Those of us who were around in the 1980s will know how seriously we took colour. I was hopeless at, and not terribly interested in football, but I remember walking back from school and kicking about an empty cigarette packet with a zeal and passion that would have got me to the World Cup final.
It was the height of the Church school crisis, and the packet in question was a Du Maurier red. The brand, which I think had a factory in Malta at the time, used two colours. Normal cigarettes came in a red packet, so-called lights in a blue one. Except the strength of tobacco was of no issue, because Labourites smoked red and Nationalists blue. Other brands that had a similar colour scheme followed the same protocol.
Our parents’ smoking palettes aside, colour was one of the key ways by which we experienced and lived the constant partisan posturing. We would get seriously upset if our teachers asked us to use red covers for copybooks. (Not that many of them would have favoured that colour anyway, certainly not at a Church school.) And, when it came to choosing colours for sports teams, the preference for blue had nothing to do with Oxbridge aspirations.
At one point, all the window fittings at Castille were painted a bright red. This departure from the customary dark green was seen as, and possibly was, a massive political statement; in any case, the red period was followed by a blue interlude and eventually by an evergreen truce sometime after 1987.
The Nationalist Party newspaper had In-Tagħna (the word Nazzjon was for some obscure reason strictly non-kosher) emblazoned on it in a bright blue. And so on.
Nor was the partisan loyalty to colour restricted to a mundane and benign livery. The early 1980s was the time of the tal-ġakketta blu (blue jackets), a kind of Nationalist royal guard whose drones wore jackets with black and blue stripes and had a job description that included protecting the party leadership and property against Labour thugs and baton-twirling police squads.
The points are, first, that Malta in the 1980s was a nation of chromatically-limited Rothkos and, second, that to those of us who experienced it, the partisan attachment to colour felt primordial, timeless almost. Nationalists were and had always been blue, likewise Labour and their red, and that was that.
Except I found myself wondering the other day how the obsession with colour had come about. Assuming Mnajdra was not originally painted red to Haġar Qim’s blue, I drifted towards recent history.
It was precisely the choreography of redlessness that sold the Moviment to so many. Muscat’s blue ties were so obviously a studied strategy that they worked to devastating effect
The case of Labour was easy enough to settle – red has been the colour of choice of socialist parties around the world for a very long time. The Nationalist penchant for blue, however, is a different story. The first clue came from a historian, who told me he was not aware the party had any long-standing associations with the colour.
The maduma (literally, ‘tile’) was logically the next port of call. It makes sense that Giovanni Bonello should have written about it, for it was his father Vincenzo who in 1927 designed the modern Nationalist Party emblem. Its only nod to blue is in the crescent that ties the national shield with the golden crown of sovereignty.
Vincenzo was a man of great culture who was also acquainted with heraldry. In the maduma, blue is simply a heraldic tincture that represents justice and patriotism.
The trail seemed to run cold somewhere between 1927 and the 1980s, until a friend told me that the modern Nationalist blue could be traced back to the 1976 elections, when ballot papers were first used that grouped candidates according to party. Until then, the order was alphabetical and the only (black and white) clues in ballot papers were the Labour torċa (torch) and Nationalist maduma. Labour’s natural choice for the new style was red; for its part, the Nationalist party chose to have its section printed in blue.
The reason why blue was chosen is not clear, but the inspiration may have come from the British Conservatives specifically, and the favoured colour of many other non-socialist parties generally. The fact is that by the late 1970s, the die (or was it dye?) was firmly cast.
Which came as a surprise to me, because I clearly remember thinking in the 1980s that Nationalists were blue as people had ears and a nose. What seemed to us timeless was, in fact, only a few years old. Expressions like ‘x’kulur hu?’ (‘what colour is he?’, politically speaking), which one imagines the people of Malta might have asked of St Paul even before his clothes were dry, were historically shallow.
The second part of the story takes us to the peace-pipe age of the early 1990s, through the EU referendum years, to the present. Throughout, we haven’t stopped reminding ourselves that we have ‘matured’ and put colour-themed tribalism behind us. (Because, you know, tribal people spend their time jumping around and waving coloured feathers.)
Surely there is some truth to this, at least as far as colour is concerned. Party mass meetings, themselves a dying breed, are today less obviously colour-coded. The seas of blue and red are a thing of the past – of the 1980s, in fact. Thus, my first conclusion, that the obsession with colour was a passing phase during which the country perfected bipartisan polarisation to a fine art. The facile symbolism and rallying power of colour served the two parties well when they needed it.
My second conclusion is that the first is a tad simplistic. Take the colour strategy of Joseph Muscat’s Moviment. On the one hand there certainly was very little red in the Malta Tagħna Lkoll logo – the requisite of the Maltese flag, in fact. On the other, it was precisely the choreography of redlessness that sold the Moviment to so many. Muscat’s blue ties were so obviously a studied strategy that they worked to devastating effect.
We have entered a phase of our political history in which absence matters at least as much as presence. Nothing sums it up quite as well as colour does.
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