About 30 years ago I remember reading a very interesting article by Godfrey Wettinger about the popular attitudes of the Maltese towards the Order of the Knights of St John. Most of the history we learned at school had been the history of the Grand Masters and the different waves of rulers who had controlled our islands because of their strategic position.

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 and gladly becoming a British colony by consent.

Reading 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 Prof. Wettinger's article that the Maltese had in fact resented the rule of the Knights and a doctor had actually been hanged for protesting against Grand Master La 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.

I was so proud of this unknown Maltese doctor. A footnote by Prof. Wettinger haunted me. It 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 Giuseppe! We did not even know him by the right name whereas we knew about the Grand Master who hanged him and venerated him!

In recent years Stanley Fiorini has shed more light on Giuseppe Callus. He has established 1505 as the year of his birth. So next year we should be commemorating 500 years since he was born. Should not a set of new stamps be printed in his honour? Should we not publish new books celebrating him and making him known?

The Callus story raises the simple but fundamental question: What does the historical and legendary memory of Dr Callus say about our national consciousness when we do not even know who stood up to the country's foreign rulers in a bid to improve the lot of the Maltese?

Commemorating Dr Callus does not mean that we should lock ourselves into the mindset where we organise our picture of the world with the Maltese as goodies and the foreigners as baddies. But even if we are now in the 21st century, have become members of the European Union and live in a time of globalisation, as people living on small islands who import everything from shoes to our picture of ourselves and of the world we must develop our ability to think with our own brains and see with our own eyes... if we are to survive and thrive in the years ahead.