The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (76 page)

We arrived and were shown in to be photographed. I had to insist before I was given a few minutes in which to wash. Tubman then held forth at great length. Finally, dinner was served. He rapped the table with his gavel and said, “Mr Vice, grace.” The vice-president sitting at the other end of the table then thanked the Lord for the bounty that was to appear. It was not until midnight that we left to make the long journey to our guesthouse in Monrovia.

Worn out, I unpacked my pyjamas, went to the bathroom, and found the washbasin full of water with rusty sediment at the bottom. I cursed and pulled out the plug, but despite my fatigue knew instinctively I had done something stupid and quickly replaced it. Sure enough, there was no water from the tap. With what remained of the rusty water, I did my best to wash off the grease and dust of travel. I looked for a bottle of soda water to brush my teeth. Finding none, I settled for Fanta. It was sweet, but better than nothing; I hoped my toothpaste would counteract the sugar. After all the excitement, I was not sleepy. I picked up some reading material from the bedside table. It was a paean of praise for the president, the star of Africa, the saviour of his country. I folded the pamphlet to take home as a souvenir of how not to impress guests.

There was no need for a joint statement in Liberia, as Tubman was known to be pro-American; he supported Malaysia and accepted the Tunku’s invitation to visit the Federation. The next day, I wandered through Monrovia to gaze at the huge presidential palace and the terrible slums around it. I was glad to get out.

After Monrovia, it was Conakry in Guinea, the most anti-French of all the Francophone African states. French President De Gaulle was displeased when Guinea voted to leave the French community. They told us the French had pulled out all the telephones and other fittings before they handed over the country. But even if everything had been left in working condition, the statist policies that President Sekou Toure pursued – socialism based on the Soviet model – were certain to condemn it to poverty. In 1964, the effects were not yet devastating. The delegation was put up in VIP chalets by the coast that looked like large African thatched huts for tribal chiefs, but were built of brick and mortar.

Sekou Toure had been a trade unionist. He was highly intelligent. We spent much time talking about socialism through an interpreter, and he gave me several volumes of his book,
Socialism for Guinea
. He was publicly known to be against imperialist intervention in France’s former colonies to support black leaders who favoured French policies, but although he knew little about Malaysia, I was able to make him understand that British troops were necessary for the survival of a small country threatened by a huge neighbour. Whatever his initial views, I left him more receptive and open-minded. He could see that James Wong, Harris Salleh and I were not colonial stooges. He received us with courtesy, gave us an official lunch, and did not denounce Malaysia.

Then we headed for Abidjan in the Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire). The contrast with Conakry was striking. President Houphouet-Boigny, a black Frenchman, had been a minister in the Fourth Republic. Polished in manners, elegant in dress, he received me in a splendid palace attractively sculptured on the slope of a hill, and we dined on exquisite French
cuisine with champignons flown in from Paris that day and excellent wines. That he was African was not to be doubted, for he had two wives, both present at dinner, both young and attractive, and sisters!

There was no need to convince him of our case. He said that those African leaders who went the other way and became anti-colonial and pro-communist or socialist would suffer. I was impressed by his realism. He had a French
chef de cabinet
(chief of staff). So did those of his ministers I met. The Frenchmen took notes and looked efficient. The president accepted the Tunku’s invitation to visit Kuala Lumpur without hesitation. The Ivory Coast was at that time a member of the UN Security Council, representing the African bloc, and therefore useful to have on Malaysia’s side.

Next, Accra in Ghana. Among the ambassadors who greeted me at the airport were those from the Ivory Coast, Egypt and Algeria, which confirmed that the Algerians were with us now. Ghana, better known in my stamp-collecting days as the Gold Coast, was the first of the African states to gain independence (in 1957). Its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was a great Pan-African, and had set an example to others by taking an Egyptian wife. The local press referred to him as Osagyefo, the man of the times or the torchbearer, and he had his anti-colonial credentials to keep up. On the day of my arrival, Accra’s
Evening News
said, “The present Malaysian Federation bears the earmarks of neo-colonialism.” The paper compared it to the dissolved Central African Federation and the incorporation of Aden into the South Arabian Federation.

I met Nkrumah on Sunday at the 18th century Christianborg Castle, an old Danish slave-trading post, which was then the seat of government. As I approached his inner sanctum, I walked between Indian-style oil lamps, wicks floating in small brass bowls lining both sides of a red carpet. I found him in a strange state of mind. He had just survived a failed coup and was withdrawn and somewhat dazed. But he was cordial and friendly towards me, and we had an hour’s discussion. He told me
– and I had it reported to our press – “If you had not come, you would have lost by default, your fault.” The next day, the local newspapers moderated their tone towards Malaysia. Now they said only that it was possible that, perhaps unconsciously, it could be used for neo-colonialist purposes. I spent the day driving 70 miles to the High Volta dam, then being built by an Italian consortium and financed jointly by the World Bank and the US and British governments. But after seeing Conakry and Accra and meeting leaders who talked in socialist terms of the distribution of wealth, I believed they would become paupers.

At Lagos in Nigeria, the Tunku’s good friend, Prime Minister Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, met me at the airport with a full guard of honour. The ceremony was totally British. His support for Malaysia was forthright and so was the friendliness of the Nigerian people. All along the 15-mile route to the city, they gathered to wave and shout greetings of welcome. Lagos was in much better shape than Accra. Many of the public buildings looked identical with those in Malaya and Singapore. They must have followed the same British Public Works Department design. On leaving, I was able to talk of the unqualified moral support that the prime minister was giving to Malaysia. Nigeria had sent a special representative to the independence ceremonies in Kuala Lumpur.

