The Writer and the World (20 page)

And it is easy for the visitor to be irritated. Those well-built, well-dressed young men idling away the afternoons in the choked village lanes: they are too well drilled, too ready to be an audience and sit in rows in their clubhouses. The complaints come easily. “If you want a job they put the Riot Unit against you. This happens three times in one month.” “Every day you will see people knocking at the deputy’s door asking for
a job, because everyone believes, ‘The deputy will give my son a job, daughter a job.’” “To see a minister you have to pay people money. We only see the pictures of the ministers.”

So they sit and complain, and threaten. “Change the government. Replace it by the socialist party. The government tolerates capitalism.” The socialist party is the party of the young. What will it do? How will it replace capitalism? There is no clear idea. But the government must be punished. The government is the government, and can do anything it really wants. “The government has failed not because they are foolish or wicked but because they are selfish.”

Is this really all to their life, this hanging about in the village lane, these games of dominoes, these endless political discussions in the clubhouses? Are there no other activities, no pleasures, no festivals? “No money, no pleasures, sir.” Rum, at fifty-five Mauritian cents a nip, just under four pennies, is expensive,
bien, bien cher;
all they can afford is the local banana spirit, which sells at two and a half pennies a pint. The cinema is expensive, one rupee or seven and a half pennies in the third class, two rupees twenty-five in the first. “I haven’t been to the cinema for ten years.” “I haven’t been for three years.” “There is no pleasure for us even in Diwali [the Hindu festival of lights]. We can’t buy presents for the children or give them new clothes.”

But that fat, open-mouthed, jolly boy, who is on “relief,” has just got married and is clearly the clown of the group. That handsome, stylishly dressed boy comes from a polygamous Muslim batch of seventeen. And that sullen man of thirty-five, with the pot-belly, has had six children in the six years he has been on relief.

But irritation is unfair. The sugar-cane, the cramped villages where the sugar workers and their families live, the little market towns: what the visitor sees is all that there is in Mauritius. There is little room for adventure, except at the top, for the French (who have always had large families), for the Chinese, for the well-to-do Indians. At the bottom, where life has been brutish, vision is more restricted, and there is only this communal sense of helplessness and self-disgust.

The relief worker, the father of six, knows he is doing a nonsense job; he doesn’t attend; he goes only to sign and get his money. The weeding gangs on the sugar estate know that they are a substitute, and a less efficient and more expensive substitute, for herbicide. Everyone knows only
that once the government was good and things appeared to be getting better; and that now, for reasons which both government and opposition say are political, things are getting worse.

The newspapers are so full of local politics that they have no space for foreign news. So in the village clubhouses they talk politics; politics absorbs all their frenzy. Speech and elections are free; real power is unobtainable; and politics is the opium of the people.

A
RAINY
Sunday afternoon, overcast yet full of glare, and sticky between the showers. In the gravelled back street of this new
cité
, an artisans’ settlement of small concrete and corrugated-iron houses just outside the town of Curepipe, an election meeting warms up. It is only a municipal by-election, but in Mauritius an election is an election, and this one has been built up into a trial of strength between the party of Gaëtan Duval, the Foreign Minister, the Black Power man, and the party called the Mauritius Democratic Union, the UDM. Duval says the initials stand for Union des Mulâtres, the Union of Mulattoes. That is Duval’s line of attack. There may be other issues; but the visitor, even after he has read all the newspapers, will not be able to detect them.

This is a UDM meeting. There is as yet no audience. Only a few Negro or mulatto boys, some in over-size jackets that belong to fathers or elder brothers; and little groups of unarmed policemen, many of them Indian, in peaked caps and slate-blue raincoats. A microphone on a lorry plays a
sega
, a Mauritian calypso in the local plantation patois.

More and more little boys come out. One thirteen-year-old boy in his brother’s jacket (three brothers, seven sisters, father out of work, mother a cook) is against the UDM. Another boy of mixed race (four brothers, four sisters, no father, no mother) likes the UDM meetings,
parce qu’ils
redressent le pays.
This is a version of the UDM slogan: elections here, like Christmas elsewhere, wouldn’t be the same without the children. The road bristles with bony little legs; it is like a schoolyard at recess. (“When I go about now,” Duval tells me later, “it’s like Gulliver in Lilliput. Small children are trying to lift me up.”) The UDM
sega
continues. A game of football starts in the sodden sunken field beside the road.

