I know that this article will not strike a chord with many of my readers, but it has to be written all the same, and the fact has to be spelled out: we have a great deal to be ashamed of and, to shame us further, we do not even realise that we have any cause for shame. Like the person who picks his teeth at table and, because he has always been surrounded by family and friends who do likewise, does not realise that this is unacceptable in the wider context, we cannot see that the way we speak about and behave towards those who are black or Muslim marks us down as backward. In other words, it is we who are inferior in our thinking and behaviour, and not those we consider to be so. Surrounded by people who are as backward as we are in these matters, we do not realise how unacceptable our views are, and how unsophisticated our thinking is. We are picking our teeth at the table, surrounded by thousands of others all busy with the elongated nail on their little finger. We cannot see ourselves as disgusting because, in the context of this tiny society, dehumanising blacks and Muslims is normal. Yet, scrutinised by others who have come a long way since the time when spitting and tooth-picking at table were acceptable, we look like peasants from the Dark Ages because we do this.

Our attitude towards black people would be comical were it not so revolting and at the same time, so very sad. I find myself shaking my head with incredulity that I am writing this in 2006, just as I am incredulous at being surrounded by people to whom all blacks are the same, referred to as ‘they’ and lumped in one barrel no matter who they are or where they come from. A man born and bred in Los Angeles, a woman born and bred in Manchester, and a refugee from Somalia are seen by the Maltese as having everything in common, because they have what to the average Maltese person is the common defining factor: they are all black.

I am really tired of hearing my fellow Maltese, from all educational and economic backgrounds, speak about suwed and dawk, as though we were living in Mississipi in 1956 and all went down to the Ku Klux Klan club for a spot of nigger-bashing or nigger-torturing as the weekend’s entertainment. It is so backward, so unsophisticated, and so primitive that I cringe. It is almost as bad as listening to a bunch of Maltese men of a certain age joke about women as though the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s had never happened or, as in my recent experience, having to deal with an embarrassing bore who doesn’t realise he is offensive when he turns to a group of women my age at a wine-tasting event and says of a bold red wine: “Careful with this, girls. It’s a little strong for the ladies.” It might be a little strong for the ladies, I had to restrain myself from saying, but what about the niggers, Jews and pufti? What stopped me, apart from the fact of his adoring woman-friend, aged around 65 and still giggling at her master’s fabulously funny jokes, was the notion that he wouldn’t even have realised what I meant. He might even, horrors, have thought that my choice of terminology was what I usually used, prompting him to laugh at my ‘joke’. He was so far out of touch with the times he lives in that he just wouldn’t have got it.

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And now, as we sit around the table picking our teeth and talking about dawk is-suwed, some strangers from a strange land have walked in on us and recoiled with revulsion. Members of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs have visited our detention centres and declared themselves “shocked and disgusted”. The government could not refuse them permission to visit, as it does to almost everyone else, and so the veil has been swept away. The members of the delegation, which included both of our MEPs elected on the Nationalist ticket, have announced that, in their view, Malta needs help to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. I sense from their words that this is not for Malta’s sake, but for the sake of the immigrants, who are possibly suffering greater privations than those from which they escaped. The MEPs, with the obvious exception of the two Maltese, come from societies that are far more advanced than we are in terms of civil liberties. The great changes that have been altering thinking in the western half of Europe from the Enlightenment up until the present day have largely passed us by, as we sit hovering here on the outermost reaches of European civilisation. Cut off from mainstream thought, we have remained a shallow backwater where civil liberties and sophisticated thinking are concerned. I meet many people who do not even know what civil liberties are, and they come from roughly my sort of background. Just imagine, then, what awareness is like among people with even less education. Of human rights, we are aware, but of civil liberties, we are not. Well, nobody’s ever told us about them, and we never bothered to find out for ourselves.

This is why our government thinks it acceptable to lock up people who have committed no crime, for 18 months in the most appalling conditions. In the civilisation of which we form part, people are locked up if found guilty after due process in a criminal court, or if on remand while waiting to be tried for very serious crimes and with the danger that they might abscond, threaten witnesses, kill others or tamper with the evidence if granted freedom against a bail bond. Civilised countries do not lock people up for 18 months, without a trial or the prospect of a trial, just because they crossed the border into the country without a passport or a visa.

