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The Playboy Prince. Abdul Rahman was the seventh son of his father's sixth wife and, with his 44 brothers and sisters, lived the plush life befitting the offspring of the Sultan of Kedah. His Siamese mother demanded that he be carried to school on the shoulders of a retainer, and though he was an indifferent student, his royal birth won him a scholarship to Cambridge, where he began to read law. But the Tunku skipped most of his lectures, seldom missed a tea or dinner-dance, distinguished himself mainly by picking up 28 traffic violations in his silver Riley with red fenders.
Not unexpectedly, the playboy prince flunked his bar exams. So far down the line of succession that he had no chance of ever attaining his father's sultanate, the Tunku returned to Malaya as a minor civil servant in a number of remote outposts. On foot and on elephant, he traveled through the bush getting to know the land and the people, once even worked as a manual laborer to help build a new mosque, which the grateful Malays named Rahmaniah after him.
World War II and Japan's swift conquest of the Malayan peninsula hastened Abdul Rahman's maturity. As a useful district officer, the Tunku was kept on the job by the Japanese. Secretly, however, he helped hide escapees from Japanese death camps, kept in contact with British guerrilla units, which were supplying arms to anti-Japanese Communist irregulars in the jungles.
"Who the Hell Is He?" Abdul Rahman was also in contact with the Malayan independence movement that began to take root when the Japanese ousted the British. With the end of the war, at the age of 42, the Tunku returned to England to get his law degree, began to play a larger part in the cause of merdeka (freedom). He insisted that it was the duty of every Malay in Britain to join the nationalistic Malay Society. Because of his age and long experience in the civil service, younger Malay students looked to him as their leader, called him—because of his darker skin—"Black Uncle." In fiery political bull sessions with youthful follower Tun Abdul Razak, the seeds of a future political partnership were being sown; today Razak is the most trusted member of his Cabinet.
Back home, the middle-aging lawyer joined the United Malay Nationalist Organization, slowly began building up a political following in his native Kedah. In other Malay states, the Tunku's firebrand followers from the London days began pushing him for the party leadership; finally, in 1951, Abdul Rahman took over as boss of the U.M.N.O. "Nobody had ever heard of him," an official recalls. "I remember people asking 'Who the hell is he?' "