Mauritius and Diaspora Reconnection

Mauritius is the rare place where the record survives. Two systems of forced migration filled the island, they were administered by governments that wrote things down, and a great deal of what they wrote is still here. For a descendant, that is the difference between a feeling and a name.

They were different systems, and the island does not confuse them. Neither should this page.

Slavery, and Le Morne

Enslaved people were brought to Mauritius from the African mainland, from Madagascar, from India and from Southeast Asia. Those who escaped went up, into the caves and onto the ledges of Le Morne Brabant, the basalt mountain at the southwest corner, and formed maroon communities there through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.

Le Morne was inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 under criteria three and six, as a landscape that stands for maroonage and for resistance to slavery worldwide. It is oral tradition rather than architecture that carries it, which is why the inscription rests on the meaning of the place rather than on what is built there.

Indenture, and Aapravasi Ghat

Slavery ended in Mauritius in 1835. The year before, the British government had begun what it called the great experiment: importing indentured laborers, at first from India, to work the sugar estates under contract. The first arrivals landed at the immigration depot in Port Louis in 1834, and by 1920 almost half a million people had passed through it.

What remains is small. Aapravasi Ghat covers about sixteen hundred square meters and consists of the surviving stone steps, part of the depot buildings and the hospital block. It was inscribed in 2006 under criterion six alone, as the place where a system that reshaped the labor of half the world began. The Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa and Southeast Asia all received people processed through depots modeled on this one.

Coming back well

Two things are worth knowing before you arrive. The first is that the two commemorations are separate: the first of February for abolition, the second of November for the arrival of the indentured. Descendants of both live here and the distinction is theirs, not a technicality.

The second is that this is a small island where a great many people share the history you are looking into. Ask, and you will usually be helped further than you expected. Announce, and you will be answered politely and briefly.