Ex nihilo: The Christian creation story and the founding of modern Singapore

It has been nearly two hundred years since the ships of the East India Company, led by a British administrator named Stamford Raffles, sailed into Temasek in an event now known as “the founding of modern Singapore.” A few days and a sneaky treaty later, ¹ Singapore was on the road to its future as a bustling British settlement, crown colony, developing nation, and, eventually, first-world city-state. In 1819, there was a Malay village, some Orang Laut, ² and a tiny Chinese-run gambier plantation on the island. The rest, as the history books tell us, was nothing but jungle.

Today, Singapore is the modern city par excellence—cash-rich, cosmopolitan, and populated by pure humanity—five million automatic, yet infinitely malleable worker-consumers stacked in organized, high-rise city blocks, all seeming paragons of wealth and efficiency. The history books tell us that this is a modern miracle: that the Singapore we see today was built out of nothing, on a blip of an island with no natural resources except its people. We are told that we came from nothing, that we are entirely Man-made—conceived by global trade, midwived by the ingenuity of the state, and kept alive by our own unstinting labor. “No one owes Singapore a living,” says one of our Shared Values. ³ This is what we must keep doing to flourish and survive.

Most people groups recall their encounters with the imperial West with deep ambivalence, if not outright bitterness and regret. The memory of the seizure of land and technology, the exploitation of labor, and the systematic disruption and devaluation of non-modern ways of knowing and being preserves for these peoples the recognition that the benefits of modernity—technology, trade, “progress”—come at the high cost of dignity and blood. If anything was gained, it was only because something was—and is still being—lost.

But most Singaporeans remember the Raffles Event with positivity—even gratitude. Unlike the Mesoamerican civilizations destroyed by the Spanish, the Chinese empire humiliated in the Opium War, or even the diverse, multicultural territory of Malacca conquered by the Portuguese, with Temasek, there is every appearance that the British strolled into and took over a neglected and virtually empty free space, rather than a cherished, contested, and defended home. ⁴ Singapore as a people, to say nothing of a Singaporean way of life, did not even exist prior to the establishment of the British port. “If Raffles hadn’t come,” we say, “we’d still be an ulu ⁵ little fishing village. ⁶ But look what we have now!”

It seems, then, that in the case of Singapore at least, the fiction of the West’s discovery and development of the “East” has come true—that we are living proof that the benefits of modernity can indeed come at almost no cost. ⁷ There was, after all, nothing to be lost in primitive Temasek. What great culture was there to speak of in that backwater village? What value was there in that muggy, uninhabited jungle-swamp? Modernity in the form of British trade gave us everything we have. It made us from nothing. It is, we might almost say, our god.

What could it mean, in this Man-made city, to remember the biblical story of the genesis of the earth? What does it mean to claim as Christians do that Yahweh alone made the world out of true Nothing, in a unique act of pure, un-destructive creation?

To claim this is to claim that all other forms of creation, all grand human designs, do not come out of nothing, but are in fact profoundly dependent on that first Creation. It is to render the narrative of the ex nihilo “founding of modern Singapore” questionable, if not outright idolatrous. To see Temasek as first and foremost God’s good creation is to see that the villages and the jungle were not nothing, but nothinged—made worthless in a pattern repeated again and again in modern Singapore’s ceaseless march of progress, when people were emptied out of the kampongs in the 1960s and shuffled into government housing estates; when dialects were marginalized from public discourse in favor of Standard Chinese in the 1970s; when traditional burial grounds are cleared today to make way for wider roads, and old neighborhoods are gentrified and hawker centers ⁸ replaced by restaurants and condominiums. Even land reclamation—the most ostensibly ex nihilo of modern Singapore’s distinctive acts of self-creation—comes at the price of the reefs and swamplands which once were the bones and marrow of the island.

I am not arguing that any form of cultivation, industrialization, or change that disrupts or destroys existing cultural–ecological life-systems is inherently evil—clearly, any such action must be carefully weighed. My point is rather that the ex nihilo development story drummed into us through textbooks and National Day Parade ⁹ re-enactments contributes to a warped weighing, by making certain things and people invisible or worthless in our memory and estimation, so that they can be destroyed or commodified in reality.

Why do our students learn so much about Raffles’ strategic battle for economic control of Southeast Asia, and so little about the complex moral–political motivations of the Johor Sultanate that controlled Temasek before the British came? ¹⁰ What of the life-world of Wa Hakim, the village boy who often appears in historical accounts as a witness to Raffles’ arrival, but fades into the background almost immediately after? Why is it not more widely known that there were over a thousand Orang Laut living off Singapore’s coast in 1819, or that one community, the Orang Biduanda Kallang, was displaced to Johor 5 years later, and almost entirely wiped out by smallpox by 1848? The very fact that we think so little of Temasek as these people knew and lived it testifies to a colonial erasure that was perhaps less bloody, but certainly no less decisive than that which notoriously took place in the Americas. The founding of modern Singapore was, then, not an exception to, but a perfect example of modernity’s method of creating by destroying—by making us nothing, so that it alone can claim to create.

What stories of creation did the Orang Laut have? How did the Johor Sultanate imagine the body politic? Questions like these are problematic because they use the disciplinary language of modern scholarship, and set Western models up as normative paradigms for comparison. Nonetheless, they are a useful first step toward rethinking Singapore’s successes not as ex nihilo creations of modernity, but the result of a costly series of political and cosmological conquests—first by the British, who used a form of the biblical creation story to overwrite the stories of other lands with a Babel-tower of Civilization that they hoped would take them to God; ¹¹ and then by the “native” elites of Singapore, who rejected Western rule, but continued the modern mission of salvation through the pursuit of secular gods like Progress, Security, and National Development. These new gods have demanded no fewer sacrifices: the left-wing parties and trade unions shut down in Operation Coldstore, the Chinese cultural aspirations embodied in Nanyang University, the Christian social consciousness of groups like the Young Catholic Worker movement, and other alternative witnesses to the common good that have been vilified, marginalized, assimilated, incarcerated, or expelled for threatening the harmony and stability—not of Singapore itself, but of the modern vision and version of Singapore. ¹²

Those of us who have benefited from the success of modern Singapore must thus reckon with ourselves as beneficiaries of an imperfect and imperializing form of creatio ex nihilo. This is no Garden of Eden, to be enjoyed with simple gratitude, or defended at all cost from contestation and change. This is rather Caesar’s city, modernity’s temple, built by human hands. In this city, some bodies have been marked as breakable so that we can build as we please. Some suffering has been statisticized, so that we can discount it. Some spirits have been pushed from the public square, and—in policy debates, at least—some people’s dreams don’t matter.

Those who value above all the goods of modern Singapore may count these costs as nothing. That cannot be the case for those who claim to believe in the inherently given worth of all Creatures, great or small. Rather, it is only by learning to see—and see with—those whom our false gods have made invisible, that we open ourselves to a clearer vision of our Creator God.