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Chapter 4: "A Roar from the Oppressed People"
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“A Roar from the Oppressed People” 73 73 4 “A Roar from the Oppressed People” “Bukit Ho Swee was not on our radar screen” when the Housing and Development Board commenced its public housing project in 1960, said a Board architect in 2006.1 This statement belies the efforts of three colonial agencies to regulate unauthorised wooden housing west of the Singapore River in the 1950s. The municipal commission, which in 1951 became the city council, was responsible for approving building plans, surveying and controlling dwellings, and sanitising kampongs in the urban area. The Singapore Improvement Trust, established in 1927 to carry out improvement schemes in the Central Area, became the de facto housing authority after World War II. The Trust and the Land Office managed the lease of vacant Trust and Crown lands, issuing, respectively, Temporary Occupation Licences and tenancy permits to wooden-house owners for short-term periods of occupation. After World War II, Singapore was swept by a wave of anticolonialism . Urban kampong dwellers abandoned their fear of authority and resisted unreasonable colonial policies, either spontaneously or when organised by left-wing activists aligned with the People’s Action Party. In doing so, the residents utilised both customary and modernist resources: respectively the secret societies that aided them in confronting unwelcome demolition squads, and the political associations that mobilised them to demand fair terms of compensation 1 Author’s interview with Alan Choe Fook Cheong, 27 Nov. 2006. 74 Squatters into Citizens and resettlement. At the end of the 1950s, the politics of rehousing reached the borders of Kampong Bukit Ho Swee. Representation and Surveillance Post-war British policy towards unauthorised wooden housing in Singapore was framed within a language of emergency, which spoke on behalf of the dwellers in the collective sense, never individually, rendering them into objects that could be objectively appraised and acted against. Central to this discourse was the term “squatter”, which alleged an illegal encroachment on property and social inertia hindering the march of progress. Yet, both charges were largely untrue: most urban kampong dwellers were opportunistic migrants actively seeking to “find a road” and eke out a livelihood, as J.M. Fraser, manager of the Trust, himself privately conceded.2 Neither were they truly squatters, for the Trust, Land Office and private landowners all customarily leased out land not required for development for short-term occupation, fearing that vacant lots would tempt trespassers and rubbish dumpers.3 The term was challenged on only one occasion . The Land Clearance and Resettlement Working Party of 1955 rejected it as “most unsatisfactory”, reasoning that the dwellers were more accurately rent-paying tenants.4 But although it proposed replacing the term with “attap dweller”, “squatter” continued to be used officially in both the colonial and postcolonial periods.5 The 1947 Singapore Housing Committee, given the task of preparing a preliminary building plan to relieve the island’s housing shortage, was the first post-war British attempt to cope with the issue of unauthorised housing.6 Using the characteristic discourse of emergency , the committee likened housing development in Singapore to a 2 SIT 952/50, Comments on Memo Submitted by Commissioner of Lands on the Problem of Squatters on Crown Land by Manager, SIT, 13 Nov. 1950. 3 SIT, Annual Report 1955, p. 31. 4 HB 722/55, Notes of Seventh Meeting, 11 Nov 1955; HB 722/55, “Interim Report of the Working Party Formed to Consider a Report on the ‘Squatter Problem’”, n.d., c.1955. 5 HB 722/55, Notes of First Meeting, 15 Sept. 1955. 6 Singapore, Report of the Housing Committee (Singapore: Government Printing House, 1947), p. 3. [3.89.72.221] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:33 GMT) “A Roar from the Oppressed People” 75 contagious affliction of “Gigantism”, out of which “[a] chaotic and unwieldy megalopolis has been created”, “detrimental to health and morals”.7 It declared the “insanitary kampongs” to be “the worst type of slum”, with “living conditions which are not fit for animals to live in”. Because the problem, the report proposed, affected the entire city, “[t]he only solution to this problem is demolition and re-housing”.8 Kampongs were also seen as dangerous places, where Singapore’s outcasts dwelled. Committee Chairman and Commissioner of Lands C.W.A. Sennett viewed slums as “the nurseries of a C3 nation and schools for training youth for crime”; the term “C3”, used in the British rating of medical fitness during World War I, referred to being unfit...