A most queenly passing

SINGAPORE: Nearly half a century ago, I was born at noon in the Queen Elizabeth 2nd Hospital in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The general hospital had been opened by the visiting British monarch two years earlier, and was thus named in her honor. Sabah was by then a component part of Malaysia for nearly a decade, but it was formerly a British colony, and before that essentially a company state run by the British North Borneo Chartered Company, much like India was for a period administered by the British East India Company.

By the time the British left Sabah, or North Borneo as it was then called, Queen Elizabeth had reigned for more than a decade, and her name and iconic image adorned many edifices and even stationery, both public and private. There was, of course, some semblance of decolonization efforts, but at least at that time they remained half-hearted at best, as Sabah, and indeed the whole of Malaysia, inherited its political and socioeconomic framework from the British. Malaysia has a constitutional monarch, albeit a rotational and not inherited one, and Sabah has a constitutional governor, both as more symbolic rather than absolute rulers, patterned after — unsurprisingly — the British monarchy.