“Malaria.”
It was the eradication of malaria that led to the population explosion.
“No. Malaria was common here.”
“Cholera. For example, cholera was not common here. There are other illnesses now. I cannot say their names. But people do suffer from them. We suppose that certain things happen in Mauritius.”
“Sysilis.”
He is corrected. “Syphilis. That’s on the increase, especially at Port Louis. The government is taking steps to legalize prostitution. They give the girls licenses nowadays.”
It is the Japanese, whose trawlers use the harbour, who have introduced a system of licensing.
“On the one side the government is fighting prostitution. On the other side it is encouraging it.”
“They are right to do so, become prostitutes. They are suffering from poverty. They should do it. As I myself know—”
“I will kill my daughter if she does that.”
“But prostitution is good for them, if it gives them money. Many students have become prostitutes, especially at Port Louis.”
“They are building a new hotel here. The government will give permits for girls to work there as prostitutes.”
The talk is gentle, slow, without anger. Outside, on the road, the swastika, emblem of threat and power, and the walls scrawled and counter-scrawled with political slogans and the initials of parties.
BUT SOME ARE LUCKY. Some get away. Like this very small twenty-year-old boy, encountered not far from the Government Buildings in Port Louis, still delicately holding his “papers,” the duplicated foolscap sheet with the precious ministerial signature and ministry stamp. He is off to England; a hospital has accepted him. He is very small and pared-down, his frailty the result of an illness when he was six. He got his School Certificate in 1968, when he was seventeen, and for the last three years he has been doing nothing, just waiting for this. He is solemn and slightly defiant, as though afraid to express pleasure and ready to defend his success. He is clearly of good character. But does he have a real love for nursing? He says that he’s wanted to do nothing else, ever since he was a boy; he even joined the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade.
His father works in a sugar factory and earns 150 rupees a month, just over £11. He has four sisters and two brothers. Their usual breakfast is bread and butter and bananas. During his years of idleness he would help with the housework in the mornings; then he would go to the British Council library to read, returning home for a lunch of rice and vegetable curry. Sometimes he fell ill and couldn’t eat. Sometimes he was just too miserable to eat. He went out walking then with his friends and they had “nice baths by the river.” His headaches could come at any moment, especially when he was alone; and as he found it hard to sleep he would stay out on the road talking to his friends until midnight. He visited his friends a lot. They would tell one another that in a year’s time they would be “safe,” they would get a job; in this way they “inspired one another with confidence.”
Certain problems remain: the raising of the £50 surety and the 1,640-rupee fare to London, the two sums equivalent to his father’s wages for fifteen months. But the bank will help, and he will be able to repay from the eight or nine pounds a week he will be getting from the English hospital. He is absolutely unconcerned about racial problems in England; it will not matter to him what people say to him or about him; and he doesn’t care if he never sees Mauritius again. He and his friends have given up local politics. Politics can’t help anyone in Mauritius now. The government can’t help anyone now. “The MMM is also the same. It is better to depend on yourself.”
IN A BIGGER, richer country Gaëtan Duval, the Foreign Minister, might have been an actor or a pop star. He has the disquieting attractiveness (though, at forty, his looks have begun to go, and he is concerned about his softening waistline); he has the hair, the clothes; and he has the actor’s needs. His enemies say politics provides him with a “periodic mob-bath”; he says, as an actor might say, that he is in politics for “the love.” “You get people to love you and you feel love for them.” And he was especially pleased, when I met him, with his “Black Is Beautiful” campaign. “In these few weeks I have created a psychological revolution in the mind of the black man in this country.”
But he was also advocating trade with South Africa. How was that linked with Black Power?
“They’re not! That is the point.” And he roared with laughter, rocking back in his chair, his lace-trimmed black shirt open all down his milky-brown chest. He called, “Madame Bell! Madame Bell!” And when the middle-aged white receptionist-secretary came in from the outer office, he asked her for the text of the speech that had been made in his praise a fortnight before in Paris, when he had been presented with the Gold Star of Tourism by the Société des Gens de Lettres de France.