Lusaka was in Northern Rhodesia, soon to become independent and change its name to Zambia. It had held its first general election in January, just a few weeks before we arrived. Kenneth Kaunda, the prime minister, was away and I was received by his deputy leader, Kamanga. We were put up at the Livingstone Hotel, an attractive, single-storey, rambling building, like a large inn in an English provincial town. The ministers were friendly. They knew very little about Southeast Asia but were very pleased we had visited them to seek their support, and the government accepted the Tunku’s invitation for Kaunda to visit Malaysia.

Then on to Blantyre, Malawi. The president was Dr Hastings Banda, whom everyone called Ngwazi, meaning a man to be looked up to like
a lion for his power and strength. He had qualified as a medical doctor in Scotland and practised happily there for many years. He did not need any convincing; he was dead set against anti-white xenophobia.

And from Malawi, on to Madagascar, then called Malagasy, and to its capital Tananarive, where President Tsiranana received us with great warmth and hospitality. He was an interesting man, blunt and straightforward. He talked openly of his country’s close ties with France. After hearing me, he said, “If one must be colonised, it is at least preferable that the colonising be done by a higher rather than a lower civilisation.”

Madagascar was a strange country, an island off the African coast whose people were part-African and part-Malay or Polynesian. Their dances combined the African stomping of feet with Malay and Polynesian hand movements, and there were Malay words in their language. After our discussions in his office, Tsiranana produced a leather pouch from his drawer and spread out a sparkling array of semi-precious stones, all mined in Madagascar. He invited each of us to choose one. I picked an aquamarine for Choo. The other members of the mission each had a different preference. He found great pleasure in seeing the delight on our faces as we made our choice of gems.

Dar-es-Salaam in Tanganyika, later to become Tanzania, was different. Julius Nyerere was a Christian, a humanist and a socialist, and he expressed his support for Malaysia in unequivocal terms. From our first meeting, I liked him for his simplicity of dress, manner and way of life. He put me up at the presidential mansion, formerly used by the British governor and before World War I by the German administrator. He himself preferred to live in a small house nearby. He had his Indian ministers to dinner, making the point that, unlike the other East African countries, he had a place for them in Tanganyika. But alas, his Fabianism and statism, picked up not so much from Marxist tracts as from discussions with other anti-colonial leaders and well-meaning British socialists he had met in Britain, caused his country unnecessary poverty.

When I arrived at Kampala in Uganda, Prime Minister Milton Obote was away and I was received by his ministers. They were friendly and understanding; the Commonwealth ties counted. There was some tension between the government and the Kabaka of Buganda, or “King Freddie” as he was popularly called, but although Obote had met the Tunku at Commonwealth conferences and mistakenly seen him as another “King Freddie”, that did not affect Uganda’s support for Malaysia. They sympathised with Malaysia and did not support Indonesia.

The next stop, Nairobi, was important. President Jomo Kenyatta was known as Mzee, a term of great respect and reverence for an old man. He had a worldwide reputation as a fighter for freedom who had been detained in shackles during the Mao Mao rebellion in the 1950s against the British government and the white settlers. The governor-general, Malcolm MacDonald, whom I had known when he was the British commissioner-general to Southeast Asia, had briefed the Kenyan government about Malaysia, and all I needed to do was to meet Kenyatta and get his endorsement. Unfortunately, he was away in Mombasa, opening an oil refinery, but Malcolm MacDonald was resourceful and got the government to fly me there.

Kenyatta met me at the airport and we drove together in a convertible to my hotel through throngs of people, all shouting
“Urumbi, Urumbi”
. Kenyatta prompted me to join the chant and point my forefinger to the sky as they did; the gesture, he explained, meant “let us pull as one people”. In a joint communiqué, he emphasised Kenya’s friendship with Malaysia, welcomed the mission’s visit as a step towards strengthening understanding, and thanked me for coming to Mombasa to see him.

My last stop was Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. After my arrival, I went for a drive in the afternoon, had dinner at the guesthouse, and slept. At 3 am, I woke up feeling an enormous weight on my chest. I feared I was about to have a heart attack. I slept fitfully. At breakfast, I asked some other members of the mission whether any of them had experienced this strange sensation. None had. I wished we had brought a doctor with us. When the main party arrived in a coach from a hotel in town, I was greatly relieved to find that several of them had had the same experience. It was mountain sickness. Addis Ababa was 8,500 feet above sea level.

President Jomo Kenyatta receiving me at Mombasa Airport, January 1964.

February 1964: Visiting Julius Nyerere (centre) in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Stephen Kalong Ningkan, chief minister of Sarawak, is at right.

To be received in audience by Emperor Haile Selassie, I had to walk past two cheetahs lightly chained to posts on either side of him. It was a scene from King Solomon in biblical times, except that Haile Selassie wore a British-style military uniform. He listened and was unequivocal in his support for Malaysia. But his was not one of the revolutionary regimes of Africa. I was shocked by the deference and cowed demeanour of the people on the streets as my car drove by with flags fluttering. They took off their hats and bowed deeply. The flags represented authority, whether they flew for the emperor, his guests or his officials, and they knew their humble place at the bottom of the ladder. In contrast to the sometimes handsome buildings around them, they looked shabby and poor. I attributed all this to an antiquated feudal system that kept the peasants down and confined wealth to the nobility. I did not feel sanguine about the future of the country.