The albatross, genus Diomedea, is a great white bird that nests on remote oceanic islands of the Southern Hemisphere. Having the largest wingspan of any bird species, they soar vast distances—often circumnavigating the globe—in search of food. Pairs will mate for life. In Singapore, this creature will forever be invoked to name a set of documents, which we’re now told contain the key to our nation’s secret histories. The Albatross File revises the conventional account of our unilateral expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965. As part of SG60, a multi-media campaign was launched to correct the impressions we’ve had all along about the circumstances of that mildly-put “separation”.
Sparing no demographic, the contents of the File were broadcast across formats. Armchair historians and geopolitical wonks have a CNA documentary, where scholars and retired diplomats recite archival papers with bookish severity. Bibliophiles get a 488-page volume, The Albatross File: Inside Separation edited by Susan Sim, former police officer, intelligence analyst, and counter-terrorism consultant. The perfect candidate to present history from the view of the security state keeping us all safe. There’s a permanent exhibition, “The Albatross File: Singapore’s Independence Declassified” on view at the National Library, currently headed by Gene Tan who ringmastered the SG Bicentennial in 2019. There’s even a film re-enacting events faced by the main protagonists, directed by Brian Gothong Tan. A friend who saw it called it a tearjerker, promising a treat for those who prefer history served saccharine. For the audiovisually-inclined, there are two video podcasts featuring Janadas Devan, former head of government communications and now senior advisor at the ministry of digital development and information. With teacherly indulgence, he lays out a polished account to CNA producers and The Straits Times’s Sumiko Tan.
What blinding truths does Albatross unmask? Separation was mutual, pulled off by both Malayan and Singaporean leaders without British knowledge. Goh Keng Swee pushed for full separation, even when Lee Kuan Yew tried for a looser confederation and had worked doggedly to prevent a total breakup. Neither were all the UMNO leaders equally to blame. The main troublemakers were a faction of UMNO extremists whom Lee called the “ultras”: Syed Jaafar Albar and a young Mahathir Mohamad among them.
They had forced the PAP into a corner. The British and PAP concluded that the ultras were using race riots as “an instrument of intimidation”, said Janadas in a podcast. He quotes Goh from the magic File, saying how the alleged UMNO-instigated riots of 1964 convinced Lee to launch “a counteroffensive, to make life intolerable for them.” The Malaysian Solidarity Convention of May 1965 proclaimed a “Malaysian Malaysia” to pressure Tunku Abdul Rahman. Later that month, Lee delivered his famous speech in the federal parliament that became the last straw, challenging UMNO’s program for giving Malaysians a better future. He began in English, before breaking into Malay to the amazement of his audience. These provocations convinced the Tunku that Singapore had to get out. Goh reached the same conclusion (without Lee) in his meeting with Tun Abdul Razak, who began preparing the legal paperwork for Separation with E W Barker. There’s a funny story about how they both got a bit drunk before signing on the dotted lines of history.
This is still a sentimental hagiography of Singapore’s founding fathers rising against impossible odds. A fearless Goh took the decisive leap into the unknown for all of us. Anguished Lee appears pitiful because he tried his hardest to avoid separation. His wife Kwa Geok Choo—the only woman in the cast—testifies her husband’s emotional wreckage. In fact, the details of who did what may not matter as much as how they make you feel.
Sentiment runs through all the material. The National Library’s exhibition is not subtle in urging us to “Feel History”. One promotional banner reads: “The promising merger. The bitter separation.” The third act is where we are today, completing a New Testament drama of the Garden, Fall, and Redemption. As we walk through the exhibition, experiencing its audio-visual elements and wall texts, our emotional responses attune us to the narrative’s mechanisms of persuasion. To what conclusions are we guided? Who are we meant to become through this story? We are interpellated, says the French philosopher Louis Althusser: made into social subjects through ideological acts of address. Here we are called to feel a certain way towards some events and individuals, and thereby become citizens.
