The Writer and the World (19 page)

But so many are qualified. Since the only Mauritians acceptable abroad are nurses, in Mauritius they all love nursing. They are a nation of nurses. And they hang around the ministers’ doors in Port Louis, the capital, waiting for the call to serve. The ministers are all-powerful in Mauritius; nothing can be done except through a minister. But what can the ministers do? Once manna fell from heaven—this is how the Foreign Minister put it—and the Germans asked for five hundred nurses. But manna doesn’t fall every day; the hope that the French would take five thousand units a year remains a hope.

There is a Minister of State for Emigration, a plump, chuckling mulatto, a former motor mechanic. But he can give no figures for emigration. He says he doesn’t carry these figures in his head; and, besides, he is
preoccupied with a local election. “All our energies are devoted to this by-election at Curepipe. We think that Mauritius must have a good political climate to solve our problems.”

The Minister can give no figures because there are not many figures to give. So the young men hang around, sometimes for years, waiting for their careers to begin. They meet in little clubhouses of concrete or corrugated iron, decorated with posters from the British Information Services or cut-outs from foreign magazines, and talk and talk. Some of them begin to suffer from spells of dizziness and have to stay at home. Many of them get headaches, those awful Mauritian headaches that can drive an unemployed labourer mad, interrupt the career of a civil servant, and turn educated young men into mindless invalids.

It was on Mauritius that the dodo forgot how to fly, because it had no enemies: the island, 720 square miles, was once uninhabited. Now, with more than a thousand people to the square mile, the island is overpopulated.

The Dutch attempted to settle Mauritius in the seventeenth century. They cut down the ebony forests and introduced sugar-cane. When the Dutch left—driven out, it is said, by rats—the French came. The French, mainly peasants from Brittany, stayed and continued to flourish after the British conquest in the early nineteenth century. They grew sugar-cane, depending for labour first on slaves from Madagascar and Africa, and then, when slavery was abolished, on indentured immigrants from India.

Throughout the nineteenth century labour was short, and immigration from India continued until 1917, so that today Indians make up two-thirds of the population. Even with this immigration the population held steady. In 1931 the population was more or less what it had been in 1901, just under 400,000. Then the disaster occurred. In 1949 malaria was finally eradicated. The population jumped. It is now about 820,000. Three Mauritians out of five are under twenty-one. No one knows how many unemployed or idle people there are—estimates vary from 50,000 to 80,000—and the population grows by about 12,000 every year.

The economy, and the social structure, is still that of an agricultural colony, a tiny part of an empire: the island has been independent for only three years. The large estates, the big commission agents and the sugar factories are white (though there are many Indian landowners and there is an Indian aristocracy of sorts); rural labour is Indian; mulattoes are
civil servants; Negroes are artisans, dockworkers and fishermen; Chinese are in trade.

Sugar remains the main crop and virtually the sole export. Sugar-cane covers nearly half the island, so that from the air this island of disaster looks empty and green, dotted with half-pyramids of stone that are like the relics of a vanished civilization. The stone comes from the sugar-cane fields: “de-stoning”—and the boulders are enormous—is a recurring task. Once the de-stoning was done by hand; now it is done by bulldozers. Sugar has always been an efficient industry, and in Mauritius the efficiency shows. Lushness has been abolished; order has been imposed on the tropical landscape. The visitor who keeps to the main highways sees an island as well-kept as a lawn, monotonous except for the jagged volcanic hills, miniature green Matterhorns.

An island roughly oval in shape, 720 square miles in the Indian Ocean, far from anywhere, colonized, like those West Indian islands on the other side of the world, only for sugar, part of the great human engineering of recent empires, the shifting about of leaderless groups of conquered peoples: to the travel writers, who have set to work on Mauritius, the island is “a lost paradise” which is “being developed into an idyllic spot.” It is an island which the visitor leaves with “a feeling of peace.” To the Mauritian who cannot leave it is a prison: sugar-cane and sugarcane, ending in the sea, and the diseased coconut trees, blighted by the rhinoceros beetle.

Twenty thousand tourists came to Mauritius last year. The lost paradise already has a casino, and the casino company, in tune with the holiday tastes of these low latitudes, has also put in fruit machines in the island’s leading hotels. The tourists prefer the fruit machines. In the Park Hotel in Curepipe the fat women and their fatter girls start playing the machines after breakfast; in the late afternoon, when the television also blares, conversation in the lounge of this allegedly eighteenth-century building becomes impossible.

The casino is patronized mainly by local Chinese, sitting as blank-faced here before the bright tables in the dark-red hall as they do behind their shop counters in the villages, having apparently only changed from khaki shorts and singlets into suits. The Chinese are a race apart in Mauritius, and impenetrable; it is a cause for awe that people can be so reckless with money which, in the Mauritian myth, they have made by such tedious treachery. In the myth, the Chinese shopkeeper spends a part of
every working day extracting one or two matches from every box in his stock, so that out of, say, twenty boxes of matches he makes twenty-one and so picks up an extra quarter-penny of pure profit.

The casino picks up more than quarter-pennies, and many Mauritians are pleased with the success and modernity of the place. I couldn’t find out what there was in the casino venture for the Mauritius Treasury or the tourist trade. To enquire was only to probe a kind of native innocence. But everyone knew that the casino employed a number of people and that the white and mulatto girls who operated the tables—their satiny old-fashioned evening-dress uniforms labelled with their first names—had until a few months before been idle and unemployed. Now, very quickly, they had acquired this difficult modern skill: in this “adaptability”—a recurring Mauritian word—lay the hope for the future. In Mauritius it always comes to this: jobs, employment, a use of the hands, something to do.

