President George Abela, several distinguished guests including President Emeritus Fenech Adami, members of the diplomatic corps, scholars and judges, gathered at The Palace, Valletta last Wednesday for the launch of the book Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean –

a major historical work by Professor Henry Frendo, which has been 26 years in the making and draws on as many as six different national archives. The soiree comprised a panel discussion chaired by University Chancellor Professor David Attard, with Dr Albert Ganado, Professor Gloria Lauri-Lucente and Mario Ellul, selected readings from the 900-page volume by Dr Philip Farrugia Randon, and the accordionist Albert Garzia who played motifs from three politically-motivated tunes from England, Italy and Malta during the inter-war period. We are publishing below the author’s concluding address, which won prolonged applause

A few weeks ago (10 April 2012), a regular columnist in a local English language paper, whose colonial history figures prominently in this book, published an appeal (p.8): “…it is essential at this juncture in our history to bury hatchets, exchange healing potions and extend olive branches. If Germany, France, Spain and Portugal can do it, why not us Maltese? We live in a country where most of us are either related to everyone else or have known one another for generations. Therefore, reviving old memories and reopening old wounds does nothing to instil a sense of fairness and equitability in our democratic system…”

He was referring to the 1970s and 1980s, but he might as well have been referring to the 1930s and 1940s, which so far we know even less about; and some people certainly will dislike and possibly deride what they find revealed and portrayed in Europe and Empire.

When my books on Manwel Dimech first appeared, then a practically unknown figure shrouded in mystery and almost a taboo subject, an established correspondent took issue with the narrative. In the same newspaper, in 1972 (14th November 1972, p. 14), he wrote thus: “I consider that it was a great error to rewrite a history which should have remained buried. No one can blame those who reacted… sorrowful facts should remain buried…”

These views represent a mentality and a philosophy that is diametrically opposed to what I set out to do. I wished to expose a fear and an ignorance of the past – the negative relevance of this to our very being, our present and future, as citizens of a democratic state. As Simon Shama put it: “To know our past is to grow up.” Was it not George Santayana who famously said (in vol. 1 of The Life of Reason, 1905) that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”?

In our case, it is often not so much a question of remembering as of knowing even. Healing presupposes diagnosis and treatment.

The situation is further complicated by colonialism, of which Europe and Empire may be seen as a critique. In his portrait of the colonized and the colonizer (1957), Albert Memmi holds that ‘the most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed form history and from the community’: “The colonized enjoys none of the attributes of citizenship; neither his own, which is dependent, contested and smothered, nor that of the colonizer. He can hardly adhere to one or claim the other.”

In Decolonising the Mind (1986) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes thus: “Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the moral universe of the colonized, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relations to the world.”

One cannot eliminate core values from evaluation, thus for example the penalty of hanging until death; or exile without charge, or indeed brushing the past under the carpet. Underlying much of the clash of cultures and interests were conflicting postures as to whether Malta still belonged with Europe – “a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (John Donne) – Italy being a bridge to the mainland; or if it had drifted economically, linguistically, culturally and spiritually, well beyond its geographical Southern-Latin axis to the Nordic, Anglo-Saxon ‘mother country’ which now owned and ruled it. Hence the title of this book and the dust jacket illustrations selected for it: in front, St Publius overlooking the fleet in harbour in a typical hustle and bustle scene by the wharf; at the back, hundreds of schoolchildren waving Union Jacks in the 18th century Manoel Theatre.

Now that the sun has set on a supposedly invincible empire, we can permit ourselves some questions, even taking the cue on world domination from one of our tunes tonight:

“To thee belongs the rural reign;

“Thy cities shall with commerce shine:

“All thine shall be the subject main,

“And every shore it circles thine.”

By the same token, given the fall of Fascism, one looks anew, sceptically and critically, at its version of patriotism:

“Salve o popolo d’eroi,

“Salve o patria immortale,

“Sono rinati i figli tuoi

“Con la fede e l’ideale.”

The Satariano-Cilia folk tune released in 1931 satirizes new mores in acculturation as worldiness and mimicking:

“Tal-‘bon ton’ ajma xi ksuha,

“Din la Ngliza trid tixxala

“Tikber ftit lill-papa’ titlob,

“Biex tat-tennis tixtri pala

“Jikber ftit mohhu fil-football,

“Jew fil-cricket…”

Writing about Historicism and its Problems, Friedrich Meinecke noted that: “The search for causalities in history is impossible without reference to values; the comprehension of values is impossible without investigation of their causal origins.’”

In my concluding chapter entitled “A Culture of Dependent Fear: Decolonising the Mind, Reclaiming History and the Future of Identity”, I note that one cannot continue blaming colonialism for our idiosyncrasies because nations have to win true freedom for themselves ‘in the region of the spirit’. But, as Alfred Zimmern (1918) said, the aftermath of oppression would still remain: “The bitter memories and the inbred intolerance which are so often the fruit of persecution, and the habits of servility and wire-pulling, of intrigue and agitation which inevitably grow upon individuals or groups who have been living for long years amid the excitements of propaganda, instead of leading a normal healthy social existence.”

In highlighting relations between Britain and Italy, patterns in fascism and colonialism, racial and discriminatory behaviour between the Maltese and English, internecine rivalries among the Maltese themselves ranging from servility to pretension – in particular during the accentuated tensions and consequent trends of repression bordering on hysteria and terrorism in the 1930s and 1940s, Europe and Empire posits some disturbing questions. Did people see the light through iron bars? Was the overseer worse than the master? Did utility, functionality and convenience have the better of quality, integrity and right? Had repeated top-down changes interrupted continuity, sobriety and equanimity in lifestyle, and altered nationality? Was British rule a blessing or a curse, or neither? Did many Maltese really wish to be united to Italy at all? Would an anointed officialdom for an upgraded Maltese turn a onetime folksy vernacular into the national expression of culture, refinement and communication? Had party political confrontation after all permitted the emergence of a body politic? Would economic dependence and strategic liability ever be overcome? Were a restored national psyche and a socio-cultural equilibrium attainable after such a strained metamorphosis, further accentuated by the fears and ravages of war and its aftermath? Given such a tangential past, how had attributes, perceptions, attitudes and relations changed? Would a national identity, such as that was, further survive neo-colonialism, EU membership and globalisation? What place was reserved for history, in an acquired self-knowledge through reading, the media, school curricula?

This is a very tall order, punctuated with much pathos along the way, from whichever window one peeps; but one to which posterity must address itself empirically and critically in perspective, because we have the right to know and the duty to remember.

© Henry Frendo, 2 May 2012