A personal view of Bruneian culture and politics

In Brunei's history since the discovery of oil within its borders, both as a dependency and a sovereign nation it has achieved little but to trim its hedges, and that with foreign labour. Culturally and economically Brunei is moribund. Its economic fortunes are tied to the global market for petroleum. Its sole productive industry apart from oil is the manufacture of prawn-flavoured crisps. As an oil-exporting nation during a world-wide energy squeeze, Brunei experienced negative economic growth in the 2008-2009 financial year. With the immense wealth of its oil revenues it has constructed a large teapot and a polo field. It is a world leader in pen-and-ink-based bureaucratic paperwork.

The cultural position of Brunei is equally dire. The mind-numbing national ideology of MIB (Malay Islamic Monarchy) is intended to keep society locked in its own hopelessness, self-admiring mendacity and costiveness from top to bottom. There are no prospects in Brunei for advancement in its socioeconomic structures by virtue of merit. All positions of economic and political influence are dominated by the royal elite. It has no democratic elections and a sham parliament dominated by the Sultan. A large portion of its people live in poverty. They are literate in Malay but the state-controlled media ensure there is little of value to read. Social structure is rigidly Islamic, with the habits of mindless obedience and self-punishment this entails. Like other such societies Brunei mutilates the genitals of its children – a practice so eloquently expressive of a culture’s degree of respect for the young. Domestic violence is rife and drug-related crime endemic from one end of the country to the other. In its prison stands a gallows.

The stasis and rigidity of Brunei’s social structure renders the schooling process meaningless. School is a sorting system which serves to supply an industrialised society with labour, but in Brunei’s case there is nothing for which to sort. I taught students who were resigned, with a kind of polite despair, to a future without any hope of a well-paid job; who knew they had little chance of reaching a horizon that extended beyond their kampong or the one trashy mall in town; kids whose big break in the routine of school, religious school, mosque and sleep was marching once per year to honour the depredations of their own monarch. In two decades of ‘improvements’ to Brunei’s education outcomes, the country’s statistics of student performance have been improved by nothing except the progressive lowering of the pass mark in country-wide exams.

I say all this out of pity and dismay, and with some individual Bruneians in mind, whose dealings with me were always polite and forgiving of the flailings of an intruder who finds his expectations of the decently lived human life defeated one by one in a series of disheartening encounters. Local people often were eager to talk to me about how wrong things were in Brunei, but in our resignation to the fact that these matters must remain at the level of gossip there was a shared sense of defeat by larger forces. I keep my strongest feelings of sympathy for people of intelligence and sensitivity in Brunei - those who have a greater awareness of the unjust situation in which they live than, say, the abject housewives who jostle to fill their plastic bags with free food laid on for the Sultan’s birthday - those who have been penalised, demoted, sacked, denied employment or imprisoned because of their willingness to speak publicly about the ghastliness of their own country and its overlords, or just because they were of the wrong race or religion.