capable of enjoying full liberty they must feel the weight of authority and must become acquainted with the mutual relations of society … Power we do and have possessed; we have employed it in the most arbitrary of all modes, in the exaction of forced services and in the monopoly of the produce of the country … We have destroyed the power of the native Chiefs; both reason and humanity would urge us to take the management into our own hands and to repair the mischief of a hundred years by affording them a regular and organized government … Tyrants seldom want an excuse and in becoming a despot I am desirous to give you mine …’

  The out-stations of the province, Tapanuli, Indrapura, etc, were no longer to be leased out to the highest bidder or administered by the Company directly but to be run by Buginese regents as the Buginese Corps was to be disbanded. Revenue was to come from land revenue, as in his reform in Java, but in fact, there was no one to collect or oversee the new system. It was a cosmetic reform, on paper only. Native chiefs were not paid their salaries nor were the producers reliably paid for their pepper by the new Buginese overlords Raffles had imposed on them. It is hard to know how far Raffles deceived himself in this as in his reforms in Java. There is an increasing cynicism in his reports. By now, he knows no one bothers to read them. His thoughts are already of home.

  Raffles’ promotion of spice, sugar, potatoes and coffee was another disaster. Despite the use of convict labour, i.e. de facto slavery, it was never economic. The soil was unsuitable and a huge investment in resources and labour was required to coax fruit from it, fertilizer, a little shelter for each tree. Moreover, the Company had crammed its warehouses with cheap spices while it had the run of the Moluccas during the Napoleonic Wars. As a result, Raffles was paying 4s. 7½d. a pound for nutmeg in Bengkulu while it was selling in London for 3s. a pound
. The Company were appalled to discover that Raffles by 1824 had half a million coffee trees in Bengkulu, every single one of which was costing them money. It is not to be wondered at that they were unconvinced by his claims that the new settlement of Singapore would make money. It would be a reversal of their 150 years’ experience of the area and the whole tendency of Raffles’ working life.

  Almost My Only Child

  Singapore gleams in the national neatness of … the Malays? the Chinese? the Tamils? No … the Singaporeans. The phantom graffitist of Bogor would here be quite without occupation. Here all graffiti is government approved.

  New Year in Singapore. Outside, no snow deep and crisp and even but air still and damp and stifling. The normal evening breeze has failed to appear. Lightning flickers over towards the east like a defective neon tube. From the tenth-floor balcony you can see the lights of the gloriously ramshackle Indonesian blocks of flats across the water. A hundred televisions are radiating Malay Islamic virtue from Malaysia as well as local Chinese pizazz and the gurgle of Tamil down into the stairwell. Raffles kept the different races apart under their own leaders; modern policy jumbles them up.

  The Indian family down the hall are cooking a sauce that exudes musky heat. Its insidious aroma penetrates locked doors and windows and provides an, as it were, smelltrack for a public-service advertisement urging Chinese parents not to beat and scream at their children every time they see them. My Malay hosts nod in approval. Yes, yes, Chinese indeed are like that – that woman on the next floor, for example – not like philoprogenitive Malays. Content brown children are hefted on to laps in proof, clutching storybooks nowadays written in English. One looks at me.

  ‘Uncle,’ he says, ‘will you help me with my Mandarin home-work?’ I demur. Modern youth, I feel, have got beyond me in their wisdom.