I think it necessary to remind you all at this point that these are people like you and me that we are talking about, not animals or a sub-human species. You wouldn’t do this to your pet cat or dog, and yet you think it’s perfectly all right to do it to a human being. How would you like to spend 18 months trapped in Dickensian squalor, deprived of your freedom, living like a cow in a pen, with nothing to help while away the long hours, with overflowing lavatories and barely the means to keep yourself clean, with nothing to keep out the cold and nothing to fend off the heat, with no idea what is going to become of you, or whether your family is alive or dead? I can hear many of you answer: “Oh, but I wouldn’t try to get into Europe without a passport.” Well, that’s because you live in a comfortable backwater with a fairly decent life no matter how hard you complain. You don’t even know the meaning of abject fear and utter despair, or of seeing your relatives killed and maimed and not knowing where you will be tomorrow. Nobody in his right mind takes that kind of risk unless he is desperate. What frightens me most about my fellow Maltese of the “send them back where they belong, we don’t want them here” mentality is the sheer inability to feel any kind of empathy. They are as hard as nails. They are like those Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, watching Jewish families subjected to violence and abuse and feeling nothing, because the Jewish families living in their own towns and streets had been completely dehumanised. To these Maltese, the people in those pens are dehumanised. They do not have the same human rights that we do, and certainly not the same feelings.

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When a group of detainees escaped from the pens where they are being held like animals, the cry went up in bars and offices around Malta: “EEEE, harbu hafna suwed!” Matrons girded themselves against rape and barricaded their homes against theft. Fathers warned their teenage daughters to be careful. It was back to the times of the corsairs. In moments of supreme tragi-comedy that pinpoint how very cut off we are from European reality, policemen apprehended men in the streets purely on the basis that they are black and so possibly escaped detainees. The primitive thinking is: if he’s black, then he could be an illegal immigrant, so I had better stop him and find out. How offensive is that? It comes of being the only country in non-former-Iron-Curtain Europe to have no black people living as part of society. Little Britain has the Only Gay in the Village. The two or three black men who have lived here for years because they are married to Maltese women have so far been the Only Blacks in the Village. Some months ago, I heard an otherwise highly educated man say to his friend, quite loudly and with no sign of embarrassment, which is unsurprising given that he didn’t realise he had anything to be embarrassed about: “What a lot of these blacks there are about lately. This morning I was walking along the Sliema ‘front and I saw at least five of them.” I blushed on his behalf. It was like hearing somebody say: “My goodness, this business of women having the vote is really out of order. God knows what they’ll do with it, because they’re not trained to think.”

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Reporters overheard pedestrians say of the escapees: “They should burn them in the square.” Coincidentally, I had been reading Godfrey Wettinger’s mammoth tome about the history of slavery in Malta (which is really a history of our terrible cruelty), and in particular, the details of what the Maltese did to a group of slaves who had made a desperate bid to escape from Malta and go back home, but failed. This was not in the Dark Ages, but just over 200 years ago, shortly before the arrival of Napoleon. Incredibly, children in Malta are taught absolutely nothing about slavery in these islands, and so we have whole generations of Maltese adults who think of black Africans as the descendents of slaves but have not the slightest inkling that they may very well be the descendants of slaves themselves, given that most of the slaves were not black Africans, but Jewish people or Muslims from the Mediterranean basin (‘different’ people). These escaped slaves were tortured behind four walls, then paraded through the streets of Valletta. Bits of their living flesh were chopped off and the pieces stuck to other parts of their bodies with molten tar while the crowd bayed. Then they were murdered horribly. I can’t tell you precisely how because at that point I felt sick and had to turn the page, only to be confronted with contemporary illustrations of how slaves were tortured for misdemeanours. A brief glance and I felt even worse. I haven’t been able to look at those pictures yet, and what makes it all the more distressing is that the people who did those things were our forebears, so close to us in time that there is perfect equidistance between those routine atrocities (built on the even greater atrocity of slavery), and the birth of my grandparents, one of whom died only three years ago. Yet I remain appalled that, 200 years on, some Maltese have not moved on and are still advocating the same kind of barbaric treatment: burning the slaves in the squares. Why not throw in a few witches while we’re at it?