Many Maltese people of the generation
Many Maltese people of the generation that grew up during the war continued to refer to all foreigners as ‘l-Ingliżi,’ the English. Not exactly all foreigners. English people, of course, and Americans and all northern Europeans. Not Africans or Asians. Not Italians; certainly not Sicilians or Neapolitans or Romans. Maybe Tyroleans would have made the grade. Needless to say, educated and well-travelled Maltese people would have distinguished between all these, but—just as all soft drinks were ‘Coca’ and all animated cartoons were ‘Mickey Mouse’—everyone else used the generic ‘Ingliżi’ for anyone who was not Mediterranean or African or Asian. White people, in other words.
The Maltese themselves became white not exactly at midnight of the 1st of May 2004, but some time after that when the summer had kicked in and the first boat of migrants arrived. Before Malta joined the EU and became the southernmost redoubt of European manifest destiny, the categories were murkier. I remember children at primary school swapping duplicate football stickers on the bus. Blond players were worth two dark-haired men. So, for instance, a German midfielder would be worth a Brazilian striker and an Argentinian centre-back. I don’t want to probe my memory too deeply about the effect of other racial markers on the rate of exchange. There were a few black basketball players on the Island and everyone was very nice to them. They were tall, of course, and American, and looked like they were coming out of the movies. No one was racist about them because there was just a handful of them and everybody had seen The Color Purple and Mississippi Burning and knew that you weren’t supposed to be racist about black people. There were also many Libyan men in the country, working and studying, who could not always be differentiated by the naked eye from Maltese men. People rarely had a good word to say about them, but that was ‘different.’
The Church gave everyone the opportunity to be on the eyepiece end of the orientalist telescope. Parishioners donated canned foods and jumpers to ‘the missions’ and in return they were shown pictures of Maltese priests spreading ‘the good news’ in foreign lands. To the parishioners who made the donations, the congregants in those pictures, gathered in a very neatly constructed church made of mud and wood, were recognisably ‘other,’ the priest on the other hand looked exactly like them. He was their cousin, after all, or their uncle.
In the 19th Century there had been a significant amount of emigration from Malta to Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. These movements were sometimes ad hoc, sometimes more organised. In 1836, for instance, a small British fleet appeared in the port of La Goulette, in Tunis. It had left Malta with the aim of coercing the Tunisian ruler, Mustafa Bey, to accept Maltese immigrant labourers into his realm. By the end of the century, around 35,000 Maltese people were living on the North African shore.
A century later, Britain still had a surplus Maltese population that inconveniently grew around its military base—‘like flies’ according to Lord Home, ‘like rabbits’ according to Nye Bevan—and it needed to ease the pressure on HM Treasury by dispersing some of this population across the globe. But times had changed; Britan’s gunboats couldn’t anymore just appear in a foreign port to dump its Maltese protégés. A ‘wind of change’ was blowing, after all, and the empire was being dismantled. Maltese emigration had continued in fits and starts throughout the 20th Century but recipient countries did not have an infinite tolerance for incoming migrants. So in the late 1950s, the British authorities racked their brains—which is to say they spent a couple of mornings—trying to find fresh venues that would be prepared to accept more Maltese immigrants. It wasn’t easy to find anywhere they could send them, besides Australia and Britain itself. ‘The Maltese are very touchy about their standing as Europeans,’ a Colonial Office memorandum stated in 1962, ‘which rules out the Asian, African and West Indian Commonwealth countries.’ Quebec offered a suitably ‘Catholic Latin atmosphere’ but ‘at one time there was an unspoken reluctance on the part of the Canadian authorities to recognise the Maltese as being wholly European, and this might still be an obstacle in persuading the Canadian Government to make any substantial increase in their quota.’ A memo from the minister of state a few months later continues to consider the topic. ‘As to whether the Maltese might be acceptable immigrants into South Africa … they might well not be acceptable on racial grounds.’ In any case, by the end of the 20th Century, net emigration was close to 120,000 people—around a third of the population—mostly to Australia, the UK and Canada.
Australia had previously also been reluctant to accept the Maltese as ‘wholly European’ and in 1922, Mr Henry Casolani travelled to London to meet the Commonwealth superintendent of Immigration. While there, he met the press and said he wanted to refute once and for all a little misunderstanding that seemed to have been doing the rounds regarding his compatriots. ‘They are absolutely white,’ he reassured them. ‘There is not a drop of coloured blood in all the Maltese who went to Australia during the last two years. They are born and bred agriculturists, religious, cleanly, do not dabble in politics, and are innocent of the subversive ideas frequently prevailing in their class.’ Mr Casolani was clearly protesting too much, and even back home, his claim that the Maltese were ‘absolutely white’ must have been as incomprehensible as his claim that they ‘do not dabble in politics.’
The isolation brought about by Covid-19 was shattered abruptly and spectacularly by a spate of protests that brought many people out on the streets again in cities across the world. Suddenly, history was once again being reckoned in centuries rather than by the tickertape rise and fall of the R-number. As is the manner with revolutions, riots, and protests, the Black Lives Matter protests that grew out of the killing of George Floyd in the US soon spread to Europe. Now, it’s not the first time that a cause is picked up from the other side of the Atlantic, wrenched out of context, and brought to Europe and sometimes you could easily be forgiven for thinking that some people who think they’re doing politics are in fact just consuming American pop-culture. In this case, however, the context only became deeper as it crossed over to our side. Europe’s reckoning with its racist past and present has a very long way to go. On Maltese social media, a part of this attention was very usefully turned to the drive-by murder of Lassana Cisse Souleymane in April 2019, a 42-year old migrant worker from Ivory Coast.
