Free Aung San Suu Kyi by Jesper Bengtsson

concerning common ownership and criticism of the class differences in a capitalist economy.
    Aung San came to the university a year after the Saya San revolt. He was only eighteen years old and had sprinted through the school system with top marks in all subjects—a remarkable achievement considering his background and his mother’s refusal for a long time to permit her youngest son to leave home, which meant starting primary school two years after his peers.
    For a young Burmese from a rural area, Rangoon at that time must have meant the equivalent of moving from a place like Augusta in Montana, or Owensboro in Kentucky, to Los Angeles or New York. The city was marked by its multicultural identity. Indians, British, French, and Chinese walked the streets alongside those of Burmese descent. European cars drove along the straight streets in the blocks around the area of the port. Rows of bookstores were available to those who were interested in literature, both English and Burmese.
    Englishmen dominated the university. The indigenous students were few, and the first professor with a Burmese background had been appointed only a few years previous. English and Burmese were compulsory subjects. However, all the course literature and all the lectures as well as discussions during the lessons were carried on in the language of the colonial power, even if some of the teachers were Burmese. The students had the right to dress in longyis, the Burmese sarongs worn by men and women alike, but the teachers were dressed in a strict European style, often a suit, shirt with cufflinks, and bow tie. For many of the students, it was a bizarre experience to sit through lessons in which the teacher barely mastered the language he was expected to speak.
    In retrospect, Aung San does not appear to be an obvious candidate for the role of national hero. He seems to have been an oddity at university— a person who at a less dramatic time would have had difficulty in asserting himself as a leader. “He could sit by himself for hours, far away in his own thoughts,” wrote Bo Let Ya, one of his closest friends during his years as a student. “He didn’t reply when you spoke with him.” Others described how Aung San was completely unaware of his own appearance. He dressed badly and always wore his clothes until they were so dirty that nobody could bear him any longer. And when he was going to change clothes, he always borrowed from friends, since he never had any of his own that were clean enough to wear. The anticolonial struggle was his whole world. “He was a political animal and politics was his sole existence,” wrote the author Dagon Taya many years later. “Nothing else mattered for him. No social obligations, not manners, not art, and not music. Politics was a consuming passion with him, and it made him crude, rude, and raw.”
    When Aung San participated in debates he could take the floor and then talk until he was shut up by the boos and protests of the audience. “Aung San, you fool, sit down!” they would yell at him. His English was grammatically correct but his pronunciation was terrible, and since both teaching and public discussions were carried on in English, there were many who did not even understand what he was saying. On other occasions his friends discovered him holding long speeches for the bushes behind his student lodgings. When they asked what he was doing, he said that he was giving a speech to the bushes in the same way as the British politician Edmund Burke had held speeches to the sea, to train his rhetorical ability.
    I suppose that even this type of personality can find its place in history, and perhaps Burma in the 1930s was such an opportunity for Aung San. It is clear that he became a leading representative of the young nationalist movement within a period of a few years, along with individuals like U Nu, Let Ya, and Rashid.
    Their first platform was the student