Annie Ooi was Bersih’s ‘Rosa Parks’

 

From Terence Netto

It helps that every galvanising movement for socio-political change has had a defining figure to lift it from the run and ruck of the mundane to something mythopoetic.

Annie Ooi became that icon for electoral reform advocacy group, Bersih, from its second rally on July 2, 2009 in Kuala Lumpur.

Ooi, a retired English teacher from Penang who died at 78 yesterday while visiting her daughter in Melbourne, took part in the huge Bersih rallies of the early 2000s and later.

She attracted media attention by her willingness to march in the rallies, braving the hot weather and tear gas fired by the cops.

With her distinctive salt-and-pepper hair, yellow T-shirt and floppy hat, Ooi became an iconic figure who stirred rally goers and other watching Malaysians to take the movement for electoral reform seriously.

In a sense, she was a Rosa Parks figure, the latter being the African-American woman who refused to yield her seat to a white passenger in the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955.

Montgomery is a town in the southern US state of Alabama where Parks worked as a seamstress in the middle decades of the 20th century.

After a hard day at work, while returning home by bus, she was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused.

Her refusal ignited the civil rights movement in the US.

It was led by Martin Luther King, and culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, a pivotal piece of legislation that conferred on African-Americans the rights gained them by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 but long thwarted by a variety of measures known as Jim Crowism.

When told that her refusal to yield her seat had ignited a revolution, the unassuming Parks said: “My feets is tired but my soul is rested.”

King used this quotation in one of the books he wrote on the civil rights movement, describing Park’s words as possessing an “ungrammatical profoundity (sic)”.

Well, as a retired English teacher at Convent Datuk Keramat in Penang, Ooi would have sported flawless grammar although, in remarks to the media, she was far too unassuming to weigh it in the balance.

Suffice to say, she was an ordinary Malaysian whose love of country and desire for meaningful reform drew her to the picket lines and to an indelible niche in the annals of electoral reform. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.