The tourists come from the nearby French island of Réunion (technically a department of France), from Madagascar, England, India, and South Africa. Relations with South Africa are close. South Africa buys, at more than a fair price, every kilo of the somewhat flavourless tea that Mauritius produces; and to see what “Made in South Africa” looks like in Afrikaans, all you have to do is to turn over the ash-tray in your hotel room. Mauritius is no place for the anti-apartheid campaigner. Many French Mauritians have family or business links with South Africa; and during the period of French “over-reaction” before independence (“We always over-react here”)—when the French rallied their loyal Negroes (anti-apartheid people really should stay away from Mauritius) and there were rumours of a French–South African commando takeover—during this period of over-reaction a number of French people moved to South Africa.

As visitors the South Africans are popular. And not all the South Africans who come are white. B
LACKS IN SOUTH AFRICA SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN:
this is the front-page headline in the
Mauritius Times
over a question-and-answer interview with a visiting South African Indian, Mr. Ahmed Cajee Khan.

Earlier this year Black Power slogans in French and the local French patois appeared in many towns and villages:
C’est beau d’etre noir, Noir ene jolie couleur, Noirs au pouvoir.
It was the idea of the Foreign Minister, Gaëtan Duval. Duval himself isn’t black. He is a brown-skinned, straight-haired man of forty, as handsome as a pop star and with a pop star’s taste in clothes. As part of his Black Power campaign he took to wearing black leather and making public appearances on a black horse called Black Beauty. For many years Duval was regarded as the leader of the island’s blacks. But then two years ago, forgetting pre-independence disputes, he took his party into a coalition government; and since then, as the government’s popularity has gone down, so has Duval’s.

Black Power was Duval’s way of fighting back. It was intended, so far as I could gather, to scare off political poachers. It certainly wasn’t intended to frighten ordinary white people. Duval supports the idea of trade with South Africa, and he would like to see more South African tourists. He would like to see South Africans buying houses in special tourist developments. Statistics showed, he told me one day at lunch, that a hotel room provided employment for only two servants. A house provided employment for four.

T
HE GOVERNMENT
recognizes a problem of unemployment. A White Paper says that 130,000 new jobs will have to be created by 1980. The government doesn’t recognize a problem of over-population and discourages investigation of its effects. It disapproves of “crude” family planning programmes on TV. Mauritius is a conservative, wife-beating society and the government doesn’t want to offend anybody.

There are also good political reasons. At a seminar on unemployment, which began the day after I arrived, a spokesman for the Labour Party, the major party in the ruling coalition, said: “We have rejected the all too facile and simple explanation that unemployment is a consequence of overpopulation and the lack of capital and investment possibilities … In fact it is clear that the holders of economic power, either for fear of inadequate protection of their interest or again out of a carefully elaborated political strategy, refused to be involved in the necessary political process … The Mauritian situation, therefore, presents a picture where the holders of political power are separated by a wide, almost unbridgeable gap from those holding economic power.”

So, by stressing unemployment and by playing down overpopulation, the government defends itself and seeks to remain the instrument of protest, as in colonial days. Protest against the rich, so often white, whose talents and money are yet needed; protest against the sugarcane, the slave crop, hateful yet indispensable.

But the government is unpopular. If there were an election tomorrow the government would be overthrown, not by its old enemies, most of whom it has anyway absorbed, but by the young, those people who have grown up during the years of the population explosion.

The Prime Minister, an Indian in an island with an Indian majority, is seventy. The political party of the young, whose sudden popularity has rocked the government, was founded in 1968 by a French Mauritian student, then aged twenty-three and fresh from the events of Paris. The Prime Minister has a background of rural Indian poverty. Education and self-education, the long years in London in the 1920s, first as a student, then as a doctor, trade union work on his return to Mauritius, politics: it has been a long haul, against an almost “settler” opposition, and his achievement has been remarkable. Over the last twelve years he has created a rudimentary welfare state in Mauritius. There are extensive social
services; there is a system of “relief work” for the unemployed (four rupees, thirty pence, four days a week); there is a monthly allowance of ten rupees, about seventy-five pence, for families with three children below the age of fourteen.

This rudimentary welfare state has saved the society from collapse; and the people who have benefited are the young. They are better educated and better fed than their parents. An excellent television service keeps them sharp and well informed. Their expectations are higher; they are no longer an uncomplaining part of the old serf society. The flaw is that this welfare state has been created, perhaps at the expense of development, within a static colonial economy where sugar is still king. The higher skills are not required in Mauritius. Elsewhere, only those with really good characters and a love of nursing need apply.

“They blame the government. Once they have the certificate in hand they never think of anything else except securing a job with government. There are organized groups in agriculture, but the bulk would like to sit behind a desk and have papers to scratch all day.” “The government has made the people of Mauritius beggars. The thing is we had an extended family system here we could have made better use of. What has happened is that all this government relief has weakened the family system.” “Our people have no sense of adventure.” “People are becoming accident-conscious. Malingering. My surgery is pestered with malingerers hoping to get compensation from the government for their ‘accidents.’”

These are middle-class comments on the Mauritius welfare state, and they are supported to some extent by a White Paper. Too many people, the White Paper says, live at the “relief” level; too many people do “unproductive” relief jobs (sometimes relief workers are sent to clean the beaches); and as a result “the will to work among those employed, who see it is possible to live with less work or even without working, is being affected.”