The speech was brought in, a foolscap sheet, and—though there was really no need: in the morning the text was to be in the newspapers—Duval began to read it out. “Monsieur le Ministre, laissez-moi d’abord saluer le Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, l’Homme d’Etat, l’Ecrivain, le Penseur, l’Homme d’Action. Vous êtes le symbole de tout ce que nous aimons en l’Ile Maurice [Minister, let me first of all salute you as Foreign Secretary, statesman, writer, thinker, man of action. You are the symbol of everything we love in Mauritius] … That’s the sort of thing that makes our Franco-Mauritians mad. That a black man should be a symbol of French culture. And I am the sort of man who rubs it in.”
Until recently, Duval said, the French believed that there were only ten thousand French-speaking people in Mauritius—the French Mauritians. Now they knew that one-third of the island, and that meant a lot of black people, spoke French. “The French are pouring money on me. They gave me four million rupees. Another million this week. And now we’ve sent fifty-three workers to France. I’m fighting this election on my foreign policy.” But the South Africans were slow. “They’re slower than the old Boers.” He had asked them for a three-year supply of subsidized pig-food for his pig scheme, but so far they hadn’t done anything.
Someone came into the office.
“Meet François,” Duval said. “Factotum, friend.” We were all going to lunch in Curepipe. As we were leaving the courtyard, Duval called out to someone, “Good news. Germany is taking thirty-six more. Lufthansa, in Frankfurt.” Thirty-six workers.
“In addition to the hundred?”
“Yes. I will announce it at the meeting today.” And as we drove along the scenic highway (its flowering roadside shrubs and roundabout gardens maintained by relief workers) he said, “I told the Germans when I was there that if they had anything to give me they had better give it to me before the election. Otherwise they would have to give it to somebody else … It doesn’t matter at all whether we lose this municipal seat or not, because we have such a majority. But I create this atmosphere of tension. I can’t live otherwise. I can do these things because everyone thinks I am a little mad and do not act altogether rationally … What do you think of these?” He passed me, from a full box, his new publicity photographs, taken especially for the election: sitting in his black leather suit on Black Beauty, sitting astride a motorcycle, and standing with crossed legs against the front of his sports car. “They are for the women. I appeared on French television in an Indian outfit and I am still getting letters. The English don’t like me, even when they try. The French are different. Do you know what they said about me in the French papers? A handsome black god.”
When we were in the restaurant in Curepipe I told him—after a glass or two of wine—that I found it hard to think of him as a politician. He said he could leave politics; he was a farmer. I said I’d heard that some of the piglets he had distributed had been eaten. He was instantly serious and offended; but then, almost at once, he said that perhaps some had been eaten, but that wasn’t what he had heard.
François, factotum, friend, spoke in patois.
At the end Duval said, “I’ve just been heari
ng a sad story. The father of all the little pigs died. Black Power.”
A waiter came and said, “M. Duval, téléphone pour ’ous.”
“Qui sanne là-?a ?”
“Consul africain.”
“The South Africans,” Duval said.
When he came back he said, “The consul has just had a telephone call from South Africa. They’ve offered a gift of fifty sows and two boars and free food for them for one year. I told him to tell Pretoria to send me a telegram.” No doubt for the meeting.
I said, “I thought you asked for pig-food for three years.”
“That was subsidized. This is free. They’re scared.”
There was a French consulate wedding party in a private room of the restaurant. A young Frenchwoman came out, became ecstatic at the sight of Duval and, ignoring the rest of us, embraced him and began to talk. Then a blue-suited man came out and said, “Gaëtan, ils te demandent de venir les bénir.” (“Gaëtan, they want you to come and bless them.”)
“Je n’ai pas mon collier de maire.” (“I don’t have my mayoral chain.”)
