The Legacy of Divisions: The Politicization of Singapore’s July 1964 Race Riots

One of Singapore’s worst racial riots erupted on July 21, 1964, during a Muslim procession celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday, or Mawlid. Racial tensions broke out between Malay youths taking part in the procession and the Chinese, escalating to violent conflicts in the Geylang Serai area. 22 people were killed and 454 injured, according to the official statistics published by the Government of Singapore. The riots were a part of a series of violent outbreaks that punctuated the post-World War II and independence periods in Singapore’s history, including the 1950 Maria Hertogh riots, the 1954 anti-National Service riots, the 1955 Hock Lee Bus riots, the October 1956 riots, and the September 1964 riots, most of which were racially-motivated. 

This study is an examination of the memories and sentiments from the 1964 race riots and the multiculturalist policies of the government of Singapore that emerged in the wake of the riots. Its focus is the great discrepancy between the individual memories of those who lived through the riots, and the highly politicized collective narrative of those events that became the basis of those events. Such developments—the dichotomy between memory and policy—is not unprecedented in world historical analysis, but this case study’s focus on the politicization of a series of riots to suit a government’s agenda may be useful in the context of similar processes at work elsewhere. Individual memory shows a much greater degree of variance, as it is influenced by more factors such as age and the cultural environment in which one lives. On the other hand, the degree to which individual memory can be swayed and changed by collective memory, often the narrative skewed to one political interest, can also vary from person to person.

While individual memory may be prone to external effects like the media or the individual’s own ethnic or cultural background, it is an example of how stories are simplified to fit a certain political narrative. However, this narrative contradicts the sentiment of the people and makes a seemingly justified case for the legislative changes that resulted. Progress is rarely linear, and the world’s historical process contains many unintended consequences as well as consequences engineered by skewed perspectives. This is a familiar pattern in world history processes: the process by which a memory of an event is created, and as that memory shifts over time, policy evolves from that shift. The use of the 1964 racial riots is one such example of this. The contrasts reveal the importance of the memory, the diversity of stories that can arise from a single event, and the influence of a permeated but possibly skewed story.

Individual Memories of the Riots and the Culmination of Racial Tensions

While the official storyline illustrated by the government of Singapore is not disputed, interviews conducted by Adeline Hwee Cheng Low, a Singaporean sociologist, in 2001 reveal a much more “unruly plurality” in the memories of the general public surrounding the riots. Low conducted interviews across the three major ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malay, and Indian) and with both men and women. Her interviewees’ recounts of the event itself, of its cause, and the changes it caused in the aftermath (or lack thereof) reveals a discrepancy between the illustration the Singaporean government has painted of the event and the way the public sees the riots. 

All of Low’s informants reported that they were greatly surprised by the riots. One of them, a Malay woman, was in the procession itself when the riots began. Her experiences reveal the chaos of the riots, especially when they broke out and interrupted the Mawlid procession, an important religious occasion. In her recount, she said:

The procession started from City Hall towards Jamiyah. There were thousands of people. It’s one of the biggest religious festivals. All the Malays are down there, everywhere. We reach around Lorong 3 Geylang, gangsters start throwing stones, bottles from shophouses, so a group of youngsters in the procession rush up to retaliate … A lot of people ran into the houses along the streets. I ran into a Hindu lady’s house, couldn’t go home … The Hindu lady let anyone come in and give us food and drink.

This informant’s experience also revealed how racially-divisive the events were in the moment, particularly because the violence of the riots made each of the bystander’s decisions a matter of life and death.

Then we stopped a bus and climbed up, the bus were all Telok Kurau (her kampong) people. When we reach Joo Chiat, this group of Chinese stop the bus you know. Wanted the people to get down. They block the place, won’t let the bus move. We shouted “move on, move on” so the bus driver just move through very fast didn’t stop lah, didn’t allow it to stop. From the bus we saw the Chinese take out parang (machetes). Bus driver Indian Fella. If he was Chinese, he would most probably stop the bus and let the Chinese kill us Malays but he just drove. If he hit anybody, die right, also never mind.

In moments like these, people like the bus driver she described had to choose between letting people of one race die over the other. The fact that the bus driver happened to be Indian saved the lives of the Malays on the bus, but it also meant that the Chinese rioters were injured in the process. As she said, if he had happened to be of another race, he may have chosen differently. Not only did he also have to choose to save one race over another, but he also had to choose to sacrifice one group of people for another. This was an extreme culmination of racial tensions building up that turned into violence.

