KAMAL BIN MAT SALIH:
(1946 - 2025)

   Tan Sri Datuk Kamal bin Mat Salih was a Malaysian economist, policy advisor, academic administrator and politician. He served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wangsa Maju from April 1995 to November 1999. He was a member of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), a component party of the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition.

   I was born in Gunung Semanggol on July 29th, 1946 just after the Japanese surrender and the return of British administration. It was in this same village, a few years after, in the hallowed classrooms of the Ehya as-Sharif, that a faction led by Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmi broke away from UMNO to form PAS, the Islamic party. These two political parties were destined to do battle in the political arena in Malaysia throughout the length of my life, serving as the backdrop to my own engagement with politics in my adult career later. The religious Islamic strand in my upbringing, and in the life of Semanggol had revolved around the activities of Ehya as-Sharif.

   I grew up in a house of books, for ever since I can remember I was surrounded by books. I blame it on my elder brother and sisters. I am the second youngest in a family of nine siblings, five boys, two of whom passed away before I saw the light of day, and four elder sisters. The books, arrayed in a row of window-high shelves along two walls, and a third against another wall, seemed to be the defining character of my parents' modest traditional Malay house.

   Throughout my later adult life this same book arrangement in the serambi would be recreated many times over. The interior design of this study had been imprinted early in my mind during those many happy childhood hours lying on the floor between those shelves, flipping through those books and magazines and imagining that I was reading them. They became a kind of refuge for me growing up in between the everyday preoccupations of a rural boyhood. It was here that I first read Hamka's Tenggelamnya Kapal Van der Wijck when I was about ten (and later learned Hamka's plot here also involved the notion of "immanent will" so well employed by Thomas Hardy in his novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd), and Harun Ar-Rashid's Nyawa di Hujung Pedang a year later. Displayed so arrogantly on the shelves of my father's house, these books - despite such foreboding-looking titles to a child - would willy-nilly get to one eventually. Thus began my lifelong love affair with books.

   Schooling in those early days was fun. It had always been so for me. Going to school to me was like going to a game or to go on an outing with friends, without parental supervision. Of course there were the teachers, but in my books they were just like older and wiser more knowledgeable friends, or just like my elder brother or sister, or when I was younger, like my mother. Some of them treated me as teacher's pet. They were all, in turn, my pet teachers.

   Throughout my school career, if you can call it that, I had never come across a bad teacher. Each one contributed something to my growth as a person, through formal means or just by example. The driving force of my education was emulation, which explains my abiding love for biographies. As I lived through it, each engagement with a teacher was projected onto a master-canvas, a storyboard, a drama unfolding, whose twists and turns of plot created a finer and better-hued characterization of the hero against his protagonists, leading to a never-ending resolution of the story. For the hero again emerges on another stage, to begin a new act of the same play. The final resolution of these stagings is me, the eventual victor of the plot.

   My first teacher was my mother. When she first heard that day from my father that I was enrolling in King Edward VII School, or KE as it was and is popularly known in Taiping, she must have thought that the sky had fallen on our heads. Before this all her children had gone to Ehya, and it was so expected of me too. It was already bad that I had gone to a secular Malay school instead of the Arabic school to start my primary schooling, but now her younger son was going to a "Christian" school! While the first decision must have been made by my father, the decision to go to English school was without any of the family's knowledge, let alone consent. It was all mine, as it was to be with all other decisions on my educational choices after that. No consultation with parents or kin, a degree of independence I learnt early in life.

   My father, too, might have been surprised by the news that morning, but might not have been. I had just reported to Semanggol Malay School to start Standard Four when Cikgu Hassan, my class teacher who had taught English in my previous three years, told me and two others to go see the headmaster, who then instructed us to go to Taiping to enroll in Special Malay Class 1 (SMC1) in KE. This was 1956 and I was ten. It should have been expected, because Cikgu Hassan was the one who had sponsored me to take the KE entrance examination to enter the English transition stream. I was his favourite pupil and he was my favourite teacher because of the storytelling sessions in class about the lives of great men, and of Sinbad. He was my first guide outside of my immediate family, to lead me to the path of enlightenment. Still, I remember being surprised and excited at the prospect of going to English school, for I had forgotten about the exam and was certainly not thinking about passing it.

   My father did not show any emotion when I went to see him at his regular coffee shop, a stone's throw away from the school, where he was having his breakfast after giving me a ride on his bicycle to the first day of class. He did not flinch when I told him the news and that I needed bus fare to go to Taiping. This may be because deep down he must have expected, and probably felt proud, that something like this would happen in his young charge's life.

