The main problem confronting race relations questions in Malaysia has invariably been in the interpretation of historical facts.

This situation has recently re-surfaced with politicians making claims of racial supremacy almost bordering on xenophobia, the call by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad to ‘teach history to avoid mistakes' and an article on an interview with Professor Khoo Kay Kim entitled ‘Put history back in expert hands'

Unfortunately, the unprecedented ‘challenge' by academician Khoo, in defence of his assertion on ‘divide and rule', cannot be sustained for the simple reason that such a ‘policy' was never promulgated specifically, but permeated the entire colonial administration at every turn especially in multiracial societies.

In fact Professor Khoo should be aware that even from a limited historical perspective, that divide-and-rule was endemic to almost every country that had the unfortunate experience of being subjected to British colonial rule- the ‘classic' case being that of India

Therefore his ‘challenge' in the context of a serious intellectual and academic debate, where we are trained to examine and test hypothesis in striving to establish the truth, must be demolished on the grounds of being simplistic and A-theoretical.

From a wider perspective, Khoo's view involves a one dimensional observation that does not encompass the other more important parameters of colonial social history.

This is not surprising, because it is now internationally well-established that the discipline of history itself is constrained by the documentation of facts and events, and therefore its contribution to the body of knowledge can only be descriptive and not analytical in nature.

As a result, because history can only take the social situation as ‘given', without the benefit of wider theoretical social science inputs, in terms of identifying causal and meaningful observations, the call to ‘Put history back in expert hands'( presumably of historians!) is seriously flawed.

In the Malaysian experience, nowhere is this historical limitation more detrimental and damaging than in the people's struggle during the colonial period for political independence.

Unfortunately, some local historians, perhaps because they lacked a social science knowledge base, were unable to grasp and understand the indigenous nationalist consciousness and aspirations of Malaysians for political independence from day one of the imposition of British colonial political dominance.

Much of their work therefore has not only been A-theoretical, but Eurocentric, and to some extent specifically ‘pro-British'.

But as Mahathir has correctly emphasised ‘We need to know how we came to be colonised', otherwise ‘We may think we are going forward when in fact we are going backward'(!)

History therefore needs to put in the hands of social historians and social scientists if it is to have the desired impact.

Finally, it is therefore defining and indeed most timely that a more realistic and acceptable interpretation of the history of the British colonial period, can now finally take its place in the impeccable historical record in a most prestigious World -Wide International Encyclopedia.

According to the Editor, the insertion titled ‘Malaysia, protest and revolt' in the Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, (March 2009) is the only relevant historical reference inclusion selected from the entire bibliography of the Malaya/Malaysia region on this tropic from 1500 to date.

The insertion is based on my book ‘The Finest Hour: Malaysian-MCP Peace Accord in Perspective' where Mahathir and Zaid Ibrahim submitted lead forewords.