But he got up and went. He came back many minutes later. His eyes were champagne-bright and he was smiling. “I’ve just heard something very funny. This girl who’s got married, you see, is half-Belgian and half-Polish. Typically French. She was there with her brother. I said to them, ‘If you are Polish, why aren’t you more beautiful?’ And the brother said, Parce que nous sommes habillés.’” (“Because we have our clothes on.”)
Later, in the crowded town hall, Duval had some of his supporters sing one of his campaign songs for me.
Black Beau-tee! Black Beau-tee!
Black is beautiful!
Beautiful, beautiful
Is black.
“This is going to be the uniform,” Duval said, showing some bits of material. “Black and red. Black belts with red trousers. Black shirt. Wet look.”
The following day, when I went to the Foreign Ministry to check my notes of our lunch, Duval introduced a little Negro boy in the outer office as the composer of his campaign sega. The boy beat time on Madame Bell’s table and sang:
Mo’ dire ’ous: la frapper.
Laisse-mo’ trappe-li,
Laisse-mo’ batte-li.
Mo’ alle condamné,
Jamais mo’ va laisser mulâtre
Faire mari de mon endroit.
(I tell you, hit them. Lemme catch them, lemme lash them.
I rather go to jail than let a mulatto man boss me around.)
“The level of political thought here is fantastically low,” Paul Bérenger, the twenty-six-year-old French Mauritian founder of the MMM, said. He had been shot at a few days before from the town hall in Curepipe where Duval’s men had sung the Black Beauty song for me. And now—in Port Louis, in this new air-conditioned basement restaurant, almost empty after lunch—Bérenger was with his bodyguard, a black giant called Muttur, running slightly to fat, but still famous locally as a boxer. Bérenger was in his own way as stylish as Duval, and in Mauritius as exotic. Small, slender, soft-spoken, with tinted rimless glasses, a thin handlebar moustache, and a black leather jacket hanging over his shoulders, he was like a European, of Europe. There was no trace of Mauritius in his speech or accent; and he looked what he was, a man from the Paris barricades of ’68. “A good year, if I may say so.”
He said, “Of course the government talks only of unemployment. That word tends to make it only an issue of economics, to take the human and political aspects out of it … Before 1968 in Mauritius people didn’t have to think or offer serious economic or political programmes. They simply had to play the racial card. In the past the people at the top sought to take the pressure out of the situation by having the different races fight and kill each other, and they would start the same thing again if they could … The history of this country is the history of several different struggles succeeding one another and then fighting each other. That’s the drama of this place. The first struggle was the struggle of the slaves. The head of a rebellious slave, a Malagasy chief, was kept in our museum here in Port Louis for many years. Then you have the rise of the coloureds [mulattoes]. In 1911 there were riots here in Port Louis between coloureds and whites. Then the Indians. The coloureds, following the white example, became anti-Indian. Then the creoles [blacks] also fell for that. And the main agent of that change was Duval. That is the importance, the malefic importance, of Duval: bringing over the blacks on the side of the whites. Duval is a myth. He is a creation. He is King Creole. Created by the newspapers. It’s a myth that’s dead. But he doesn’t want to die.”
Bérenger snapped his fingers. The black bodyguard brought out a paper-bag of what looked like sweets. Bérenger took one; the bodyguard took one. Bérenger said, “Hack’s Cough Drops.”
Bérenger comes from an old French Mauritian family. His father was a civil servant. Not a planter, not a landed man; and there are people in Mauritius who say that this is at the heart of Bérenger’s own rebellion. In 1963, at the age of eighteen, before going to university (North Wales), he worked for a while as a sailor. “The MMM was started during a holiday in Mauritius in 1968. Though that makes it sound more casual than it was. The government made us a present. We planned to demonstrate peacefully against Princess Alexandra’s visit. The government threw eighteen of us into jail. Why Alexandra? Well, Alex’s husband is Ogilvy, Ogilvy is Lonrho, and Lonrho is extremely powerful here—hotels, sugar factories, import-export. Plus the waste involved in the reception. I’ve been in jail four times since then … The situation is bad. People feel it can blow up at any moment. I doubt whether we’ll go past this year without the government crumbling or an uprising or general elections.”
