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13 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 25 APRIL 2021 pation was best captured in the brutal and unforgiving writings of his most ardent of followers, the socialist writer Gwann Ma- mo, author of the satirical Ulied in-Nanna Venut fl-Amerka. How Dimech tried to emanci- pate the masses In a society where the vast ma- jority were illiterate, Dimech's appeal to reason was "a revolu- tionary task". It was this ability, says anti-poverty activist Mat- thew Borg, "to take the reader from point A to B by reasoning out", that distinguished Dimech as a progressive thinker. And it was this deficit, as ad- dressed in Mamo's Ulied..., in the way people and his contem- poraries thought, that Dimech set out to correct. "His life was a continuous exercise to educate the masses without belittling or paternalizing," Borg says, adding the role of Dimech's 'circle of the enlighetened' – ix-Xirka tal-Im- dawlin – to "democratically de- fuse political knowledge to the masses" in a process of empow- erment. Borg contrasts Dimech's over- riding concern with emancipa- tion, with the dumbing down appeal of the modern political class. "They make no real effort to elevate political discourse for the masses to follow," Borg com- plains. "Stuck in a conservative, parochial-style discourse which constantly moves away from the subject matter at hand, or which values truth according to which tribe one belongs to, they're making sure the Ulied in-Nanna Venut saga continues." And as historian Henry Fren- do observed in 1978: "impelled by his great wish to see the Mal- tese worker react intelligently instead of being forever led here and there", Dimech insisted "that the worker should develop his self-respect, and behave not on- ly as a worker but also, and not least, as a fully-fledged citizen." A ghost haunting the establish- ment Despite his lingering influence on a minority of socialists from the nascent but clerically dom- inated Labour of the 1920s (be- fore the Sedition Trials purges orchestrated by the same elites who condemned Dimech to ex- ile), Dimech was ejected from collective memory; only to be slowly rediscovered by historians like Henry Frendo and Geraldu Azzopardi, and in more recent times Mark Montebello. Dimech was posthumously promoted to Labour's pantheon in the 1970s, earning him a Le- ninesque 'monument' in Castille square. It was a veritable irony to see the gentle scourge of the establishment transplanted right in front of the seat power, to even provide the backdrop for left-wing activists in the De- cember 2019 anti-corruption protests. Despite his resonance with with mainstream secular, repub- lican and socialist, continental thinking, in Malta the radical Di- mech remained the eternal out- sider. "It was not Dimech who was born ahead of his time… He was born in exactly in the right time… it was his opponents who were a hundred years behind their time," Montebello says. But his ejection by the retro- grade Maltese traditional elites turned him in to a role model for aspiring rebels in the next cen- tury; from the Għaqda Soċjalis- ta Maltija in the 1920s to Mov- iment Graffitti in the mid-1990s, Dimech lived on and thrived in the periphery, a ghost who keeps haunting the establishment. Since its inception in 1994, Moviment Graffitti has always identified with the historical figure of Manwel Dimech: the first generation of activists sported t-shirts of Dimech with the seminal quote: "We are the sworn enemies of the thieves in suits (ħallelin bil-ġlekk)". The prominent Graffitti activ- ist Andre Callus says Dimech is frequently referred to in the group's dis- course, actions and imagery. "This affinity is The prom- inent Graf- fitti activist Andre Callus says Dimech is frequently referred to in the group's dis- course, actions and imagery. "This affinity is due to both Dimech's ideas as well as his organisational practices... When Graffitti was campaign- ing on LGBT rights, divorce and abortion, already in the mid-90s, activists must have felt a similar- ity between their radical activism in a stiffly conservative society and Dimech's in the 1900s." Dimech's defining characteris- tic – a desire to achieve change at a social level rather than the im- mediate seizure of formal, polit- ical power – makes him unique. "He's one of the very few histor- ical figures on the political Left in Malta who worked outside the framework of political parties... it chimes in with the political and organisational practices of Graf- fitti, as an organisation that is active politically, but outside the electoral sphere." jdebono@mediatoday.com.mt Manwel Dimech Born on Christmas day in 1860 in Valletta, Dimech lived the life of a street urchin, locked up first for petty theft at age 13. At 17 he was sen- tenced to 17 years' jail for involuntary murder. In prison, he became a self-thought intellectual and polyglot. In 1890 he was jailed again for trading in counterfeit money, and was released at 36 in 1896. On his release, Dimech embarked on social and political activism, publish- ing Il-Bandiera tal-Maltin. It was in Italian towns like Genoa that he became acquainted with the nascent workers' movements and trade unions, founding his Xirka tal-Imdawlin upon his return to Malta. Ex- communicated in 1911 for holding "illuminist" beliefs, a year later he would be pelted by stones by a mob in Qormi. His excommu- nication was eventually lifted but Dimech's growing influence in the Dockyard was of concern to the colonial authorities, who upon the start of WWI had him deported to Sicily. Dimech later moved to British-controlled Egypt where he was arrested again, spending the last seven years of his life imprisoned in P.O.W. camps in Alexandria where he died in 1921 after being repeatedly refused permission to return to Malta. Mark Montebello: "He remains forever the unadulterated voice of the people who are excluded from history, the anonymous and the dispossessed"