The protests that followed from the George Floyd shooting became wider as time went on. There were protests against police violence but also protests against the legacy of the slave trade—as in the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign to topple the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford—and colonialism in general. In Malta there were protests in front of the Courts protesting the fact that the two men accused of the murder of Lassana Cisse—two soldiers, off-duty at the time of the shooting—were still out on bail. This, you could say, was the grown-up reaction—focus on the current reality, on responsibilities more than recriminations. But something was shortcircuited in the process, because in identifying all-too-readily with the powerful European bloc, together with the noblesse oblige that comes with it, Malta’s own colonial history is ignored. Part of this comes from the awkwardness of wading through the extremely partisan politics that prevailed during the decolonisation process, partly from the awkwardness of discussing related subjects like religion and class.
Although I talk about religion and class far more than is generally acceptable in polite company, I do share the awkwardness of discussing Malta’s colonial past, particularly in the context of all other colonisation. All too often, I feel obligated to defer to the far greater suffering, humiliation and outright genocide experienced by other parts of the globe. But it has always been equally uncomfortable for me to be identified as somehow closer to the coloniser than the colonised. When I lived in the UK and the issue of reparations would come up, I would be completely supportive of such a move, but also vexed by the idea that I would definitively be thrown into the camp of the coloniser, because it would be unlikely that Malta’s halting access to reconstruction funds would be taken as seriously as the wholesale transport of entire generations from other countries into slavery. My part of any such payments would, of course be hidden, and negligible compared to all the other things funded by my tax but some small amount of it, however minuscule, and in whatever abstracted way, would go towards identifying me with the coloniser.
Minimising the effects of colonisation on Maltese culture is not as magnanimous as it might seem. It perpetuates that subtle strain of pick-me decolonisation that ran through the long arduous process of Malta’s exit from the British Empire. Every now and then, in speeches and documents, you could catch a hint of the line of argument that ‘you can’t treat us the way you treat your other colonised subjects, we are European, after all’. This was probably stated most explicitly during the Integration talks. On the one hand was Mintoff’s extremely clearsighted argument that no settlement would be acceptable except for a perfect economic equivalence between a UK subject in the British Isles and one in the Maltese Islands. On the other hand, there was the understanding that although a majority of the House on both Labour and Tory sides were in favour of incorporating Malta into the United Kingdom, and have three Maltese members of parliament, the same offer would almost certainly not be extended to other remaining parts of the Empire. It was said in parliament that maybe Gibraltar could also be taken in because like Malta they were ‘heirs to the Hellenic and Christian culture’. But, everyone in the House realised what was going on. ‘If we do not take in Gambia, we are up against the question whether we admit only whites and Europeans to this Parliament, or go beyond that stage and admit others of different colours. I submit that once we begin by having Members for Malta in the House of Commons we shall have to go on to the Gambias and beyond, because we cannot stop at whites and Europeans only.’ Those Members of the House who were in favour of Malta’s Integration were saying, ‘Yes, of course, we’ll let in the Gambia, so what’s the problem?’ But even they must have realised what the problem would be.
I’d already been gone from London for a few years when I learnt that in 1835, the British governement had set up a scheme to compensate slave owners who would be disadvantaged by the abolition of slavery. First of all, the former slaves were to become ‘apprentices’ for the first six years of their freedom. This apprenticeship meant that they would continue to work for their former owners, for no pay. To further absorb the shock, to make sure that slave owners could continue in the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed, the former owners were compensated for each slave they used to own. The government, effectively, bought the slaves off the slaveowners. The compensation paid amounted to £20 Million, a massive transfer of wealth equivalent to around £1,958 Million in 2022 prices. Looked at another way, as the same fraction of GDP in the year that it was made, it would now be equivalent to £17 Billion. To make these payments, the Treasury borrowed the money from private banks, and the loan was fully paid off only in 2015. Which means that, in the eighteen years I lived in the UK, out of every pound I ever paid in tax, some small amount of it, however minuscule, and in whatever abstracted way, went to enrich the families of slave owners and their descendants.
¶ end of part twenty-four
An earlier draft of this newsletter went out in error today at noon!
The image used to publicise this newsletter is a still from Society (USA 1989) directed by Brian Yuzna. I once heard an Italian journalist say that the Italians used to call all (northern) foreigners ‘Americani.’ Mr Casolani’s visit is reported here in the New Zealand Herald. The research regarding the history of Maltese decolonisation is part of research I have been doing for a novel based around this theme. The details of the compensation paid in the UK to slave owners are explained in this article in The Voice and this article in the Guardian. The Bank of England’s own research can be found here. At the time of writing, three years after the protests in front of the Maltese Courts ‘inspired’ by those in the US following the George Floyd murder, Francesco Fenech and Lorin Scicluna—the two men accused of the murder of Lassana Cisse—remain out on bail.
There will be one more newsletter in this series, plus a coda—so subscribe now before it’s too late!