A motor-car rocks down a side road and pulls up next to the lorry. Stones fly. And all at once, to shouts and curses, enraged mulattoes and blacks are fighting around the car and the lorry. The football game breaks up; the children scatter, big jackets swinging above matchstick legs, and then stop to watch. The amplified
sega
continues. The gentle policemen intervene gently, leading away angry men in different directions, each man shouting over his shoulder.

The rain, the bush, the cheap houses, the poor clothes, the mixture of races, the umbrellaed groups who have come out to watch: the hysterical scene is yet so intimate: adults fighting in front of the children, the squalor of the overcrowded barracoon: the politics of the powerless.

The disturbance clears, the car drives off. The
sega
stops. The man on the lorry coughs into the microphone and the meeting begins.

“M. Duval le Zour li Black Power, le soir li blanc.”
(“Mr. Duval is Black Power in the daytime. In the night he white.”)

“Black Power?” the Negro girl in a pink blouse says. “For me it is a joke.”

“M. Duval na pas content creóle petit chevé.
Mr. Duval don’t like black people crinkly head.
‘Quand mo’ alle côte z’aut’ donne-moi manze macaroni et boire rhum blanc. Moi content manze un pé c’est qui bon.’
Hear him: ‘When I go by other people let them give me macaroni to eat and white rum to drink. I like eating a lil good food.’”

For the Negro girl the UDM is also a joke. “I don’t care for politicians. I come here for
distraction.
There are many like me here. Seventy-five per cent of the girls and boys here don’t work. The people are becoming poorer after independence.
Travaillent moins.”

She is twenty-one, small and thin, narrow shoulders quite square, her eyes hollow. She left school at the fifth standard in 1960. “I have done nothing since 1960. I have my typing certificate, but no work.” But, like every other young person in Mauritius, she has a story of a job which once she nearly got. “There was a job advertised for a clerk in a filling
station. I and another Muslim girl went. The Muslim girl was selected. Why? I cannot say. I called before the Muslim girl.” She is calm now, will condemn no one; but she was angry at the time. “I returned home and said to my mother, ‘But look what’s happened. I didn’t get the job.’ I had been registered for five years, the Muslim girl for five months. I think the man at the filling station was a Muslim man, but I don’t know. I don’t know.” The memory is fresh; but this happened three years ago, when she was eighteen. Anger is useless; she will not be angry, she will criticize no one.

Her father is a painter; her mother doesn’t work. She has four sisters and three brothers. “I am the eldest. I was hoping to be a teacher. I’ve been to see Gaëtan Duval many times, but he’s just promised and promised.” When her father is in work he earns between twenty and thirty rupees a week, between £1.50 and £2.25. The rent of their house in the
cité
is twenty-five and a half rupees a month; electricity costs another nine rupees. “We eat rice, curry, salt fish. Sometimes we eat rice, oil and fried onions. Salt fish is dear now, a little piece for five cents [about a third of a penny]. It is very difficult for eight children. I can stay without food, but the young ones cannot.”

Amusements? The cinema? “For five years I haven’t been to the cinema.
On n’connaît pas. Connaît pas. Je suis découragée.”
She stays at home and reads poems; she has a schoolbook,
A Book of Longer Poems.
“In Mauritius there are no boy friends.” She means that there can be no casual encounters; she cannot go out unchaperoned to mixed gatherings. To go out with a boy, the boy will have to write to her parents for permission; but there can be no boys because her family are too poor to invite anyone to their house. “I have a rich friend from school days. Her father is a policeman. She invites me to parties, but I can’t go. Because my mother will not let me go alone. One day perhaps I may get married. By chance.”

