Are We Really Independent? Inside Malta’s 60-Year Struggle With Freedom

Are we really independent?
The question hangs over Malta like the August humidity—familiar, heavy, impossible to swat away. Every 21 September the islands explode in tricolour: band marches down Valletta’s Republic Street, fireworks bruise the night sky above Floriana, and Facebook feeds clog with nostalgic black-and-white photos of Dom Mintoff holding the independence document. We congratulate ourselves on sixty years of statehood, yet a niggling voice whispers: did we merely swap one master for a dozen others?

Walk the streets the morning after the party and the hangover is palpable. Taxi drivers queuing outside the airport grumble that the concession was quietly renewed to a foreign operator until 2045. In Gżira, residents wake to the smell of fried calamari drifting off a cruise ship that has just dumped 4,000 passengers onto a pedestrian-unfriendly pavement. In Marsa, a Syrian refugee sweeps the entrance to a government-run open centre whose budget is stitched together by Brussels and a Lutheran NGO from Sweden. The Union Jack no longer flutters over the Grand Harbour, but someone else is still calling shots—just with different letterheads.

Our language, stubbornly Semitic yet sprinkled with Italian courtesies and English legalese, is the first clue that independence was never a clean break. We kept the Westminster model, the driving side, even the 999 emergency number. Try buying a house without referencing a 19th-century British ordinance still lodged in Chapter 16 of the laws of Malta. The knights left us aubergines and baroque; the British left us bureaucracy and a taste for Cadbury’s chocolate. Independence, it seems, was less rupture than rebranding.

Economically, the story is starker. When the Union Jack came down in 1964, Malta’s GDP was roughly equivalent to that of rural Sicily. Today, nominal GDP per capita rivals parts of Germany. Yet the engine is no longer the naval dockyard—privatised, downsized, and finally shuttered—but a digital casino of iGaming licences, crypto start-ups and, above all, the golden-passport shop. Sell citizenship, import millionaires, inflate rents: a strategy that would have baffled Mintoff’s socialist 1970s but now feels inevitable. The landlords prosper; the artists are evicted from Valletta’s cramped baroque flats; the village core empties out. Independence delivered prosperity, but prosperity is parcelled out like a Paceville guest list—VIP rope included.

Ask a farmer in Qormi if he feels sovereign while spraying Israeli-designed pesticides on foreign-owned seed, and he’ll laugh until the pesticide makes him cough. Ask a teacher in Żejtun whether curriculum reform is decided in Floriana or in the shadowy boardrooms of Pearson, and she’ll point to the stack of photocopied worksheets copyrighted in London. Even our festivals are franchised: the village festa still honours St Gregory, but the €80,000 petard that rattles your sternum at 8 a.m. was imported from Sicily because local fireworks factories can’t afford the insurance.

Yet to dismiss independence as illusion is to ignore the psychic miracle it performed. My 92-year-old nanna remembers watching the British governor’s yacht sail out of the harbour and feeling, for the first time, that the limestone beneath her feet belonged to her. That emotional title deed cannot be measured in megawatts or maritime conventions. It is sung in the ta’ Qali farmers’ market where vendors switch from Maltese to English to Italian within one sentence, confident the land is finally theirs to bargain with. It is painted in the murals of Ħamrun that celebrate queer love in a country where, only fifty years ago, colonial sodomy laws sent gay men to prison. Independence gave us the right to argue over our own contradictions—loudly, messily, in our own accent.

So are we really independent? The honest answer is: partly, imperfectly, and still under review. Like a teenager who leaves home but keeps returning with laundry, Malta negotiates daily with the ghosts of empires and the seductions of global capital. True independence may not be a certificate dated 21 September 1964, but a living conversation—one that happens in Maltese, over pastizzi, preferably with the door shut to no one and open to everyone.