Born in the early 1950s, people of my generation were brought up knowing very little about the Maltese islands. Most of our syllabi of geography, history and literature were about the British Isles. We were schooled in two distinct realities – separated from ourselves.

We lived on a small Mediterranean island with its own geography, history and culture, yet our schoolbooks were about an abstract country we did not know except on the map.

Every effort was made to wrench us away from our Mediterranean context as if we were like the Channel Islands but floating in mid-air.

What we were taught about our past was mostly made up of legends and myths. We were given a simplistic outline of history that was very one-dimensional and a caricature of our rich and varied past. In the very distant past, there were giants who built temples and then we became Christians before Europeans. We were brought up believing that we have always been Catholic and nothing but Catholic since St Paul converted us nearly 2,000 years ago.

We were not educated to think of ourselves as a place of encounter of very different cultures and religions but as a bulwark against non-Christians and pagans.

We still need to discover our past and ourselves. But to do that we must stop hugging the old familiar coast we know. We must sail forth… away from the comfort zone we have created. It will be worthwhile, as the Maltese islands we will discover will equip us to feel more at home in the diverse, borderless and multicultural world of the 21st century.

If we explore our past with new eyes, we will discover what multicultural and diverse and multiple identities we have: that we were Muslim centuries ago; that several Maltese were persecuted, even burnt at the stake, for spreading Lutheranism in Malta; that, perhaps for centuries, these islands had no people living in them and we are a nation of immigrants; that we have Maltese and Gozitans living in every corner of the globe and we have many among us whose ancestors come from many different countries with a diversity of cultures and religions; that even three centuries ago you could walk up Valletta’s main street and hear people talking to each other in many different languages.

As Andre’ Gide says: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.” Are we ready for it? We now have enough serious historians who have researched and discovered our past but most of us still look at our country and ourselves with the same old eyes.

Commemorating Callus

Fifty years ago, as a university student, I discovered Ġużeppi Callus after reading a very interesting article by Godfrey Wettinger about the popular attitudes of the Maltese towards the Order of the Knights of St John.

The little local history we learned at school had been about the grand masters and some of the different rulers who had controlled our islands because of their strategic position.

Several Maltese were persecuted, even burnt at the stake, for spreading Lutheranism in Malta- Evarist Bartolo

In our school textbooks, the Maltese people hardly featured at all, unless as background props and very secondary characters in a play written by others: welcoming Count Roger who arrived from Sicily to liberate the islands from the Muslim yoke; rebelling against Napoleon for ransacking our churches and gladly asking the British to rescue us from him, only to become their colony for at least 164 years.

As a young man, I read a lot about the painful efforts of other people to free themselves from colonialism and run their own affairs. I must admit I felt ashamed of belonging to a race who seemed genetically programmed to be always a colonised and submissive people.

I felt so happy reading Wettinger’s article that the Maltese had, in fact, resented the autocratic rule of the Knights  and a doctor had actually been hanged for protesting against Grand Master Jean de Valette’s decision to impose heavy taxes on the Maltese while taking away from them the little say they had in running their own island. While I acknowledge that the Order started us on the path to statehood, they treated the Maltese as inferior in their own land.

A footnote by Wettinger said that, not only did the Maltese know very little about this national hero, most of those who knew anything about him referred to him as Mattew, when, in fact,  he was Ġużeppi. We did not even know him by the right name, whereas we venerated the grand master who hanged him.

De Valette has a monument in Valletta, and rightly so, but how come we have no monument for Callus?

In recent years, Stanley Fiorini has shed more light on Callus. He has established 1505 as the year of his birth. So, in 2025, we should be commemorating 520 years since he was born.

The Callus story raises the simple but fundamental question: What does the historical and legendary memory of Callus say about our national consciousness when we do not even know who stood up for our people?

We can celebrate ourselves without being chauvinistic and xenophobic. Asking ourselves the questions “Where are we today?” and “How do we cope living in today’s world?” are not academic or useless questions.

In a borderless, disoriented world, where the old is dying and the new is struggling to be born, we need to answer complicated questions like “Where did we come from?”, “What are the different components of our dynamic plural identity?”, “Where are we going?”, “Who are we?” and “What would we like to become?”