   My mother was a different case altogether. She cried and moaned that I was now going to be lost to the devil. I got into SMC1 in the afternoon session of KE Primary School, in the old wooden block off Station Road. Mother made sure that she spent an hour daily before I left to catch the 11 o'clock Red Bus to Taiping, teaching me all the basics of a good Muslim. She would then hand over twenty cents for bus fare and the tiffin carrier containing some rice and fish for my afternoon tea-break at school. She never failed in this routine that she had taken upon herself. I had sisters and a brother who excelled in religious education in Ehya, but she was the one responsible for my religious training, even though I also went to religious classes in Malay school. This was the pattern for the good part of my first year in KE. On days of the week when my mother was weak from her asthma condition, I took over the cooking under her supervision; that was how I first learned to make good sambal tumis! When I received a state scholarship at the start of my second year in KE, I gave all of the monthly eight ringgit that I was awarded to my mother.

   At one point that first year, maybe for a month, my father would himself cycle me to Kamunting where he coincidentally was commuting to build an extension to our neighbor's new house in Kampong Pinang after they had left Semanggol the previous year. Leaving at six in the morning, when it was still dark, we would arrive an hour and half later, whence I would spend reading or playing around before taking the Red Bus again to Taiping another five kilometers from Kamunting, and then, after class, rejoin him for the journey back home, arriving back close to maghrib.

   In the second year the three KE boys from Semanggol banded together and hired a private car owned by a kind Chinese shopkeeper who made a daily round trip from Bagan Serai to get his supplies in Taiping. My class teacher in the first two years in KE was a very motherly Eurasian, who taught us everything from nursery rhymes to basket weaving, and made us read Briar Patch and Enid Blyton's The Famous Five. I felt very much at home, the transition from teaching mother to mothering teacher so natural and easy. My friend Samsuddin was in my SMC1 class and he introduced me to comics - Beano, Rob Roy, Dandy, Buck Jones and The Battle of Britain. Rashid was two years older than us (he left Malay school at Std Five), and was admitted into the A class, while Samsuddin and I were in B. In SMC2, joining Rashid in the A class, I came across First Aid in English (FAiE), a sort of almanac which became my "bible" for synonyms, antonyms, abbreviations and lists of groups, proverbs and idioms and other grammar issues in the English language. By the time I entered Form One in the Victoria Institution, FAiE had become the source of winning questions for me during the weekly class quiz challenge. I looked forward to those sessions very much.

   At the start of 1958, my family having departed for KL the previous year, I was on my own and safely settled in my cousin's house near the old Taiping airport, and would just have to walk to school, crossing the railway line on the way. After two years of the Special Malay Class we entered Std Six, which was located at the old KE stone building on Swettenham Road with its huge padang, home to the famous KE Tigers rugby team. We now graduated to reading an abridged version of Mutiny on the Bounty. My class teacher was a charming and pretty Chinese lady, and for the first time we mixed with the other races in class, but it was still not co-educational. This was to remain so throughout my secondary school as well. One of our older friends in class had a crush on an equally pretty teacher, a Malay, who was fresh out from teacher training college. But my favourite in Std Six was Ms Cheng, my class teacher. I think my looking forward to going to school so much must be because of her.

   One day after class, it rained so heavily that everyone was stranded. I wondered what it was when Ms Cheng, who was standing with other teachers taking shelter from the lashing afternoon thunderstorm, signaled for me to come over. She told me to take her bicycle home for the weekend, as she had decided to take a car ride home with one of her teacher friends. You can imagine what kind of boost to a boy's confidence is given by that gesture. Many of my assembled friends must have envied me, but they cheered, including Henry, who was my equivalent of Lat's Chinese friend in The Town Boy. He would often bring me to his father's shop, and was the one who introduced me to the famous Taiping black fried koey teow! I was to be blessed with many good non-Malay friends throughout my school and college years.

   It was no different in the Victoria Institution. My transfer to the V.I. was made possible by Mr. Chin, the KE VII Primary School Headmaster. He must have written a glowing recommendation letter to support my application, since I had won the Std Six class prize for that year, beating Rashid to it. Mr. Ahmad, who taught English in Ehya School, provided an additional reference. He was the goalkeeper of the Semanggol football team and, in a small way, was my childhood hero, whenever my father took me to matches in the district league when Ehya played estate teams and other local boys' associations. My father was an avid football fan, and he passed on that fascination to me. Later, when I was in the V.I., he would attend where possible my own football matches, one such held against Kajang High School at the Stadium Merdeka in a semi-final of the Selangor Schools Under-15 football competition. I had rejoined my mother and family in Batu 3½ Gombak, KL just at the end of the year 1958.