Gratitude is a prevailing sentiment in casual online reactions I’ve seen. Relief is another. “Thank god we got out, otherwise I’d be speaking Malay today.” (Oh, the horror.) There is suspense and surprise. The book has “DECLASSIFIED” stamped on its cover, promising powerful revelations. Banners outside the National Library exhibition hail Goh Keng Swee as “the architect of our separation”. Another goes, “There were tears and anguish. And a story you should know.” Tantalising the viewer with privileged proximity to scenes of emotion, we’re invited to “Listen in on our founding leaders’ feelings about separation” and to “Be right there as it happened.”
I’m not saying these things to disparage sensitive souls. Hopeless romantic that I am, I teared up watching the CNA docu, a political thriller with an unexpected moment where Lee Kuan Yew—of all people—inflicts a moral injury. It’s the scene where the daughter of Donald Stephens, Sabah’s then-chief minister, read out a letter saying he felt betrayed by Lee after campaigning “up hill and down dale” to convince his people of Malaysian Malaysia. It was expertly set up, the daughter recounting her accidental discovery of the letter during the pandemic. She chokes up reading it. I felt history. The exercise is very effective at what it sets out to do.
But our national history is also obsessed with the dangers of emotion. Accounts of merger and separation often climax with the 1964 riots, an eruption of racial animosity shortly after the PAP contested the federal elections. Although UMNO warned the PAP to stay away from politics on the Peninsula, everything was apparently fair game since the Tunku had earlier breached a “gentleman’s agreement” with Lee to not participate in the 1963 Singapore state elections. In Singapore’s textbook telling, it is always UMNO’s Malay-first “communal politics” and high-handed meddling that produced violence.
The exhibition plays an excerpt of an incendiary speech by Syed Jaafar Albar, demonstrating how the ultras incited racial hatred. What emotion is this footage meant to elicit in audiences? Is it fear? Goodness, what terrible monsters those Malay nationalists were. How narrowly we escaped their jaws. It’s hard to shake off the implication that Malays in particular shouldn’t assert themselves too much, for the sake of Singapore’s stability. But more importantly, that reel raises questions. How do we deal with the emotions from the past? Is there a more responsible way to put these emotions into perspective? Should the audience be made to inhabit these emotions as a way to explain and justify the actions of historical figures?
Without diminishing the harms of Malay nationalism—and all ethnic nationalisms—it’s also easy to mobilise fear towards a seemingly outsized threat for political gain. Apart from the assessments of politicians and colonial intelligence, we still don’t know how dangerous or powerful were the so-called existential dangers to Singapore at the time, whether the extreme fringes of Malay nationalism or the communists. How truly menacing are the enemies of the state decried by the global far-right today: trans people, Muslims, migrants, or the “woke left”? In conditions of vulnerability and resentment, who gains power?
Politicians stoked the racial tensions of those years. Ordinary people’s hopes and fears were manipulated by all sides in the ferocious bid to fill Britain’s power vacuum as it withdrew from the Far East. And yet, across all these presentations on the Albatross File, politicians as a social class are hardly scrutinised. The narrative is dominated by their intrigues, ambitions, and manoeuvres. British-educated lawyers, economists, and blue-blooded princes made claims on behalf of “the people”—us, supposedly—though the people themselves are invisible. While merger was achieved by staging a referendum, the decision to undo it was made in secret between rival statesmen. Their tears and humanity are in focus, not those of ordinary Malayans facing divided families, friendships, and futures.
The view of history from the soaring albatross won’t include reactions by ordinary Malays to separation, either, despite UMNO and the PAP clashing over whose political program would “improve” our lot specifically. (Here I go again, the parochial Malay making this all about us.) But we were forced to choose between two sides with little grey in between. As we became minorities overnight, is there some space in this redemptive account of separation for our anxieties and misgivings?
Read another way, the drama of separation is less about the stark choice between multiracialism and Malay supremacy, but what can happen when people are made into a playground for electoral support. This is a story about the sentiments of economically- and politically-vulnerable groups being leveraged by elites to serve their own political interests. In our constitutional process, we’re obliged to choose our representatives in power. That process will always carry the inherent risk of turning our identities and sympathies into political resources. Through this “constitutional path” to independence, patriarchs subdued the furious revolutionary forces unleashed during the 1950s and the 1960s, restoring the authoritarian structure of the colonial state that persists to this day.