I told him I had found no trace of MMM doctrine in Triolet. The socialism his party had expounded seemed to have been absorbed into the paranoid myth of the enemy.
He didn’t answer directly. He said, “There is always something behind the myth.” And then, tentatively, like a man thinking aloud, he began to talk around the subject of myth-making. “Things can go fantastic distances in the minds of people here. I suppose the size of the island has something to do with it … There is a definite melodramatic tendency. In Port Louis, for example, I was said to have an electric baton. I don’t know what they meant by that. In Curepipe it was a baton with a chain. And my black leather jacket is supposed to be bullet-proof. And I suppose that if as I walk past the municipality office in Curepipe I am shot at; and if there is a minister, supposedly the protector of the black, who wears black leather and sits on a black horse; then you are in a situation that can give rise to any kind of myth.
“You live with certain things; you don’t put them together. There’s one of our ministers—it’s only now, as I am talking here, I see how extensive this myth-faculty is—this minister, on election day he wore his paratroop uniform. Ramgoolam [the Prime Minister] used to be a myth. The chacha or uncle of the Hindus. Very active and powerful, but somehow floating above it all. There is a biography of Ramgoolam by one of our local writers. It’s a biography without a date. It’s fantastic mythology and poetry and things … I believe the real depression comes when you go through our education system. There’s the linguistic aspect. The language we all use is despised.” (The MMM is romantic about the local patois, which it sees as an important part of a “national” culture.) “The Franco-Mauritians too have their myths. When I came back the story among them was that I had brought de Gaulle down. You can find it still. ‘If Paul brought de Gaulle down, what chance does poor old Ram-goolam have?’ They all deal in fantasies. And it’s rooted in the colonial situation.”
He made the two hours pass quickly. As he left with his bodyguard he smiled and said, “I’ve got to go now and get some ‘tough guys’ for the forum this afternoon.”
But the tough guys were not needed. No one tried to break up the MMM meeting that afternoon, which was in the town of Rose Hill. The hall was packed with several hundred students. A racially mixed audie
nce, a mixed platform, ideas being treated like news: it was the brightest gathering I had seen in Mauritius. And by its very existence it was—but perhaps only in the eye of the visitor—a tribute to the liberal administration that was being rejected.
“IT IS AN IMITATION,” Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the Prime Minister, says. “They are trying to imitate Mao, Fidel Castro. Fantasy? They are not dealing in fantasy; they think their ideas will take root here. There is poverty. But we are trying to contain that by social services. We spend about thirty million rupees on assistance. People criticize us for that, for giving things like family allowances. My reply is: ‘Children are born. I cannot allow them to grow up stunted. If they are well fed, well educated, they are not a burden on society. Otherwise they will become backward, mentally.’”
A different vocabulary, different concerns: a different life. The Prime Minister is nearly as old as the century; and that poetic biography Bérenger spoke about is an attempt to do justice to a subject which—though the scale is small, the setting restricted—is worthy of legend: the rise to power of a man born into a depressed and leaderless community, in an agricultural colony, in the darkest age of colonialism. Few colonial leaders have shown such courage and tenacity as Ramgoolam; few, having achieved power, have been so anxious to heal old enmities and rule humanely. But already the new state, as incomplete as it ever was, is threatened, and from more than one direction.
Bérenger says, “This hanging around ministers’ offices, people looking for jobs, this is encouraged by the ministers. Each minister is trying to succeed Ramgoolam and each is trying to play his card.”
The Prime Minister says, “Now we have the Public Service Commission. This waiting outside the doors of ministers is a mistake. It is a relic of colonial days.”
The old enemy. And also the new: “Colonialism is a destructive institution. It creates parasites and hangers-on. And they are still with us—people of all races who profited from the stay in this country of a foreign power. I don’t know whether they’ve completely reconciled themselves to the changes. I think this new movement, the MMM, is a devious approach by these same people to revive themselves. I think they want to have their own back on me especially and my party.”