MCKK and Nation Building

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MCKK Centenary 1905 – 2005
MCKK and Nation Building

MCKK Men leading the nation to independence and prosperity

In 1946, aristocrat, official and MCKK man Datuk Onn Jaafar founded UMNO, the United Malays’ Nationalist Organisation, which would then marshal the Malays’ uprising against the Malayan Union and shepherd it to democratic sovereign nationhood in scarcely a decade.

Onn would be elbowed aside on the way, but other MCKK men stayed firmly involved in the processes leading to Tunku Abdul Rahman’s photo-opportunity of a lifetime in Merdeka Stadium on Saturday, August 31, 1957.

Among them was the second MCKK man (third, if Tunku’s sojourn in MCKK in 1915 counted!) to lead UMNO, Tun Abdul Razak Hussein. As UMNO’s third president and the country’s second Prime Minister, it fell to Razak to design and implement a new national contract after the Tunku’s burnt to ashes in the race riots of 1969.

The Pax Malaysiana that since guaranteed Malay survival through shared prosperity with the country’s other communities was sealed on a Malay College man’s watch, and the rest of us are drop-dead proud of that, and in awe of him.

The Pride, the Passion, and the Tradition

Any conceit that only MCKK could produce Malay leaders of such caliber was thoroughly debunked in the Mahathir era. Tun Mahathir was among those who did not care for the Malay College’s hoity-toity pride in the disproportionate role it had played in the country’s pre-Independence rule.

By the time he became the country’s fourth Prime Minister in 1981, there were widespread reservations over the clubby ways of MCOBA, the Malay College Old Boys’ Association, with its representation at the highest levels of the nation’s economy, politics, governance and monarchy.

But MCKK men remained ambitious for over-achievement in the corporatising, privatizing, and massively expanding Malaysian economy initiated by Dr. Mahathir, whose designated successor, what’s more, seemed destined to ensure that Malaysia’s fifth Prime Minister would be yet another MCKK man.

Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s initial upward mobility imparted a fateful inside-track cachet to a certain striped College tie, which by the early 1990s was appearing on Wednesdays in corner suites, board rooms, corporate corridors, and cronies’ crannies throughout Malaysia Inc.

Silent triumph

Renong, builders of the North-South Expressway and the country’s first Malay private-sector mega-corporation, was prominently helmed by young Malay College millionaires. When the company set up its headquarters in the MCOBA building in Kuala Lumpur, the two logos together seemed to beam a quiet triumph, if not outright dominion, over the burstling highways below.

There were several other conglomerates and institutions in which MCKK men were at the helm, guiding the organizations toward success. And they were recognizable by the striped College tie they wore.

Then the Asian financial crisis and the tandem plummet of the Ringgit and Anwar’s political prestige punched their lights out, and for a time MCOBA was a punching bag and MCKK a punchline.

That’s all history, too, now. Dr. Mahathir’s retired. Anwar’s out of prison. The remnants of the 1990s’ conglomerates are under new management and doing business here and abroad. The country is nin good shape for the Malay College to celebrate its centenary in all pomp and circumstance, in rightful recognition of the role it has played in the making of this nation.

MCKK - an impetus for modern education

For what was once a single wooden hut is now a dozen universities and a thousand sixth-form colleges. In 100 years, the Malay College has gone from being one of a kind, to first among equals, to one amid the multitudes.

Fully residential schools have become anachronisms. The basic reason for their existence itself no longer exists, now that no child has to live a three-day walk from the nearest classroom. More pertinently, a boarding school’s way of cultivating individual self-reliance may not accord with the family’s central role in society.

After 100 years as witness to and agent of this country’s ascent from colonized servitude to prosperous sovereignty, the Malay College today wonders what would justify its existence for another 100 years.

MILES – an extension of the MCKK vision for nation building

MCOBA has designated a new form of private-sector educational institution, to be raised atop the nation-building foundations laid by the Malay College in the past century. It’s called “MILES” for MCOBA Institute for Leadership Enhancement.

Infrastructure is envisaged for somewhere in north Selangor; architect’s drawings depict a steel glass building vaguely evoking the Greco-Roman proportions of the Malay College’s stately “Big School” in Kuala Kangsar.

But MILES is a K-economy concept, not entirely reliant on physical plant. The institute’s students and scholars will apply modern technology and teaching techniques to advancing the nation’s intellectual development in all fields, regardless of which schools they attended, and no longer in the name of Malay alone, but of our Malaysia.

With MILES, the wards of the Malay College hope to institute a mechanism by which the spirit and role of their alma mater in shaping the 20^th century might survive the 21^st.

This much of her should endure, we hope, even if the grand old dame herself fades into an unsung dotage in a nation where premium secondary education has at last become available to all, regardless not just birth and breeding, but equally of gender, religion, and race.

Early MCKK followed the traditions of elite English public school system, such as Eton

With the formation of the FMS (1986), the Malay Rulers lost political powers. In spite of early misgivings, the special school, later known as the MCKK, was established to train young Malay boys from the ruling classes for certain positions in the administration of British Malaya. Malay Rulers, particularly Sultan Idris Murshidul ‘Azzam of Perak (1887-1916) in particular saw the need for such school as early as 1888.

Under Hargreaves from 1905 to 1918, the MCKK produced the desired results as envisaged by the founding fathers. Under a fully residential school similar to those in England, it turned out generations of young Malay boys then,

with an all-round education; many developed personal characters useful in the future life after school.

From 1910 to 1940, many graduates of MCKK found their ways into several branches of the Administration. In the 1930s, almost all Malay administrators in the MCS were trained at the MCKK. In the 1940s after the WWII, almost all Mentris Besar in the Malay states were old boys. Many others also filled various positions in uniformed services.