Sabah’s three‘white maharanis’
Published on: Sunday, July 03, 2016
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WHILE Sarawak’s three White Rajahs’ hold on the State for over a hundred years shaped the course of that State’s history and became the stuff of legends, Sabah is not without its fair share.
Only that in the case of British North Borneo, as it was known before independence through the formation of Malaysia in 1963, this role fell to three women. All white, they left their mark on the State’s history no less – Agnes Keith, Osa Johnson and Dorothy Cator.
The contributions of these women centred on Sandakan which until the Second World War was far busier than Port Swettenham in Peninsular Malaysia (now Port Klang) and could easily rival Singapore.
It is now up to the authorities on how to monetise this rich history in the way the Sarawak Tourism Board is exploiting the Sarawak Borneo mystery with retro-looking advertisements in international publications capitalising on the three White Rajahs era with their spouses like the Rani of Sarawak, one of whom was an aviator like Osa, who visited Sabah twice, in 1920 and 1935.
Highlighting their roles and achievements can attract quality international visitors reachable through the literary and film world network.
Agnes Keith is obviously the more prominent of the three damsels, if any because of her international bestseller “Land Below The Wind” that conveyed to western audiences what it was like to be in Sandakan, where locals, natives, planters and the immigrants lived in harmony.
Like Agnes who came to Sabah only because she married Forest Conservator Harry Keith, Dorothy Cator was also a housewife and author. She wrote: “Everyday Life Among the Head-Hunters” (1905) with much vociferation.
“I don’t want to stand up for head-hunting, it isn’t nice! We civilised nations call it murder, and it is murder.”
In response one Governor said that North Borneo was “no place for ladies,” Cator begged to differ, explaining that “every lady by her mere presence ought to help to keep up the standard of a place.”
By recreating British domestic and social life on the imperial frontier, including Sandakan, women specifically wives, were regarded as bearers of white civilisation who kept their men from “going native”, thereby preserving colonial respectability and prestige.
“The journey was slow as the vessel steered carefully through treacherous waters riddled with corals and submerged islands.
“Gradually, the bay, ‘one of the finest harbours in the world’, came into view; its entrance guarded by “fine red sandstone cliffs backed with forest-clad hills rising to a height of about 800 feet.”
Dick and Dorothy Cator had at last reached Sandakan, the capital of British North Borneo, where the newly wedded couple were to be based for more than two years between 1893 and 1896.
Formerly known as Elopura, or “Beautiful City”, Sandakan was a modest settlement perched on the edge of the British Empire adjacent to the Dutch East Indies.
Singapore, the nearest centre of commerce and point of telegraphic communication with Europe, was literally 1,000 miles away.
“As I have travelled where no other white woman has ever been, and lived among practically unknown tribes both in Borneo and Africa, I have often been asked to write a book.”
Cator’s claim to narrative authority, based on self-identification as a white woman with original, first-hand knowledge of unexplored territories and undiscovered cultures, was undermined by her own confessed ignorance of how to systematically document what she knew.
Female identification with imperialism typically echoed and endorsed masculine imperial rhetoric, which was rooted in white superiority and its “civilising” impulse.
Cator portrayed the different ethnic communities in North Borneo within the overarching paradigm of a “Pax Britannica”, emphasising the unprecedented peace and security afforded by firm but benevolent British governance.
Her husband, Dick Cator began his stint in the British North Borneo Government in 1889/90 as a 3rdClass Magistrate at Province Alcock.
By 1891, he had been transferred to Sandakan, becoming a cadet in the East Coast District and a 3rdClass Magistrate at the Police Court & Court of Requests, Sandakan.
He was appointed Acting Assistant Government Secretary in 1892.
The next year he returned home to fetch Dorothy. They married in London and immediately left for North Borneo.
By 1894, Dick was Secretary to the Governor and promoted to 2nd Class Magistrate. He continued to be Secretary to the Governor in 1895 but relinquished his position as Magistrate.
Dorothy Cator was listed in the “Ladies’ Directory” of British North Borneo for the years 1894 and 1895.
The Cators ceased to be listed in the Directory from 1896 onwards.
Despite occupying a marginal position in the masculine space of the British Empire, the voices of women writing in colonial contexts, as exemplified by Dorothy Cator and Agnes Keith, in films by Osa Johnson, could be influential long after their eras had passed on. Hence the state would be wise to exploit their fame and legacy.
Back in her era, Dorothy continued to believe in the necessity of British intervention – it was a matter of having qualified administrators.
Moreover, it was assumed that North Borneo would revert to a state of violence and anarchy in the absence of its white civilisers.
The British Empire conjured a romantic image of bold and industrious “pioneer men taming wild terrains into productivity and profitability” that stressed ideal white masculinity as “physical, responsible, productive and hard-working.
Women were excluded from this vision; Cator likened colonial society in Sandakan to “all other European communities in the Far East, where it is an understood thing that only the men should work and the ladies sleep and amuse themselves.”
The fairer sex was presumed to make no active contribution to the imperial endeavour.
But not in her style to sit and do nothing, Cator further underscored the superiority of British imperialism by representing the conduct of other European powers in diametric contrast as inhumane and unjust.
She denounced the Spanish (in the Philippines) as “very bad colonists, cruel masters, who hate and are hated by the natives over whom they rule”; the Dutch (in Dutch Borneo) as being “inclined to look down upon the natives as not merely a lower race than themselves, but lower than their animals” and they were responsible for the “most brutal cases of cruelty on the estates which her husband Dick and the other magistrates had to inquire into.”
This affirmed the conventional rationalisation for British intervention in terms of a moral obligation to rescue and extend protection to populations “outside the pale of civilisation” that still exist today as horror news of human trafficking made the headlines.
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