When Kit Siang had a run-in with the headmaster

The following is an exclusive excerpt from Chapter 3 of ‘Lim Kit Siang: Malaysian First, Volume One: None But the Bold’, a new biography by Kee Thuan Chye.

Apart from starting the book club [at the High School Batu Pahat], Kit came to be in charge of the school library. In fact, his involvement in extra-curricular activities was quite extensive. At school level, he became chairman of the Science Society and vice-chairman of the Debating and Literary Society, and he was appointed deputy head prefect.

In Form 5, he was also editor of the school magazine, The Pilot, a position and responsibility that became naturally his because as early as when he was in Form 3, he had already come up with the initiative to start a class magazine that featured original writing by him and his classmates. It was an unprecedented enterprise admirably undertaken entirely by the students without direct help from teachers. “It was the first of its kind,” Kit proudly says.

Michael [Ong, Kit’s fellow schoolmate] affirmed it in his reminiscences of those days: “This venture was unheard of in the school’s history.” And Kit’s purpose, he added, was to encourage students to express themselves and be heard “rather than merely be at the receiving end of everything dished out by the system”.

The class magazine was called The Light, and Kit was one of its four joint editors. It came out in that historic year of 1957, in November. The new Merdeka spirit was plainly reflected in an editorial, written by Kit, that exhorted youths to do their part for the newly independent Malaya, to be at once servants and leaders of the country, and to acknowledge that...