A family's progress in Mauritius

Contemporary Review, July, 2005 by William F.S. Miles

'TAKE a look at this family portrait', the Indian Ocean computer scientist told me. 'It's my father, as a child, with his parents and eight brothers and sisters. Is there anything that strikes you about it?'

Many things were striking me that day in Mauritius, the enchanting island-nation five hundred miles to the east of Madagascar. Even after a year of residence as a Fulbright senior research scholar, the surprises came fast and hard. I had applied for a Fulbright to Mauritius as part of a broader comparative study into the long-term legacies of French versus British colonialism and decolonization. Largely to thwart Gallic pirates, Great Britain seized the island--then called Ile de France--in 1810 after less than a century of French rule dating back to 1715. Mauritius thus became a British colony for more than the one and a half centuries preceding its independence in 1968. So why was French cultural influence so much greater than British? Why did the islanders still speak French more readily than they did English?

Those were my original research questions. Yet, as so often happens during fieldwork, reality--in the form of everyday life--led me down a very different epistemological path.

We had just spent a pleasant day on Belle Mare beach, splashing in crystal clear water across the street from a local ashram, the Asian version of a spiritual retreat. Arvin's wife Deveena had prepared a delicious picnic lunch of Indian-style curry and we men were keeping an eye on their toddler girls, Chetna and Bhavyata. On the beach Arvin, whom I'd first met 'virtually' two years earlier when requesting an e-mail account in anticipation of my arrival at the University of Mauritius, patiently explained the meaning of Javascript.

Although he was junior in age to me by at least a decade, I regarded Arvin as my computer guru. Barely literate in computerese, I had often e-prostrated before this junior lecturer so that he'd extricate me from my latest electronic blunder. Slight, softspoken and ever smiling, it was Arvin who delivered me from an anachronistic DOS-based purgatory. His was the enlightenment no on-line or telephonic AOL, Toshiba, or Compaq customer support technician ever came close to providing.

Now, back in his house in Flacq, Arvin was sharing his family history. We alternated speaking in French, the language of all educated Mauritians, and English, the lingua franca of the computer literate.

'Only one of the children is wearing shoes', he continued, as I examined the glass-framed picture on the wall. 'That's how poor my grandparents were. One pair of shoes for eight kids. Whoever had a special occasion coming up, that was the child who got to wear them'.

Arvin's succinct shoe story spoke volumes about the progress Mauritius islanders have made in the course of two short generations. Most are descendants of impoverished Hindu and Muslim sugar cane cutters who were recruited from subcontinental India when African-based slavery was abolished by the British in 1835. (The heroes of Adam Hochschild's recent Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves did not anticipate this indentured service consequence of abolition.) About a third of Mauritians, who number about a million, are descendants of the African slaves themselves. Most of them are Catholic. A smattering of Chinese merchant families (some still Buddhist) and holdover whites from the French colonial era complete the Mauritian multiethnic slate.

Except for the whites and a small crust of mulattoes, until independence most Mauritians survived by scratching on the land to grow the glucose-rich export crop. Overcrowded with skyrocketing fertility rates, only as large as Rhode Island, Mauritius was viewed by the departing British as a Malthusian nightmare best jettisoned. Even the postcolonial government organized the emigration of its citizens to Europe and elsewhere.

Now Mauritius produces computer scientists.

'My father had five children', Arvin went on, explaining his genealogy. 'One of my brothers works in our father's store, the second is a pharmacist, and the third is an engineer. My sister is a civil servant'.

'How about you, Arvin? Any more children down the line?'

'No, no, two is quite enough!' he laughed. Together we pondered the paradox of his poorer parents and grandparents being able to raise many more children than he, the college graduate and instructor. Paid in Mauritian rupees, a university lecturer with a Ph.D. made the equivalent of only seven hundred dollars a month. But for the moment, Arvin only had a masters degree.

'Lots of children slept in the same room in those days', he mused. 'And they really only ate a limited set of foods. Manioc and chouchou, for instance'. Chouchou is Sechium edule, a climbing plant whose fruits the poor cooked for curry. 'We hardly ever eat that nowadays. And then, there's the question of footwear. It was normal for kids to go barefoot in those days. Now, every pair of feet must have its own pair of shoes'.