For another girl a little way up the road the prospects are brighter. She has a job as a teacher in a junior school. She is of mixed race—part of what, in Mauritius, is oddly called the General Population—and she is quite striking, with attractive, well-formed lips and almost straight hair, her looks marred only by a slight pimpliness. Her green pullover is tight over her little breasts; she wears a plaid skirt and a short fawn raincoat, a proper lined raincoat (lined because Mauritius is just outside the temperate zone and has a winter). The spirited girl supports all this stylishness on her salary of fifty rupees a month, just under four pounds. Of course
she goes to parties; of course some boy has “written in” for her, and has been rejected.

The sun breaks through. The election speeches continue. Whole households stand outside the small houses, all up the road; and it is a little like a fair. This group is eating peanuts (locally grown: a new and profitable crop, planted between the sugar-cane rows on the big estates, part of the attempt to “diversify”). There are ten people in this group, shelling peanuts, laughing at the speech, scattering peanut-hulls on the wet verge. Ten who live in the little house behind the little hedge. The tall man is out of work. Behind the hedge, at the end of the garden path, is the father, whom at first I couldn’t believe in—couldn’t believe what I had seen. A man sitting on the threshold, brought out for the afternoon’s election entertainment, a man without arms, and with legs cut off just below the hips. Tetanus.

T
HE SYMPTOMS
of depression: dizziness, a heaviness in the head, an inability to concentrate.

The mulatto civil servant who is no longer young and no longer sure of his racial status becomes nervous about his job and his future and the future of his children. He wants to get away, to leave. But the talents that support him in Mauritius cannot support him in Australia or Canada; he has little capital; he can escape, with security, only if he gets his government pension. He can resign with the pension only if he is medically unfit. Depression, then, quite genuinely incapacitates him. In time he appears before a medical board; he is “boarded out,” out of the civil service, out of Mauritius.

The unemployed young Indian labourer or labourer’s son, seeing his twenties waste away, turns to studies, making unlettered attempts at the Cambridge School Certificate—always big news in the press, the arrival of the papers from England, the arrival of the results—preparing himself for a job that doesn’t exist. “I am twenty-nine. I am not married. I passed my School Certificate in 1965. I got a third grade. I applied for several posts. I never got it. Still now I am applying. I passed my School Certificate in 1968, when I was twenty-six. I got another third grade. I now work as a relief supervisor. It is not a promising job. According to my certificate it is not sufficient. I applied for Teachers’ Training College six times. I like that very much.” He is all right. But
some break up. They yield to their headaches, give up the impossible goal of the Cambridge School Certificate and become horribly idle, at home or in the hospital.

The travel-writer, reporting on the happy-go-lucky island customs, will tell you that a bottle of rum will gain you admittance to a
sega
party. Local doctors will tell you that alcoholism is a serious and growing problem. Rum, at eight rupees a bottle, sixty pence, is expensive, almost a tourist luxury; the standard drink is the local banana spirit, which sells at nine pennies a bottle. A few years ago one out of ten patients sent to the mental hospital was an alcoholic; now it is one out of seven. These figures are unverifiable; the government, perhaps correctly, disapproves of such investigations.

It is no secret, however, that many cases of mental disorder are caused by malnutrition and severe anaemia. Just as it is obvious that this very thin young woman in the family planning clinic is starved and quite withdrawn. No amount of family planning will solve her problems now. This morning she had tea; yesterday, for dinner, she had a kind of soup: boiled rice soaked in tea. With lackluster eyes in a skeletal and already moronic face, she sits listless on the wooden bench. She wears a green sari; there is a small handkerchief in her bony hand, a trace of powder on her face. Mauritius is not India; there is no longer that knowledge of fate,
karma
, in which distress is absorbed. Everyone is responsible for himself, everyone is genteel.

Three years ago a woman of thirty-five decided to allow one of her children to starve to death, to save the others. She did so; then she fell into a depression.

For the past ten years and more economists have been visiting Mauritius and writing alarming reports, making “projections” of population and unemployment. Disaster has always appeared to lie in the future; it is assumed that at the moment people are somehow carrying on. A Mauritian journalist told me that the common people had their own little ways and could live on twenty-five cents a day, two pennies. It isn’t true. But how can the journalist, or anyone else who has to live in Mauritius, be blamed for not seeing that the disaster has occurred?