Who are the heroes you want to see today in Malaysia?

Ajibah Abol being sworn in as a minister after her victory in the 1974 Sarawak state election. She was one of a group of civil servants, mostly teachers, who resigned in 1947 to protest the handover of Sarawak to the British. The ‘Benteng 338’ group chose the nobler form of civil disobedience over assassination to show their disagreement. — theborneopost.com

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to visit the newly opened Borneo Cultures Museum in Kuching. Built at an estimated RM308mil, it is now the largest museum in Malaysia and the second-largest in South-East Asia. And for a museum buff like me, it was fun.

However, today I’m not going to talk about the extensive use of interactive digital exhibits (budgeted at RM15mil), nor the rather enjoyable children’s section which actually succeeds in making learning fun, nor even the knowledgeable staff that helped add value.

Instead, I will draw your attention to less than 1sq m of the estimated 6,700sq m of exhibition space, occupied by a modest hardback ruled notebook. It was opened to two facing pages divided into four parts. In each corner was a handwritten name in blue ink, with the occupation they held when they resigned. Some of the names have more notes in different handwriting and ink, recording when they had passed away.

The little plaque accompanying the notebook says, “Notebook with the names of 338 government officers who refused to comply. They resigned effective 1st April 1947 to express their dissatisfaction over the Cession”.

I think one of the greatest challenges in designing a museum is how do you present the exhibits so that it is more than just an endless sequence of antiques in rows upon shelves, but instead each is a part that gives context to the whole?

The background for this particular notebook is, of course, the Cession, which was when the third Rajah Brooke effectively handed Sarawak over to the British.

Many Sarawakians hoped that after the turbulent Japanese occupation during World War II, things would return to relative normalcy, perhaps with the next-in-line to be Rajah. However, they had their statehood tugged from under their feet, and “Benteng 338” was one of the groups who protested. Because many of them were teachers, it forced the closure of one-third of Malay government schools – something that served to bring more attention to their cause.

However, if you were in the museum, your eyes might instead be drawn to the next display cabinet. Occupying four times as much space as the notebook, it briefly details the assassination of the second governor of Sarawak, Duncan Stewart, who was stabbed by a young man disguised as a student.

The assassin’s name is of course Rosly Dhobie (this is how it is spelled in the display; the more common Malay spelling would be "Rosli Dhobi"), and you probably know it given recent efforts to highlight his role in history. In 1996, his body was moved out of Kuching Central Prison and buried in the Sarawak’s Heroes Mausoleum in Sibu in a state funeral given by the Sarawak government.

Part of my interest in this is because I worked on a documentary titled Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed (now available for streaming on Astro Go; see trailer here), and Stewart’s assassination was one of those topics we had to decide how to fit into the history of Sarawak.

In the end, we sandwiched a brief mention of the assassination between the protests against Cession and the British eventually cracking down on the movement. One reason for being so brief about it is because despite the assassination, it did not deter the British from consolidating their hold on Sarawak.

Another reason is because we wanted to tell the story of growing political awareness in Sarawak, leading to the formation of the SUPP (Sarawak United Peoples’ Party), and the assassination seemed counter to that.

There were other reasons, including that there was evidence that the group Rosli was associated with actually wanted to be part of Indonesia rather than Britain, when what we wanted to talk about was Sarawak establishing its own statehood identity.

However, at the end of the day, I felt strongly against highlighting it too much because I felt that Stewart was killed in cold blood. He had not even had time to do anything substantial to warrant antagonism, having only arrived in Sarawak 19 days earlier.

My personal belief is that assassination as a method of political change is only to be used in extreme circumstances, when people are under extreme duress, and Sarawak wasn’t really there. The British had been running Sarawak for three years up to that point, it was at peace, and both government revenue and expenditure had been steadily increasing. In 1946, roughly 6% of the budget was spent on medical and health facilities.

It’s true that the Malay families who used to have the ear of the Rajah had dropped down the pecking order, but I believe there were still avenues for representation through the Council Negri.

It is noble to want to fight for your country, but killing is a major sin that should not be lightly considered. However, assassinations are big, bold, sensationalistic events. Civil servants resigning in protest is much more modest. But I would argue what those civil servants did was more noble and more in line with the Malaysia I want to see today.

In fact, the museum took care to choose the page in the notebook that featured Ajibah Abol, but did not really elaborate on who she was. She had resigned as a schoolteacher in protest, and from there built an interest in politics. Eventually, she stood for and won a seat in the 1969 state election, was appointed the state Welfare and Culture minister in 1970, and founded the women’s wing of PBB (Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu) and became its chief a few years later. Not bad for somebody who quit her job.

I should add something else for context. One of the other protesters also happens to be my grandfather-in-law. I have never met him, but apart from this protest, he was very active in politics and by all accounts worked very hard to improve the lives of his fellow Sarawakians.

I believe that history does tend to repeat itself, and arguably Malaysia currently stands on the edge of even more political change. What kinds of heroes would you like to see right now who will be enshrined in museums half a century from now?

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In his fortnightly column, Contradictheory, mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi explores the theory that logic is the antithesis of emotion but people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at [e-mail]. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.