   The Victoria Institution in those days was, and still is, an elite school, and was also famous, like KE, for its rugby team. But the V.I. had Dr. G. E. D. Lewis. A Welshman, Dr. Lewis wrote a well-regarded geography text for secondary schools, and was the Headmaster when I joined the V.I. in 1959. He also formed Club 21, a merit society for high achievers in sports and academics in the V.I.; members get to wear a special badge. I did not make it to that club, although by Form Three I was the Captain of the V.I.'s Under-15 football team, and was quite accomplished in swimming. But I credit Dr. Lewis with being a caring teacher, humanitarian and leader, in spite of his occasional public caning of the naughtier boys during Monday school assemblies.

   One day when I was in Form Two, I was called to the Headmaster's office, I wasn't sure for what reason, fearing the worse. There, in the presence of a Chinese senior student, actually the School Captain, he handed me a letter of support to enable me to obtain financial assistance to buy that year's school textbooks. My father later took me to get the endorsement of the local municipal councillor in Kampong Baru, so I could get the necessary funds from the Welfare Department. My less-than-white uniforms when compared to those of the other boys in school must have given away my family's economic status to elicit such a generous response from Dr. Lewis.

   Those were salad days in the V.I. Classes were a ball, especially in Form One on quiz days. Teachers were teachers! Silas Marner (abridged version) in Form Two and Dicken's Great Expectations in Form Three entertained us in literature class. I wrote my first long essay in Bahasa Malaysia about my house in Semanggol, in place of the news-of-the-day in English and pictorials in SMC1, and got it read in class. Swimming classes, too, were fun. Sports qualifying events during the athletics season to contribute points for Davidson House (SAS House today) including running the cross-country which I didn't take to much, made for co-mingling with other pupils and seniors. I joined the Red Cross and the Air Training Corp (ATC) to make more friends, and to remain at school after hours. I would have even joined the V.I. School Band, with those fancy uniforms, which was a glamorous thing to do in those days, but for my complete absence of any talent with musical instruments. I loved music though, but listening to it was just about it.

ATC Parade for Deputy Prime Minister, Dato' Abdul Razak (1961)

   I had my own bicycle by Form Three, a second-hand gift from my brother. This gave me great mobility to cycle to the old US Information Service (USIS) Library and the British Council Library, both in the centre of town. I spent many wonderful after-school hours in the company of their books. It brought back memories of my Book House in Semanggol. I read all kinds of books, abbreviated biographies, travel books and storybooks. The Encyclopedia Britannica was an endless source of delight. During quiz time in Form One, I kept scoring points for my side of the classroom with such questions as "Who was the 18th Vice-President of the United States?" (Answer: Henry Wilson). After I registered as a member of USIS Library, borrowing books to take home was to me a God-given gift. And one day in late January 1961, the window showcase of USIS library, which usually displayed new acquisitions of the library, was filled with the image of a handsome and vigorous young man, the 35th President of the United States (you guess who!).

   While still in Form Two, 1960, I returned home one afternoon from such an after-school library session, and was told that my beloved mother had died. She was 48 years old and had been a chronic asthmatic right from the days of my childhood. My elder sister Rokiah had come home from Jogjakarta after a four-year absence to look after her just a month before that. It was news I couldn't take; I slumped to the floor with swirling images and memories of old Semanggol days. My most compelling image of my mother alive was that of her peering sadly at me through the grilled window of the bus I had just put her on after a hospital visit to return home alone to Gombak late the year before that. Shortly after the funeral, Rokiah returned to Jogjakarta to start her own family. Then I finally realized and came to accept that my pet teacher was forever gone.

   A couple of months before the end of 1961, a group of us from the V.I. took the special exams to join the Royal Military College, as recommended by our Form teachers. I, along with Fadhil Azim, Raja Malek and Chong Sun Thien, the V.I. champion miler, passed both the IQ and physical exams, and the oral interview after that. My involvement in the V.I. Red Cross and the ATC as well my captaincy of the Under-15 Football Captain, and my having a brother-in-law in the Air Force must have contributed to my getting through the whole selection process.

   The day early in 1962 arrived when those from KL joined other successful candidates from the rest of the country at the KL railway station to board several three-ton military trucks standing by to transport us to the Sungei Besi Camp......

Kamal (centre) at the Royal Military College