Almost everyone uses the cliché, from the World Bank to hotel bosses, from the Prime Minister to visiting academics, from journalists to primary school children – ‘Mauritius is a multicultural paradise where different communities live side by side in harmony’. When I try to situate the cliché in my mind, I think of three defining flashpoints in recent Mauritian history: the so-called ‘race wars’ at Independence in 1968, the general strike movement in 1979, and the uprising against the police in 1999.
When in 1975 a colleague at Bhujoharry College in Port Louis was sacked – along with 30 other teachers, including myself – for setting up a union, she told me that her father wanted to talk with me. His right hand had been cut off in the ‘race wars’ around Independence in 1968, the worst time of all for communalism – and he still mourned it, I could tell. He told me, however, that it wasn’t someone of the ‘other’ community who had chopped it off. It was when monopoly control was being established over the meat market: he had a small meat stall and was punished for being too stubborn. I realized how vested interests hid behind this ‘conflict of cultures’.