The Politics of the Kampong

The fighting also shined a light on the racial enclaves that existed in Singapore, especially in kampongs, urban settlements of cheap housing mostly inhabited by working-class families. In 1961, 200,000 to 250,000 people lived in kampongs across Singapore. These enclaves came to play a significant role in allowing racial groups to carry out violence and rioting in groups of Chinese and Malays. Another one of Low’s informants told of the terrifying fighting that took place in the neighboring areas of Geylang Serai:

The Malay kampong faced the Chinese kampong. The two sides were fighting like kids playing “masak” (cooking): ping pang pong! Glass pieces flying around everywhere. I went to hide, scared lah, then the police came and all of them ran away. I also saw the Malays, each one holding one kris (sword). Other people from other kampongs also come and join the fight. It is never ending. When the police come everybody run back into the house but once they are gone, they come out and start all the nonsense lah.

Singapore’s population is made up of three major ethnic groups, Chinese, Indian, and Malay, with the Chinese population being the largest. In 1970, 77% of Singapore’s resident population was Chinese, 14.8% was Malay, and 7% was Indian. In the years following the 1963 merger of Singapore with Malaysia, a national debate erupted over how Singapore’s multiethnic and majority-Chinese population would fit into the political structure of Singapore’s government. These debates rose during the 1963 Singapore general election between the two major parties, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the People’s Action Party (PAP). The main disagreement between the two parties lay in whether or not Malays should receive special treatment in public housing and other such government services. To this day, the Malay population, according to Stephen Nagy, “remains in a low socio-economic position compared to their compatriots.” He attributes this persistent social inequality to the choices Malays often make in choosing “education regimes and lifestyles that are strongly Islamic leaning,” referring to the dominant religion of Malays in South East Asia. Their religiously-influenced education and career paths could be acting as an obstacle for greater economic success in Singapore’s “globally oriented, capitalist economy.” The UMNO pushed for the implementation of the  Bhumiputra policies, which gave the indigenous Malay population preferential treatment and special rights to compensate for their lower economic standing. However, the PAP saw this as fostering “Malay Malaysia” racialism, and called for a “multiracial” political system with “equal rights for all.” Explaining the “inadequacy of UMNO’s policies” by example, Lee Kwan Yew, one of the founding leaders of the PAP and the first Prime Minister of Singapore, wrote:

How does a Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernized civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3% who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoes, open their motorcar doors? Of course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses. Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and big houses?

In the same month as the riots, Singapore’s Malay community had made additional requests for special licenses and exclusive land reservations, and that qualifications be less strict for Malays seeking public housing. These requests were rejected by the PAP-led government, which emphasized on racial equality in the public housing system as part of its policy of building a “Malaysian Malaysia.” The actions of the PAP were denounced by the Malay community as failing to protect the special rights of Malays.

Variations in Individual Memory

The interviewees’ ideas of the causes of the riots varied the most with race. Low’s Malay informants believed that the riots were religiously motivated rather than racially motivated because it occurred in such a significant religious event. One of the interviewees, a Malay man, said, “When they come and disturb our religion we fight back.” All of the Malays interviewed believed that the Chinese initiated the riots, but some also commented that those who participated in the violence were part of secret societies and gangs, not the local Chinese community they processed through. On the other hand, the Chinese interviewees all believed that the Malays instigated the riots, particularly Malay extremists.

However, the interviewee’s level of education also played a part in how much he or she thought that politics played into the tensions. Low explains that in the 1960s, women tended to be less widely read as men were more likely to pursue higher education. Only Malay and Chinese informants who had a college education or held government jobs attributed the riots to politics because they were able to read press reports and newspaper articles. Their individual, anecdotal memory of the events was more intertwined with the media surrounding the riots, which represented the national or collective memory. In a riot like this where the cause of the violence was so unclear, differences in memory bring to question whether or not the political aspects of the riots were emphasized to serve a political purpose, and if the individual memory is a more accurate representation of the tensions.

On the contrary, many in Singapore believed that the riots stemmed from the culmination of smaller tensions between racial groups rather than an undercurrent of conflict. One of them stated that “1964 was a small misunderstanding between Malay and Chinese. Most of the villages in Singapore were living peacefully together.” Another said that the riots were entirely spontaneous and were not political—“It happened at the split of the moment.” More importantly, most of the interviewees believed that their relationship with other racial groups calmed down quite quickly, while even helping one another during the riots to protect each other from rioters. In some areas, the riots even “served to "gel" the two races together to protect their own kampong.” In others, the riots did not affect their relationship with neighbors of different ethnic groups at all, as their neighborhoods did not see much of the violence in the July riots.

The Publicized, Political, Collective Memory

The chaotic and controversial 1964 riots inevitably created a wide variety of opinions and sentiments. While the official memory publicized by the Singapore government attributes the riots largely and almost entirely to the political conflicts between the UMNO and the PAP, residents of Singapore who experienced the riots and the aftermath of the tensions first-hand attributed the riots elsewhere. 

The official version of the narrative of the riots is “transmitted through educational institutions and the media and used to entrench institutional interests and ideology.” One of the most significant ways through which the Singapore government pushed this narrative was through television documentaries. In 1997, the Television Corporation of Singapore and Times Learning Systems produced Days to Remember, which discussed major events in Singapore’s modern history from its involvement in World War II to its first presidential election in 1993. The documentary’s narrative illustrates conflict surfacing in the 1963 election and the conflicting ideals of the UMNO and the PAP. These political tensions escalated to the racial clashes seen in the 1964 racial riots. In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Tungku Abdul Rahman, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, proposed the separation of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation. On August 9, 1965, Singapore became an independent country.

