A historic injustice brought to life

The interning of Maltese known to sympathise with Italy in 1940 and their subsequent deportation to Uganda in 1942, when the voyage to Egypt was very dangerous, is probably the blackest episode in the history of British colonial rule in Malta.

Both Scicluna and Calleja play uninhibitedly for the audience surrounding the acting spaces, and Capato’s good number of small roles provide the production with a compelling trio of performers- Paul Xuereb

Books and articles, some angrier than others, have been written about it, and in 1994 a play in Maltese, Internati, by Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, was staged. Now a new and longer play, Internati u deportati, has been given a number of performances in the gloomy, large and rambling cellars of the Prime Minister’s office at the Auberge de Castille. The venue was a good choice, suggesting imprisonment and a life of limited resources.

It was written by Joseph (better known to playgoers as Pino) Scicluna, son of one of the internees, also named Joseph, widely known at the time by his nickname ‘Balilla’. This nickname indicated, as Scicluna junior admits with just a touch of defiant embarrassment, that Scicluna senior belonged to an Italian fascist youth organisation, as did a couple of other internees, while another internee was a declared Nazi sympathiser.

The other 30-odd internees showed their political sympathies a little more cautiously, though there was little doubt that for them, Italy, Mussolini or no Mussolini, was in many ways a mother country. They were a very mixed lot, ranging from manual workers at the Dockyard to professionals of the highest degree, including the former Chief Justice, and the leader of the Nationalist party.

Scicluna’s play, which takes the audience from the original internment in 1940 to 1945 when they were eventually returned from Uganda to Malta, is sometimes an angry work, and it opens with Scicluna, dressed in orange overalls, reminding us that incarceration without charge, so shocking in 1940, is still being practised by the US at Guantanamo Bay.

Scicluna is not only the play’s chorus but also plays his father, to whom by the way he bears a good physical resemblance. Two others, Katia Capato, who also co-directs with Scicluna, plays a whole range of parts – prison warders, British officers, a woman who was a bit of a siren in the Entebbe Camp, Uganda, and Glenn Calleja, whose main part is that of Herbert Ganado, lawyer and journalist, well-known for his sense of humour, and very strong Catholic beliefs. Between them they produce a performance of much energy and a sense of disbelief that such things could be.

What the production also makes clear again and again is that despite all the humiliation and mental suffering that the internees experienced, life went on and was not without its light moments. All 42, some of them not so young, managed to survive their long internment, and one of them brought backthe foreign wife he married in Entebbe.

The characters we get to know in some depth are Balilla and Herbert Ganado. The latter wrote up his war experiences in his very popular memoirs, Rajt Malta Tinbidel, a book on which the play has leaned from time to time. He was a good professional coming from a very respectable family, and put his strong faith into the Church newspaper he edited for some years. Unlike Balilla, a working-class lad, he and the only priest in the group, Mgr Pantalleresco, were the only ones invited to tea with the former chief justice, Sir Arturo Mercieca and his wife and daughter, who were given some privileges by the British camp commandant.

In the play this greatly irks Balilla, who sees the inequalities of Maltese society reflected even in an internment camp. Other things about Ganado irritate the young man, such as his receiving loads of letters from home as against Balilla’s occasional ones, his intellectual interests, and his being so religious. Scicluna himself, the script hints broadly, had little time for religious practice.

Calleja is a credible Ganado, then still a young married man and is a good foil for Scicluna’s Balilla, a man quick to take offence and a hater of Britons and all things British. Both Scicluna and Calleja play uninhibitedly for the audience surrounding the acting spaces, and Capato’s good number of small roles provide the production with a compelling trio of performers.

British characters are played mainly by Caputo, bringing out the unpleasantness of those managing the camp in Malta and later the different camps in Uganda. These characters are sometimes angry and arrogant but they are never depicted as downright cruel.

The great enemies were fellow Maltese, and this comes out most clearly when Balilla learns with unholy glee that the strongly pro-British political leader Lord Strickland, the relentless enemy of Enrico Mizzi and his Nationalists, has just died. On the whole, however, it is perhaps a weakness of the script that we hear but little of the deep hatred there was between pro-British and pro-Italian Maltese.

In this site-specific production, the audience has to follow the characters from their original incarceration in two different places in Malta to their fearsome voyage to Alexandria, and finally to their long years in Uganda, waiting for the war to end.

Here the great enemy was boredom, so people like Balilla managed to create a tennis-court and sometimes had the pleasant experience of playing against Arturo Mercieca’s daughter Lilian, who was also good-looking and must have appealed to Balilla, who missed women very badly.

In Entebbe camp, however, there were women from other lands, and Balilla appears to have enjoyed the company, and more, of one of them played provocatively by Capato who also played a well-behaved Lilian Mercieca.

The script suggests that Ganado may have yielded to the pleasures of the flesh at some point. He was well-known to be the most faithful of husbands, but after his long sexual fast, if he did lapse once or twice, what father confessor would have failed to give him absolution?

The production held us in the audience since all of us realised this was not yet another play but also a re-evocation of sufferings unjustly suffered by people who were neither criminals nor dangerous traitors and who were never brought to court to face indictments.

Some who saw the production were probably related to one or more of the internees, and others, like myself, knew some of the internees – Ganado in my case, whom I knew to be a good man whose worst crime was to lose his temper in occasion.

Scicluna has been a ‘pious Aeneas’ to the internees, and above all, to his father, and few who saw the production can fail to be grateful to him for it.