In response to this national history lesson, many have asked, “Why now?” since the contents of the Albatross File have already been known to the public at least since 1996 when Goh Keng Swee was interviewed by Melanie Chew for her book Leaders of Singapore. In one of Janadas’ podcast interviews, he says this public presentation of the File is possible because important records and oral history interviews were recently declassified. But what does “declassified” mean? A declassified document is simply placed in the National Archives, for anyone to put a request to view them or obtain a copy. Access is not guaranteed, however, and your request can be turned down for any reason.
As we saw in the documentary, the guests perform as scholars encountering the archive, but how were they selected? The British documents—forming the bulk of the “declassified” files—are open to all, but the Singaporean ones are open to a trusted few, including Shashi Jayakumar (son of a former PAP minister, and author of a book on the PAP’s history) and Irene Ng (former PAP MP who wrote the “authorised” biography of S. Rajaratnam). In a search on the National Archives’ online catalog, Lee Kuan Yew’s oral history interview does not turn up. His account of merger would have been pertinent.
SG60 is the other obvious occasion to dispel historical accounts by former political prisoners, scholars, and artists putting patriotic fervour aside. Poh Soo Kai, founding member of the PAP and detainee of Operation Coldstore, released his memoir Living in a Time of Deception (2016), where he argued that Lee Kuan Yew rushed headlong into the merger by agreeing to unfavourable terms with the Malayan leaders. Historian P J Thum has presented alternative accounts of Singapore’s history across a range of platforms, from podcasts to social media.
In 2015, Singapore’s jubilee year, Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye was published, presenting history with more critical speculation. Plays were staged fabulating other ways of inhabiting time besides empire and nation. In Marcia Vanderstraaten and Alfian Sa’at’s HOTEL, a Malay housekeeper weeps after the separation is proclaimed, worried about the reprisals her community might face. Her Chinese coworkers console her—they speak in Malay, and teach her profanities in Hokkien and Cantonese to cheer her up. Things will stay just the same, they said, like the rooms we tidy up at work; we change the sheets and linens, but it’s still the same room. I recall feeling like that conversation pieced back together, however little, what the riots and separation smashed to shards.
Malaya was a time and place of possibility. A people’s movement overcame colonial divisions of race by choosing solidarity, social justice, and Malay as the National Language. Merger was key to these goals. But the Albatross File asserts that separation was inevitable and merger was always doomed to fail. Were they really, and has separation spelled the end of a regional consciousness? Relationships across ethnic and territorial barriers persist today through the agency of ordinary people, in their everyday practice of living together. I still hear Chinese and Indian elderly speak Malay to one another in Singapore’s marketplaces. There are babas and nyonyas who remember the old keroncong tunes by heart. Thousands cross the causeway daily for work. On the ferries plying the water between Singapore and the Riau islands, passengers sometimes watch P. Ramlee films, laughing at the jokes.
Such durable cross-border practices and imaginations may have compelled the PAP government to assert for so long that we were kicked out, had “independence thrust upon us”, and that there was no looking back. Given ardent popular support for merger then, it was probably politically unsound for Lee and his cabinet to reveal their hand in the separation. Barisan Sosialis, the PAP’s main domestic foe until 1968, had attacked Lee’s government on precisely their handling of the merger.
While the merger of September 1963 fulfilled our predecessors’ dreams of independence from colonial rule, the Albatross File skips immediately to July 1964. Our time in Malaysia is emptied of all meaning except as a ticking countdown to 9 August 1965. No matter how Malayan the people felt, they had to believe their leaders when told they were in fact, separate peoples. Their descendants are taught to admire the statesmen who did this. We are left with a politics of sentiment engineered from above, mirroring the history it tells.
The albatross was Malaysia, said Goh Keng Swee. He drew this motif from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where a sailor shot an albatross that guided his ship out of a terrible storm. The gods curse him to wander the earth bearing the bird as a burden around his neck. After he began appreciating nature, the bird fell off. But he was condemned to tell the tale of his wicked deed to strangers, over and over again. Perhaps the name of the File was more appropriate than its creator intended.
Faris Joraimi is Jom’s history editor.
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Editor’s note: This essay was updated a few hours after it was first published.
