The destiny and politics of the Near East changed irreversibly when a short-tempered Maltese servant knifed an Egyptian to death in the flourishing city of Alexandria, Egypt.
In the early afternoon of Sunday, June 11, 1882, an Arab youth named El Ajjan, driving a donkey cart, deposited his Maltese passenger at the Cafe Kawat-el-Gezaz (other sources have the Cafe Crystal) at the far end of Rue des Soeurs in the European quarter of Alexandria. That street started with a convent of nuns (hence its name) and at its other end housed convents of ladies remarkably less virginal – “infamous dens of vice and debauchery”. No prizes for guessing at which end the Maltese asked to be dropped off.
The passenger resented the fare charged and a loud altercation followed. He drew a knife and stabbed El Ajjan to death. Some details remain unclear but what seems certain is that the Maltese and the Arab had, before the murder, devoutly insulted each other’s religion, and the Maltese killed the Arab to dispel any doubts about the superiority of Christianity over Islam.
Apparently, the Maltese trouble-maker earned his living as a ‘lackey’ – a low-level manual servant who usually wears uniform – at the British consulate.
This represents one version of how trouble started, probably the most authentic and best documented. But other variants abound. One has the Maltese servant grabbing a knife used for slicing cheese at the cafe; another that the Alexandria riots began when an Egyptian knocked over an old Maltese woman sitting outside her son’s cafe. Others, again, claim that the Maltese fired a revolver.
Curiously, Maltese newspapers failed to pick up the full potential of the story – or its Maltese angle. The leading Malta Times began its report: “Alexandria – on Sunday a serious disturbance took place between the natives and the Maltese and Greeks of the lower class in which an Arab was killed”.
The Malta News and Independent only made some reference to the event 10 days after the facts. The third paper, The Malta Standard, later still, reported that “the first signal for Sunday’s riot was given by an affray between a Maltese and an Arab”.
Whatever the minor details, the killing of a young Arab (Egyptian? All North African Muslims were then indiscriminately, and incorrectly, referred to as Arabs) triggered violent and widespread riots against the European community in Alexandria.
In due course those disorders gave Britain the excuse it was looking for to gobble Egypt up and to add another luscious morsel to an empire over which, in the 19th century, the sun of exploitation never set and the sun of respect for other nations never rose.
On the debit side, a few thousand lives; on the credit side, Egypt fell straight into the unreluctant arms of Queen Victoria’s Empire. A providential killing if ever there was one.
The June 11 massacres following the Maltese murder were no trivial matter. “Other Arabs came to El Ajjan’s assistance. The Greek owner of an adjoining bakery and an Italian policeman joined in.
The Greek was killed and the Italian, who, knowing no Arabic, was an ineffectual peace-keeper, was wounded. Shots were then fired from upstairs windows of neighbouring houses owned by Europeans.”
Within minutes, incensed crowds poured into the streets brandishing sticks. “The Alexandria massacre had begun. When all was over about 7 p.m., more than 50 people (possibly many more) lay dead and shops and businesses in the European quarters of Alexandria had been sacked and looted”.
The dead referred to here were the Europeans. By the end of the day the Egyptians finished with far more victims than that. But then, Egyptians alive did not really matter, so why should they start counting once they die?
Angered and resentful, the native crowds, including policemen and artisans, attacked any European in sight, easily identifiable by the hats and the clothes they wore – “hatred of the rich foreigners was one of their driving forces...
“The surprise is not that the riots took place but that, given the incendiary proximity of armed Europeans and simmering Egyptians, they had not occurred sooner.”
Another source documents how the Egyptians, armed with long wooden sticks, hit any European in sight as hard as they could. The Europeans, in turn, fired on Egyptian soldiers and policemen, sometimes from windows.
The British and the Greek consulates handed out firearms to their nationals, both consuls having been the victims of assaults. The British consulate survived but “in a state of indescribable confusion, women and children crowded in everywhere, weeping and terrified”.
Fifty Europeans (possibly more) lost their lives and some 250 Egyptians – a massacre on both sides – but with far more Egyptian victims than Europeans: no surprise, as the latter, differently from the Egyptians, used firearms indiscriminately. In fact, of all the corpses of Europeans recovered and examined, only one, a German named Scheuter, had bullet wounds – all the other had fractures or stab lesions.
The real extent of the casualty list contrasts starkly with that divulged by the Maltese newspapers: “The number of killed amounts to about 70 while that of wounded to about 100 – 67 Europeans and five Arabs killed and 80 Europeans and 23 Arabs wounded.”