The main point of emphasis and the “moral” of the story pushed by the Singaporean government is the need for an integrated national identity and how the riots represented a challenge on the path for Singapore to “forge our identity and ideals.” The documentary closes with the interviewees featured in the film “proudly proclaiming” their Singaporean identities, saying “‘Being Singaporean has nothing to do with race’, ‘I'm Singaporean, not Indian’, and ‘My birthplace, my home’.” However, the perspective of the documentary is significantly skewed. Most of the interviewees in the documentary were former political leaders, including two former Cabinet Ministers, a lawyer, and the Singapore Development Board Chairman. There is a single story being told in this telling of the riots, especially in the political significance of the racial riots as a conflict between two competing ideas of who the Singaporean government should lift further up, namely underprivileged minorities.

Impact of the Collective Memory on Singapore’s Multicultural Policy

The skew of the story becomes especially apparent in the way the riots were described publicly in the years following and were used to justify public policies. The racial tensions of 1964 were most impactful in public housing policy, which is overseen by Singapore’s Housing and Development Board (HDB). In 2019, over 80 percent of Singapore’s population lived in public housing flats. After Singapore’s own public housing system was established, public housing applications have been allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis. The goal of this policy was to reduce the possible development of racial enclaves in the public housing estates. The government believed that the development of Malay and Chinese kampongs, or neighborhoods, led to increased ethnic separation and hostilities that culminated in the riots. The first-come-first-serve system would help to create more racially diverse housing estates to prevent the formation of racial enclaves. At the core of this effort was the need for the government to create an “integrated Asian national Singaporean culture.” The widespread nature of this policy lay on the assumption that the government needed to force ethnic integration in order for inter-race relations to improve.

The Singapore government’s use of the riots to permeate political rhetoric about the necessity for racial integration and the development of a unified Singaporean national identity contrasts with what the interviews suggest is the reality of race relations. This kind of rhetoric became even clearer in 1989, when the Singapore government went one step further by implementing the Ethnic Integration Policy. The policy set quotas for the proportion of residents in a public housing estate who could be in a specific ethnic group: “No more than 87 per cent of residents in any one block can be Chinese, while Malays are limited to 25 per cent and Indians and others 13 per cent.” The policy also dictated that those living in public housing could only sell their flat to someone of the same ethnic group. Suppiah Dhanabalan, the National Development Minister at the time, reassured the public that the purpose of the policy was not to “force the proportions down” but to “contain the problem.” However, the fact that the government believed that there was a “problem” in the first place contrasts with what the people believed to be the case. Dhanabalan went on to tell the House of Parliament that allowing races to naturally “regroup” and form enclaves would be to go back to the “pre-1965 day where there were ethnic mistrust and … riots.” The political impacts of the riots were much stronger than the cultural ones, and that the Government of Singapore politicized the event more than the people have.

While the Government made these claims that contradicted the sentiment of most Singaporeans on inter-race relations after the riots, the Singapore government did not offer conclusive evidence that racial mixing was necessary for maintaining peace in its pluralistic society. In an interview with the Straits Times, Dhanabalan stated that the Government has not conducted any qualitative studies on why races group together or why a balanced mix was needed. He explained that all Singaporeans agreed that Singapore should be a “racially cohesive society” and that steps should be taken to “foster racial integration.” There is a discrepancy between those two claims explained by the difference between the Government’s politicized view of the riots and the people’s real reactions to 1964. It is not disputed in the sentiments of Low’s interviews that actions should be taken to work towards racial harmony. However, the interviews did not indicate that racial enclaves themselves were the cause of the violence. The Ethnic Integration Policy lies on the assumption that racial groups are detrimental to the “racial tolerance and harmony” of the country. Although the Government has reasoned that creating a racial mix reflective of Singapore’s total ethnic makeup allows for election results that more accurately reflect the will of the country, the policies created by the Singapore Government demonstrates the discrepancy between the peaceful resolution the people of Singapore saw in the aftermath of the 1964 riots and the politicized and fragile situation the Government saw.

Conclusion

It is important for us to preserve the individual first-hand memories of those who experienced the riots or any cultural tensions because it helps to inform the way our cultures have evolved. Singapore is especially unique in this regard because of its long history of Chinese, Malays, and Indians co-existing in the Singapore entrepôt. Today, the city is one of the most metropolitan places in the world, where cultures from Asia and around the world merge. In this mélange of ethnic and racial backgrounds, we can continue to consider how generational shifts and cultural shifts impact the collective memory of age groups, racial groups, and political groups and the many varied individual memories that both support the collective memory and are affected by it.

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