How Malta became British

The first quotation Charles Xuereb uses in his response to J.F. Grima’s feature ‘How Malta became British’  (June 11), “It is the past, not history, that is fixed and the job of the historians is to constantly reassess it”, is a spot-on description of the personal bias running through some “historical reassessments”.

Xuereb’s bias is crystal clear – his writings and broadcasting centre mainly around his burning conviction that the 164 years of British Malta were our worst nightmare and they seem to have left him psychologically scarred. 

The statue of Queen Victoria, in Valletta. Photo: shutterstock.com

He is now also denigrating us for going around in a “colonised mind” stupor “in search of identity”.

A recent survey of our youth indicates they’re beginning to feel more European than Maltese, which is exactly right, as they’re growing up as citizens of the emerging “united states of Europe”.

Xuereb is obsessed with observations of British attitudes regarding the average Maltese as inferior. I wonder, which foreign ruler of these islands regarded the Maltese as equals? Perhaps someone will enlighten us as to which empire regarded the colonials as equals of the masters? 

Xuereb likes to claim that the Knights of St John were not colonialists. No, that’s right, they were “gentlemen pirates” running the central Mediterranean piracy and slavery centre, which brought on the siege of 1565 because Turkish shipping had been on the receiving end of their piracy trade. 

A few rich Maltese could purchase a share in a pirate ship but do you think the average Maltese was treated as an equal by the Knights? Was the average Maltese permitted to own a house in Valletta of the Knights?

During that period, and for some time later, pregnant ladies of some of the Maltese elite are said to have travelled to Sicily so that their offspring would not have a Maltese birth certificate. 

That’s only one example of how some Maltese saw themselves (and still do) as more equal than others (in the villages or in Gozo). Another example is the speaking of Italian before and English after the war, rather than Maltese of the “peasants”.

Until Xuereb proves how the British colonial period was so much worse than any other pre-independence period in our history, or what would have been a far better alternative to the British colonial period at that time, his “thesis” will remain little more than a negative obsession.

Xuereb is enamoured by France – he has every right to be. This is not only one of Europe’s foremost cultural and culinary hubs but also a bulwark of liberal western democratic values. However, as far as we are concerned, their two-year occupation of Malta was a deplorable spectacle. Although they are credited with ending local slavery, their disorganised army demanded local silver to be melted down to pay their troops and several thousand Maltese are said to have died in the ensuing conflict. 

The Sette Giugno public holiday is a monument to local political hypocrisy and prejudice when we have no such remembrance of the far more serious Maltese sacrifice suffered in just a couple of French years.

Xuereb heads this band of “enlightened patriots” who demand removal of the George Cross from our flag and Queen Victoria from central Valletta.  How about the cross of the “gentlemen pirates” on our national emblems? 

I have heard Xuereb respond to a radio phone-in questioning him why he wants to remove the George Cross.  He lost his cool on air and claimed the George Cross was a Protestant military decoration that had nothing to do with us.  Excellent example of “historical reassessments” (more correctly, “misinformation”). Is this what we’re passing on to our younger generations?

ALBERT CILIA-VINCENTI – Attard