Clearly the deliberate imperial spin had to be that the Egyptians had massacred the Europeans, not the other way round. Of the 50 or 60 Europeans who were killed, about half were Maltese. Only six British-born figured on the list. Most of the Maltese victims were buried before being properly identified.
“This seems to suggest that a high proportion of those who died came from the rather murky floating population of underworld Alexandria”. In this context “floating population” perhaps has too much black humour about it: the Egyptian populace tipped a large number of the bodies of the Europeans killed straight into the sea.
More than the extensive, brutal, senseless bloodshed, the Maltese newspapers, relentlessly colonial, focused on the impudence of inferior races harming superior Europeans. The Malta Standard reported how “Rogers Bey saw a middle-aged European dragged from a carriage by the mob and battered to pieces.
“Afterwards he saw several inoffensive Europeans attacked by the mob, driven down side streets and murdered. Just then Haidar Pasha, whose house was close by, called on Bey to enter. He was not a moment too soon, for a great crowd immediately afterwards passed pursuing a European who was running for his life. He was caught and beaten to pieces.
“Bey saw eight more treated in a similar manner, all being shamefully battered to death. Some Europeans outran their pursuers and escaped, but everyone who appeared was chased.
“The police were present but looked at the massacre quite indifferently. Many bodies were weltering on the pavement and the natives shamefully insulted them.”
Hardly any mention of the 250 or more Egyptians killed that day. Reporters could find no news value in hundreds of Egyptians slaughtered; whether they looked for it at all is another matter altogether.
Another European fugitive from Alexandria to Malta seemed far more vexed by issues of moral propriety during that bedlam than with so many losing their life. “Affairs in Alexandria are in a sad state. Foreign ladies are grossly insulted, even to being forcibly kissed in the public streets.
“The wife of our informant was insulted by being addressed in lewd language and disgraceful propositions being made to her. An Italian lady was kissed by a soldier while a comrade of the man held a drawn sword across her face”.
If the ‘informant’ really meant kissing (don’t discount Victorian prudery and self-censorship), it would seem that the lethal sword was equally drawn over the intruder’s face.
On his hurried return to Malta, Mr J. Aquilina, manager of the travel agency Thos. Cook & Sons in Alexandria, told the press how he had been instrumental in saving the life of the wife of the Austrian consul and their children who were about to be “horribly massacred by a band of wild and infuriated Arabs”.
Now natives with such deplorable manners seemed pretty unsporting to Europeans who, on the other hand, found nothing unsporting in owning two-thirds of Alexandria – most of anything worth anything there belonged to foreign Christians.
At the time of the riots, one estimate says, 3,500 English and Maltese settlers lived in Alexandria together with 10,000 Greeks and 3,500 Italians, Germans, French and other foreigners (but figures vary considerably, depending on the source).
Sadly, the majority of Maltese migrants established in the Levant hardly enjoyed the most polished of reputations – anything but. Greeks from the Ionian Islands had previously struggled fiercely for the honour of being the unchallenged rascals of Europe, but, by the 19th century “they would be replaced as principal trouble-makers in the ports of the Levant by the Maltese”.
This, however unsavoury, proves to be a widespread perception. In 1857, an American economist and writer felt he had to record that “there is not a worse set of ruffians than the Ionians and the Maltese, who wander all over the East and bully and defraud and assassinate, under British protection”.
According to another source, “when the riot broke out on June 11, the poor of Alexandria had plenty of old scores to settle with the Greeks and the Maltese in their midst.”
The truth remains that both shores of the Mediterranean concurred in regarding the Maltese living abroad as the affliction of whatever country had the misadventure of hosting them: “ignorant, superstitious, brutish, dim, treacherous, dishonest, murderous riff-raff” – hardly equivocal, and possibly accurate, if ethnic stereotyping can conveniently be overlooked.
“All that is bad in the Maltese population... is to be found abroad and, a few years ago, Tunisia was a sort of Botany Bay (the celebrated Australian colony reserved for convicts) for Malta.
Robberies, beatings and knifings occurred every day, and, if one had to examine the registers of the British consulate in Tunis, one would find that the reports and investigations of these crimes formed the bulk of the consular affairs.
The difficulty in punishing (Maltese) offenders ... gave the worst Maltese in Tunis a defiant daring both in their illicit dealings and in their actual crimes.”
At the time of the riots, Alexandria no doubt hosted a number of respectable Europeans, including Maltese, but also, in the words of a contemporary newspaper, “a great many of the wildest rowdies and the queerest cosmopolitan tramps, the oddest outlaws of mongrel breed and of indefinable ancestry who claimed to be Europeans.”
Topping the lists of undesirables were many Maltese.
To be concluded