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Ican remember the First World War,” Joseph Zammit1 announced. We were waiting for lunch in a dusty coffee shop on the Maltese island of Gozo during a tour organized by former colonial settlers of Algeria who were of Maltese ancestry. Joseph continued: “They made a giant effigy of William II, filled it with firecrackers, and blew it up!” Joseph was in his early eighties. A tall man, he seemed even more so due to his careful posture and thick shock of white hair. He dressed formally and traveled through the hot islands that summer in full suit and tie, but his grey eyes twinkled each time he set out to tell yet another surprising tale. There were two others at our table, Michel Pisani and Marie Buttigeig. All of my elderly companions had been born in Algeria but had resettled in France after Algerian independence . I asked Joseph how it was that he could remember the war—surely he hadn’t served? “Well,” he exclaimed, apparently pleased to respond, “I was born in 1911—I was seven then. I remember it well because that was when I first met my father.” Joseph’s father had been fighting in Europe since his son was three years old. “My mother took me down to the port. Men were coming down the plank of the boat, and she pointed one of them out to me and said, ‘There he is, that’s your father.’” Joseph explained to us that his father had joined the French Army as a member of the Troisième Zouaves , one of the régiments sacrifices (a regiment with a notoriously high death rate). Michel, one of the leaders of the social club who had organized our trip, joined in the conversation. “Oh, my father was in the Troisième Zouaves too,” he interjected, his voice animated. He began to outline details of his own family history, but Joseph was not interested. He began to sing, rather loudly, in a language that I assumed was Maltese. The Maltese patrons of the café stopped talking and gave each other meaningful looks that I could not interpret. Marie rolled her eyes and Michel, after listening intently , burst out laughing. As Joseph took a deep breath to start a new verse, ONE A Song in Malta  Michel whispered, “It’s in Arabic !” We listened while Joseph sang verse after verse to the simple march-like tune. It was a touching yet perplexing moment . Joseph later explained to us that the song was a Boy Scout anthem translated into Arabic that he had learned as a child in Algeria for an international Scouts jamboree. This song, and the Arabic language in particular, are important clues in understanding the powerful fascination with Malta that is widespread among these former settlers of Algeria, and characteristic of the ways in which postcoloniality is being experienced in contemporary France. The excursion to Malta that summer and the club that organized it, the Amicale France-Malte (France-Malta Social Club), are not isolated phenomena but part of a wider movement. Following their departure from French Algeria when the colony gained independence in 1962 and their subsequent “return” to France, these former settlers of Algeria (also known as pieds-noirs2) of Maltese origin formed ethnically based social clubs. They have been traveling individually and in groups to Malta ever since. This pilgrimage has escalated to the point where solo travelers and tour groups representing clubs from different parts of France sometimes meet there by chance. During one such trip, my fellow travelers encountered on three separate occasions people they had known in Algeria. In each case, they had not laid eyes on each other since they had left the colony over thirty years before. It was with astonishment and great emotion that they met again in the elevator of our hotel or just walking along the streets of Valetta, Malta’s capital. According to a travel agent I met in southeastern France, so many people were making these pilgrimages to Malta that Air Malta had rerouted its service to include direct flights from Marseilles, a more convenient location than Paris for the pied-noir population living in southern France. This study addresses the spontaneous pilgrimage movement among former settlers, and considers why it is that, several decades after leaving Algeria, settlers of Maltese origin began returning, not to the former colony , but to Malta itself. This movement is all the more intriguing because these travelers have been...

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