Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1259447
14 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 14 JUNE 2020 OPINION ANCIENT Egyptians held a unique set of beliefs on (im)mor- tality. In their spiritual universe, a person dies twice: first, when you take your final breath. And then, the last time someone says your name. Egyptians devoted their lives to building pyramids so that their god-kings, the Phar- aohs, could flourish in their sec- ond life until the end of time. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters defacing monuments of controversial historical fig- ures reminds us of the purpose of monuments: Cementing the name of powerful men in history. And the statues of the men – as it almost always men – we choose to honour and the ones we don't, says as much about who we think we were, as it does about who we are. Last weekend, the Bristol mon- ument of the prolific slave-trader Edward Colston, who became immensely wealthy from selling an estimated 80,000 people in- to slavery, was torn down and rolled into the river to great ap- plause and cheering. In a more restrained act of rebellion, red paint was splashed on the stat- utes of King Leopold II, the pri- vate owner of the Belgian Congo. The profound horror of life in the Congo Free state is best depicted by the haunting photo of a Con- golese man staring at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, one of the estimated 10 million Congolese butchered as punishment for failing to make the daily rubber quota. These events drove some to draw parallels with the memora- ble vignettes of Iraqis toppling a bronze Saddam Hussein or Pa- risians defacing portraits of Ad- olf Hitler. Others were furious as they equate iconoclasm with the erasure of history, glossing over the condemnation of Leopold II and Colston during their life- time. The spontaneous deface- ment by a small group of pro- testors and not through general consensus certainly complicates their departure. Yet it is undeniable that these symbolic actions are electrified with a political potency that makes for an unparalleled ed- ucational tool. They have done more to educate about the rac- ist institutions that propped up these men than history lessons at school ever could. As although the statues capture the likeness of man, they embody power struc- tures and ideology. And while it can be argued that toppling these statues 'erases' a part of history, the opposite can also be true. Monuments can be historical erasers. As blunt instruments of commemoration of powerful people, they can obscure despic- able actions committed by these people during their lifetime. In the future, we might look back at this juncture as a criti- cal turning-point. The historical narrative that propped up these figures is being reassessed and our shared past, in which they are butchers and not revered he- roes, is being re-imagined. After all, history is neither static nor linear. Past events are shaped by our present; much of our history is sieved through modern views. Our collective understanding of the past is fluid, continuously contested and updated. In the words of MM Bakhtin, "nothing is absolutely dead: every mean- ing will have its homecoming festival". The spread of BLM protests across the capitals of former Eu- ropean imperial powers, from the Netherlands, to the UK, and Germany, via France and Bel- gium, have galvanised citizens into an ad hoc decolonisation process of their public spaces. It remains to be seen as to whether this homecoming will continue to be a meaningful one. Their governments have not been suf- ficiently moved to review con- tentious policies vis-a-vis the Af- rican continent. A different kind of colonial aftershock The view from Malta is colour- ed by its experience as a former colony. We are experiencing a different kind of colonial after- shock. As Malta remains entan- gled in the web of international power politics, the contradictions of our colonised past, and our present role as a sentinel for For- tress Europe, came into a sharp focus through last Monday's 'pro-migrant' protests and Jus- tice For Lassana memorial, and 'anti-migrant' counter protests. The former are capitalising on the BLM media coverage to high- light the brutal murder of Ivorian immigrant, Lassana Cisse, in a memorial that took place weeks after his death's anniversary dur- ing the COVID-19 lockdown. The latter are expressing anger because the memorial comes days after Malta had to take in 425 migrants, but who were left on private boats for five weeks in a failed attempt at moving EU countries to share the responsi- bility. They embody the resent- ment of a humiliating defeat as casualties of greater forces. How this sense of victimhood aligns with their toxic patriotism is key to unlocking one of many curi- ous paradoxes that characterises Malta. British rule came to its final end in 1979, when the Maltese waved goodbye to the last for- eign troops on sovereign Maltese soil. Not all islanders were happy to see the back of British soldiers and a handful of elderly citizens remain sentimental to this day. Independence was a watershed moment for Malta and Mal- teseness flourished. This con- tinued throughout the 70s, with post-colonial stirrings expressed in novels, poetry, theatre and ac- tivism. Nowadays we treat this part of our history as a closed chap- ter. We don't really talk openly amongst ourselves about our parents' and grandparents' quo- tidian experience of colonialism. There is a disconnect between generations. In the run-up to CHOGM, membership of the Common- wealth was described as.... [an Organisation] "you join based on your past, the other [European Union (EU)] you join based on what you want your future to be". The Maltese prefer to forgive and forget. It was in this vein that Malta advised other members of the former colonial club to 'move on' from 'the blame game'. An aspirational nation, the Maltese prefer to invest in their future. Forgiving is fine. Bitterness is a useless emotion that hurts the person who holds it far more than its target. Forgetting is not. A collective amnesia replaced the fierce ideological debates and skirmishes throughout the de- colonisation process leading up to Freedom Day and is reflected in our education curriculum. Growing up, history lessons were an exercise in erasure. Re- volving around historic dates, alternating between besiegement by or liberation from (usually Muslims) and the 'great men' associated with these dates. The zenith was reached with the Great Siege of 1565, a template for Malta's popular understand- ing of its identity as the David protecting Christian Europe from the Philistine Goliath. Nev- er mind that the Crusaders were arguably the religious fundamen- talists to the tolerant Ottomans who practised religious pluralism through the millet system. Politics in its rawest form, the power dynamics that creates hi- erarchies, whether class or racial, was always absent. History was sterilised of con- flict and glossed over facts, no- toriously the Arab period, that challenged the Catholic Church's supremacy as a cultural vector of Malteseness. Our passage through time was presented as a consensus-driven exercise, in the form of a one-di- rectional progressive march to- wards an inevitable end point of salvation. The partisan zealotry that per- meates every aspect of daily life is to blame for this. To prevent par- tisanship from polluting schools, education is stripped of the big 'P' politics of partisanship, de- priving students of the ability to learn how the small 'p' politics of power and privilege drive his- torical processes and determine outcomes. Turning our attention to colonial legacy What if we viewed the BLM as an opportunity, electrified by po- litical currents, to turn our atten- tion to our colonial legacy? Dare we hope that in updating the past, we might understand our present? Could demytholo- gisation spur us to critically as- sess the nature of the racial anxi- eties that continue to colour our national identity, and how this informs the tribal way in which Maltese people relate to each other and to 'outsiders'? Ambivalence and anxieties about Malta's Europeanness, a proxy for 'whiteness', inevitably emerge in public debates linked to Malta's standing in Europe. Malta's location on the fringes of the EU, a stepping-stone into Africa, here but also there, un- derpins this ambiguous identity. The categorisation of 'white- ness' is based on the biological attribute of colour and a social construct that was defined by the subject and the rulers, and a re- flection of the hierarchy of eco- nomic, social and cultural priv- ileges. David Zammit describes how during Victorian times, the Maltese were racialised distinc- tively from Europeans. He ex- Colonial aftershock Michaela Muscat Dr Michaela Muscat is a sociologist writing in a private capacity