This is a country with a servant mentality – Aleks Farrugia

In ‘The German Ideology’, Karl Marx argues that for the working classes to achieve their material emancipation, they need to gain consciousness of their own condition. In other words, there is no material freedom unless you free your mind.

This thesis was enthusiastically adopted by most theorists of colonialism: the colonised will only free themselves from the shackles of colonialism once they rid themselves of the colonial mentality instilled in them by their former masters.

The colonial mentality reduces the colonised to aliens in their own land. It creates a servant mentality, where the colonised feel that whatever they own is by the grace of the master, who might revoke it at any time if he feels displeased in some way by the behaviour of his servants.

This distorts the notion of time in the mind of the colonised, a sense that time is the here and now, that the future is always too unstable and unpredictable to take into consideration in order to mould aspirations, and, as a consequence, maximising upon the present takes precedence over future concerns.

Upon independence, the process of decolonisation in Malta remained stilted. Perhaps the urgency to build an economy where...