Countries around the developing world are trying to come to terms with the colonial period in their histories. That inevitably colours their reinterpretation of history just as the colonial version is equally coloured by different perspectives.
What seems apparent is that the experience of being colonised has a profound impact on the colonised culture. There is often a sense of violation the colonised can feel humiliation, disempowerment and self disgust.
The fact that colonisers often brought new ideas and technology and new forms of government that led to rapid economic growth does not necessarily lessen this feeling it can exacerbate it. The colonised can be left feeling deprived of their chance to show that they could succeed on their own.
Francis Light most certainly did not discover Penang per se though perhaps he 'discovered it for the British', but he arguably did found Georgetown as did Stamford Raffles Singapore. There has been a similar argument in India over the foundation of Kolkata, or Calcutta as it was previously known.
A court ruled that Briton Job Charnock was not its founder but that it had existed as a collection of rural settlement for hundreds of years. Probably true. Equally, evidence suggests that the London area had been settled for generations before the Romans founded the place the fact that an area is settled doesn't detract from the fact that colonisers often galvanised development and made something of a location that would not have been made otherwise. They founded towns, not an area.
Without Francis Light or other British colonists, is there any strong reason to believe that Pulau Pinang would have been any different from Langkawi as it was until Dr Mahathir decided to make it one of his pet projects?
As for the issue of genocide, there is a tendency at the moment to depict this as a western phenomenon. It's ironic that in Malaysia, which probably suffered more civilian deaths at the hands of the Japanese during the 1941-45 occupation and before that from Siamese invasions than at the hands of the western colonial powers, that the former tends to be quietly overlooked.
An exhibition mounted outside the Kuala Lumpur Peace Conference a couple of months ago by students of Lim Kok Wing University was explicit in identifying Germany as the perpetrator of the European holocaust but failed to name Japan in a section of the display that referred to civilian deaths in Asia during World War Two.
What then of the wars between the Khmer and the Cham and the Thais hundreds of years ago? What of the wars of Javanese expansion? Why the silence today about Aceh from Peace Malaysia; "Saddam good, GAM badbleat!" It's like Orwell's Animal Farm!
Man's inhumanity to man is a human not a Western condition. If we don't realise this, those of us who believe that 'we could not do that' will let our guard down and allow people who are capable of doing just that to take power.
Developing countries are quite entitled to reclaim their histories for themselves but a frank and honest appraisal rather than a glib rewrite to make the schoolchildren of today feel better about themselves will serve everyone better in the long run.
