Lingering like the ghosts of the last colonial masters but two
are their descendants in Portuguese Square.
Lingering like the ghosts of the last colonial masters but two
they’re unsure of what they should do ;
they don’t even know why they’re there,
except to put a foreign presence on view.
Lingering like the ghosts of the last colonial masters but two
are their descendants in Portuguese Square.
Portuguese Square in Melaka (Malacca) is a weirdly human memento to the original colonists of this part of Malaysia. The Portuguese, who seized the port in 1511, were ousted by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. In turn, the Dutch made way in 1824 for the British to add the colony as the third of the ‘Straits Settlements’. Penang, Singapore and Malacca and the ‘Malay States’ were formed into the Federation of Malaya from 1895until Independence (‘Merdaka’) in 1957.
