A tribute to Julian Manduca

Seven years have passed since Julian Manduca passed away a couple of hours after leaving the office on a Tuesday evening.

He was so many things in his short life: a probing, no holds barred journalist who spoke truth to power, a mature student of the University of Malta, and film club organiser at university, an entrepreneur... who sold Chinese balls and red and black five-pointed stars (!), a founder of Friends of the Earth (Malta) and pioneer of left-wing green politics, a great vegetarian cook who loved food, co-founder of Actinghouse Productions, an activist with the grassroots touch who could communicate with farmers, bourgeois residents and radical activists whom he never shunned, a liberal humanist with very high moral standards and whose secular funeral summed it all up, an organiser of alternative events and parties, a  believer in direct action who joined me and others in  the hunger strike against the Hilton development in Spinola.

He was one of the few Maltese to live a truly, continental cosmopolitan lifestyle.  

I remember meeting him 23 years ago, when he introduced me to beat poetry, quantum physics, the Sponti movement and Bob Dylan's nasal voice.

Meeting Julian him was like striking gold. He was anything but boring. I wonder sometimes what he would make up of Malta seven years after his passing. He surely anticipated many things: the U-turn on golf courses, the movement against the over-development of our towns and villages, the slow but steady liberalisation of social mores and lately the campaign to decriminalise pot.

In the last article he penned before his untimely death, Julian Manduca foresaw what was going to happen after the government relaxed building heights to allow penthouses on any three-storey block :  "it would seem the construction industry is in for a field day: more construction in urban areas, more dust, noise and disturbance that assures Malta remains in a 'not ready' state."

Seven years on, the government announced that this policy is up for revision.

He was a forerunner and a progressive in the true sense of the world: that of making clear choices based on values in the here and now.   

Probably he would be disappointed at widening class differences in Maltese society, the rise of the far-right in Malta and Europe and the persistence of the political duopoly he detested so much. We have lost his guidance.

Many times I find myself asking: what would have Julian thought of this or that issue?  In the end it is easy to know, for Julian always anticipated the future.