Malaysia's longest-serving leader grew up selling banana fritters at a market
When Japanese occupation shut Malaya's schools, a teenage Mahathir Mohamad sold coffee and banana fritters at the Pekan Rabu market in Alor Setar. The boy from a one-bedroom house without electricity became a doctor, then Malaysia's prime minister for 22 years, and returned to the job at 92.
Mahathir was born in 1925 in a poor quarter of Alor Setar, capital of Kedah, then a British protectorate. His mother was a Kedah Malay; his father, a school principal from Penang, was of Malay and Indian descent, and his paternal grandfather came from Kerala. He was the first Malaysian prime minister not born into aristocracy or a leading religious or political family. A strict father pushed him to study. He learned English early, edited a student newspaper and won a place at a selective English-medium school, and as a boy he played the trumpet and did carpentry.
After the war he finished top of his school and studied medicine in Singapore for nearly six years, often driving his convertible all the way home. Writing as Che Det, he published a 1947 newspaper article on post-war Malay women. He entered parliament in 1964, lost his seat in 1969, fell out with Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and was expelled from the ruling party UMNO. In 1970 he published The Malay Dilemma. Readmitted after the Tunku left office, he served as education minister and then trade minister before becoming prime minister in 1981.
His first tenure, lasting until 2003, brought privatisation, rapid industrial growth and landmark projects, among them the Kuala Lumpur City Centre and a highway running the length of the peninsula, the North-South Expressway, earning him the title Father of Modernisation. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis he rejected IMF prescriptions, relying on capital controls and stimulus. Critics called him authoritarian: activists were detained in Operation Lalang in 1987, a 1988 constitutional crisis raised fears for judicial independence, and his sacking of his deputy Anwar Ibrahim in 1998 ignited the Reformasi movement.
He left UMNO in 2016 over the 1MDB corruption scandal and led the opposition to victory in 2018, becoming prime minister again and securing Anwar's release. He resigned amid a political crisis in 2020. With a cumulative 24 years in office, he remains the country's longest-serving premier.
Source: Mahathir Mohamad
