The report entitled ‘The place is still a shambles’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, January 28) about the proposed restoration of Villa Guardamangia begs further analysis and historical judgement.
According to a BBC radio broadcast on April 12, 2021, Princess Elizabeth and her husband lived on and off at Villa Guardamangia, between 1949-51, as a break away from “post-war austere England”. The same feature highlighted how the couple used to tour the island in a car and picnicked in the countryside. The royals socialised with the elite and danced their nights away with other services’ couples.
Obviously, nobody bothered about Maltese families desperate to rebuild their bombed houses. Post-WWII Malta was denied American Marshall Aid as the UK declared the island did not qualify for funds as a fortress colony. While this issue appeared in the Labour Party’s 1950 election prospectus, we never heard of the royal couple interceding on behalf of the island they loved.
Villa Guardamangia was acquired by the government as “a tribute to the British Crown”. The purchase of an overpriced derelict house in Guardamangia for €5 million in 2019 is to further cost the Maltese taxpayer an additional €10 million to be spent over the next five years.
It is inexplicable how, in Malta, the current stream of condemnation of colonialism by former colonies runs in the opposite direction. The State is so engrained into a distorted perception of colonialism – the result of long-dominant manipulation by the colonialists – that it took the impudent initiative to monumentalise at great expense a very royal symbol of the ‘inglorious empire’.
Is the political class infatuated with colonialism?
While former colonies are dismantling their past political connections to the former metropole – in 2021, in Canada, a statue of Queen Elizabeth II was pulled down for her being head of the waning empire when crowned in 1952 – ‘colonial’ Malta still waves the flag of imperialism as if it were something to be proud of.
I realise that many Maltese elder citizens were fond of the late queen but one must also remember that, as the head of the British Empire, in her 70 end-of-year speeches, she never even bothered to mention colonialism, let alone its dark side.
Is the political class infatuated with colonialism?
Suffice to recall that, in the very same year and in the very same country – Kenya – where, in February 1952, the princess inherited her father’s throne, British officials “detained and brutalised hundreds of thousands of Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu” and targeted roughly 1.5 million Kikuyu natives who proclaimed their allegiance to the Mau Mau, which had demanded the independence of the British colony.
Declaring a state of emergency in October 1952, the British proceeded to attack the movement by waging a war against 20,000 Mau Mau fighters. Prisoners were kept in gulags. Harvard historian Caroline Elkins’s research (Imperial Reckoning, 2005) led to a legal case in a British court for compensation. On June 6, 2013, the British parliament announced an unprecedented compensation to 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the insurrection for independence.
Though the Guardamangia project to prop up an abandoned villa for the decreasing percentages of British tourists may seem to make economic sense, certain studies in the United Kingdom show that royal attractions are not an automatic magnet to tourist patronage.
According to VisitBritain figures, quoted by Graham Smith (Abolish the Monarchy, 2023), the percentage of tourism revenue generated by the monarchy for 2019 amounted to around £500 million (sterling), which is “just 1.9 per cent of the UK’s heritage tourism revenue, 0.3 per cent of all tourism revenue and only 0.01 per cent of (the) total economy”.
Overlooked by this colonialist shrine promoters, there is another paramount consideration. While Maltese society does not flinch an eyelid to dish out millions of euros on one colonialist’s residence, how come not a cent has been spent on any of the Maltese countrymen who would certainly stimulate national consciousness?
What about turning local former abodes of Maltese protagonists of history, medicine, the arts, literature and politics into town museums? No public funds were ever used to have national poet Dun Karm’s residence for our students to visit; nor that of medic, author and archaeologist Temi Zammit.
The long list of absent memorial residences may also include those of Mikiel Anton Vassalli, high-profile artists like Antonio Sciortino, literary giants such as Ninu Cremona, Ġużè Aquilina, Francis Ebejer and many others, besides George Borg Olivier’s in Sliema and Dom Mintoff’s in Tarxien. This author is sure that none of the above – most probably not even all together – would cost as much as this dilapidated house on the narrow stretch of Guardamangia Hill for a foreigner.
Adulating colonialists’ artefacts in superfluous abundance nurture post-colonial mentalities and convey the message that national pride has no place in Malta.
Is Maltese society still in the inferior position that it prefers to flaunt its colonial wares to such extremes in order to be internationally acclaimed as a proper State?
Colonial academic Albert Memmi stated that it was “not a coincidence that the colonised peoples are the last to awaken to national consciousness. The day will have to come when the colonised will raise their head and tilt the unstable balance of colonialism”. In this 60th anniversary year of independence, how close are we to the day?
Charles XuerebCharles Xuereb is author of Decolonising the Maltese mind, in search of identity (Midsea Books, 2022).