4 - Remembering Goh Keng Swee

Summary

I first met Goh Keng Swee in London in the mid-1950s at meetings in Malaya Hall and remember the occasions when he talked about the future of an independent Malaya. We met again after I returned in 1957 to teach at the University of Malaya in Singapore and he invited me occasionally to lunch to talk about the Malaya that had just become independent. We agreed that it was only a matter of time when Singapore will also be independent. We talked about the factors that kept Singapore and the Federation apart and saw that the British wanted their colony to serve their trading and strategic purposes for as long as possible. We met informally a few more times and even talked about what a Malayan identity might be like. I also recall moments when we touched on the question of being overseas Chinese in Malaya and Singapore and what the rise of China could mean to their lives.

When the University of Malaya established its Kuala Lumpur campus in 1959, I volunteered to teach there. Dr Goh understood that as my way of continuing to prepare for the day when the two territories became one country. The efforts to establish a new federation called Malaysia began soon afterwards. From 1959 till the separation in 1965, I visited Singapore several times. Some of my trips had to do with preparing the volume of essays, Malaysia: A Survey (1964) that I was editing. Others were made after I was appointed in 1964 by Singapore's Minister for Education, Ong Pang Boon, to chair the Nanyang University Curriculum Review Committee. This was to make recommendations concerning the university's future in the new Malaysian Federation. Yet others were for me to give lectures in the old campus, now renamed the University of Singapore while the division in Kuala Lumpur retained the Malaya name. During some of these visits, I saw Dr Goh and he was interested to hear my views of the new country from a KL perspective.

After separation and the republic's independence, he asked to see me in 1967 about the establishment of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and outlined his plans to build a centre that would help Singapore understand the region and be at the same time a research institution of international repute.