Wipe Out

Of all the tunes, in all the malls, and they had to play The Shadows' Wipe Out in mine. I mean, come on - Wipe Out, really!

Wipe Out, and indeed The Shadows, were popular when I was still in short, grey, woolly shorts, praying the day would come when I would gravitate to the all-empowering long trousers. Those days, like The Queen Mother, seemed to last forever, but eventually passed. Then Wipe Out is surreally resurrected in this near deserted equatorial mall on the fringes of Kuala Lumpur which, despite the Small Faces ‘Rene’, has no coast.

A multitude of differently coloured faces abound, and shadows of colonialism continue to colour the ever vibrant hues of this once jungle land. They are new colours, new faces and a new colonialism. Colours of sand and colors of stars, with stripes, battle for hearts and minds in Kuala Lumpur. Mickey and Microsoft engage Mohammed and the mullahs in soft skirmishes. McDonald's and Burger King duke it out with kebabs and couscous, while Starbucks reigns supreme over the local mud coffee though, in predominantly Chinese areas, tea is making a comeback.

It is a wipe out, with signs (literally) of British colonialism being dismantled with street names, once English, ever changing into Malay. Colonial buildings are either being torn down, or left to rot, while mosques galore sprout turrets onto the ever Islamic skyline sharing space with the golden ‘M’. The world has to move on, this is true, and quite rightly too, I hear you say, in these post-colonial times, and that would be right too if Malaysia was not now being colonised, more insidiously, by two empires simultaneously - the Arab and the American. 

British English is rapidly being supplanted by American English, as more and more teachers of English hail from the USA, and more burka clad women assail our streets, viewing the equator through letterboxes. Wahhabism stalks the capitol’s streets where once spiritual Sufism danced and coffee shops, where all races rubbed shoulders and smiled together, have become divided between the halal and the non-halal and friends having to chose between their religious beliefs and the possibility of continuing friendships outside their race and religion.

It is not, however, a complete wipe out. There are more eateries featuring pork burgers now, as if in retaliation. More Chinese families are accepting English, or is that American, names and recently the dear old Union Jack has become a fashion accessory, and is plastered all over T-shirts, bags, mobile phone and even ipad covers. British colonialism is gone but not forgotten, even though it has been reduced to a item of fashion design, and ‘Mod’ scooters (of the 1960s) are cool and in shopfront displays. Rule Britannia!