This is the first time that I am writing in this paper so close to the anniversary of the assassination of the investigative journalist, reporter, editor, writer, publisher, archaeologist, and all round aesthete, Daphne Caruana Galizia. It is a very surreal moment for me to write for this newspaper, the newspaper she wrote for before she was assassinated. I grew up reading her columns, first in The Sunday Times in the late 1980s, and later in The Malta Independent. By the time Daphne launched her website Running Commentary in March 2008, with the first blog being Zero Tolerance for Corruption, Daphne was already an institution, a household name, a one-name ‘celebrity’. The blog is where she broke her biggest stories that were taken up after her killing by The Daphne Project, the collective work of 45 journalists from 18 news organisations worldwide.

Daphne was only 24 years old when she started writing her incisive column, which was a mix of commentary, satire, and reporting in The Sunday Times. I was seventeen at the time and her writing, even then, was fresh, scintillating and so funny. I recall making mental notes of her turns of phrase, and sometimes, I even jotted them down. I remember that I kept looking at the byline that there was an actual name attached to the column not a pseudonym  as was customary at the time. Daphne was the first woman columnist in a newsroom teeming with men; a trailblazer not just because of her young age, but that she was a woman who was not afraid to attach her name to her pieces from the very start. Daphne did not write about subjects that were tame and innocuous, or puff pieces, but actual missiles that never missed their target.

Since I am writing for this paper, which Daphne helped establish, both as its associate editor and as a columnist, in 1992, I asked the editor to send me her first column for The Malta Independent. I howled with laughter. She really could paint a picture with a few strokes of her pen. Her first column for this paper was about Lorry Sant, on the 28 June 1992, in which she described a ‘debate’ between Sant and Wenzu Mintoff, chaired by Georg Sapiano, that degenerated quickly into catcalling about ‘bloomers’. Daphne writes “Veins stood on brows, and a policeman whispered soothing words into the ear of an ageing fan with radioactive hair and yellow bermudas, while she screamed that she would die for Lorry…The air was awash with the kind of detail that would have sold millions had it been written by Jackie Collins.” The kind of writing that got me hooked and that made powerful people angry.

But Daphne was accused of not writing her own columns. Because how could she be this good and a woman? Elsewhere she wrote: “Women in Malta must strive against a massive wall of prejudice – that we are stupid, that we are uninformed, that we are incapable of getting our ducks in a row, and that our main purpose is to look decorative while listening, preferably with parted lips, while men talk.”

At 28, and with three young sons, Daphne enrolled at the University of Malta to study archaeology and anthropology. Daphne never missed a story. This is why her volume of work is vast and the sheer scale of website is impressive. Whenever a name pops up embroiled in some seedy story or other, even six years after her assassination, just type the name in her search engine, and you are presented with a blog post written by Daphne. She went after stories even when there seemed no evidence trail to follow, because in her journalism too, Daphne was guided by the maxim, a guiding principle in archaeology “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Daphne was also the editor and publisher of two lifestyle magazines, Taste in June 2004 and Flair in April 2005. They were subsequently merged as Taste&Flair in June 2014. The tagline for this publication runs as follows ‘Making Life beautiful since 2004: Daphne Caruana Galizia’s Legacy.’ In her first editorial for Taste, her intention to change the way we look about food is evident. Daphne explained the rationale behind her new publication: “Interest in food and in fresh ways of cooking and eating is growing in Malta, but there has so far been a dearth of ways in which new ideas and information can be communicated to those in search of them in a lively and interesting format.” Always the innovator.

In the first editorial Taste&Flair in June 2014, Daphne wrote: this magazine “brings together the myriad joys of food, wine, some art, architecture, beautiful things and home interiors. Good food in dull and ugly surroundings? Bad food in a beautiful room? No thank you.” Daphne was driven by style and substance. That is her legacy: in her ground-breaking investigative work, in her magazines, and most importantly her legacy is in her sons, Matthew, Andrew, and Paul. In everything she did, even when she wrote about bad manners, bad behaviour, the uncouthness of the people in public life, Daphne viewed such lapses in good taste as a manifestation of the rot that has seeped into our society. Because for Daphne, beauty could also be found in mores, in behaviour, and in how we go about our business, our duties, both in private and in public.

But all this was taken away from her. Daphne was cut down in the prime of her life. The heading is taken from the website of the Foundation set up in her name and no one feels her absence more keenly than her loved ones. The least we can do is to walk with them on this long road to justice.

I sometimes catch myself ‘playing the game’: What If? What if Daphne had been still around? What else would we have learnt from her? From her investigative work? From her publications? No one can answer these questions because Daphne is gone. Stolen from her family. From all of us. From our country.

The only certainty we have in front of us is the same as the past six years: that we must continue to fight for justice for Daphne and her stories. You might think that we sound like a broken record, that we should move on, that we should ‘live and let live’ but how could we do that when Daphne was not allowed to live the life she had built for herself with her family? Surrounded by beautiful objects that she sometimes made herself?

I wrote under many pseudonyms on her blog. We knew each other and we sometimes emailed too. But until she was assassinated I did not dare pop my head above the parapet. That stopped on the 16 October 2017. Most of us stopped hiding, and found our voices. That is also one of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s legacies. Yes, activism can be a slog, oh yes it is, but we had already failed her when we left her to fight all those dragons alone. So we slog. This is why we sit in courtrooms for hours on end with Joseph Muscat and other shady people, that is why we trudge up and down Republic Street shouting our slogans, that is why we endure all sorts of attacks, even from friendly fire, that is why we keep Daphne’s life’s work alive in all sorts of ways.

Because she can’t.

Don’t conform to the narrative that nothing can be done. That we are powerless. That we must follow the rules or else! In Daphne’s own words: “What happened in the 70s and 80s was possible because people gave in. They complied, lowered their heads below the parapet, and they worked with corrupt and abusive scum to ensure their own survival rather than defying them, for the sake of a quiet life.”

Our only duty as citizens is to be a good ancestor.

(This column is dedicated to Rose Marie Vella)

Alessandra Dee Crespo is vice-president, Repubblika