The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  The reason for this lies in the island’s history. While the coast has always been dominated by French colonists, the mountains were traditionally the hideaways of escaped Malagasy slaves: Cilaos, for example, is a corruption of the Malagache tsy laosana – the place from which you never return. It is easy to see how Cilaos came by its name. For although parts of the coast are to this day dominated by Parisian immigrants, who buy up the beachfronts, opening hotels and surfing clubs, the mountainous interior has escaped this fate, and remains firmly in the hands of the native Réunionnais.

  Here, up beyond the high passes can be found the real essence of the island’s Créole identity. In the cirques (volcanic craters), cut off from the rest of the island by mountains of terrifying verticality, live isolated communities of mountain shepherds whose way of life has not changed for a hundred years. One crater, the Cirque de Mafate, still cannot be reached by road. Here, just ten miles as the crow flies from the bars and nightclubs of Saint-Denis, is a deeply inward-looking society, some of whose members have never left the crater or seen a car.

  Anyone who wishes to see the heart of Réunion must brave the treacherous roads and head up in to the mountains. At the fine old colonial town of Saint-Louis – all eighteenth-century churches, ruined sugar mills and grand Compagnie des Indes townhouses – you turn inland, leaving the hot white glare of the palmed and coraled coastline behind. Less than a mile from the coast, the scenery changes beyond recognition.

  Nothing you have seen on the island prepares you for what lies ahead. For from the coast, the first range of the hills looks green and rolling, like the gentle contours on other Indian Ocean islands. But cross these foothills and you see for the first time the massive volcanic peaks that lie further inland: successive ranges of mountains and craters rising and receding in to inky cloudbanks of thunderous cumulus. You expect geological acrobatics like these on great landmasses where continents collide, not on an island the size of Réunion, little more than forty miles across and represented on most maps by the smallest of dots. Yet the scenery is of Andean, or even Himalayan, grandeur. These are jagged, angular, peremptory ranges with ridges that jut out like fractured bones – as sharp and angular as fragments of broken glass, but on such a scale that they rise to form whole ranges of pyramid peaks – great lines of aspiring Matterhorns and Sugarloaf Mountains, with names like ‘the Rhino’s Horn’ and ‘the Priest’s Bonnet’.

  There is something profoundly violent, even frightening, about the geological processes at work, made more terrible still by the impenetrable blackness of the basalt: it neither refracts nor reflects light, but seems rather to absorb it, to draw it in. Not even a glint of mica breaks the rocks’ terrible black monotony, and only on the gentler slopes can ferns or moss find purchase on the hard, brittle, volcanic geomorphology.

  The road through this landscape moves with serpentine indecision: it rises, curves and doubles back, hesitates, sinks, then curves back on itself once more. On either side cliffs tower upwards, with dark cloudbanks masking their peaks; small waterfalls cascade down the abyss and on to the windscreen. The effects of the towering peaks, mist and cloud combine to give the landscape an oddly primeval feel: it is as if you are rising up to some lost world – so much so that you feel you might not be surprised if a pterodactyl were suddenly to appear and glide gently down the mountain thermals.

  Cilaos, the bleak, mist-shrouded spa-town that dominates the topmost cirque, is an isolated, end-of-the-world sort of place.

  It grew to fame in the mid-nineteenth century as a hill station and sanatorium for European soldiers and colonial officials whose health had been damaged by too long in the jungles of Bengal or the swamps of Vietnam. Its climate was deemed ‘European’ – the ultimate accolade in the eyes of homesick colonials – its mildly radioactive mineral waters were credited with healing powers, while its baths were said to instantly cure rheumatism and a whole anthology of muscular complaints.

  For a century Cilaos filled every summer with bedridden brigadiers and crippled colonels – until a landslide soon after the Second World War suddenly blocked the source and killed the town dead. The unexpected return of the waters in 1971 has done little to renew the town’s prosperity, and it remains oddly time-warped. Its clapboard, candy-floss houses with their corrugated-iron roofs and nasturtium-filled gardens still seem to be locked in the past, as if all the town’s clocks had stopped the moment the source was blocked.

  Every day, as late afternoon gives way to evening, the clouds descend on Cilaos, shrouding it in a thick, misty gloaming. Yet overnight the clouds pull back, so that each morning the town awakes, miraculously refreshed, to crisp, chilly sunrises that briefly turn the great basalt amphitheatre of rock surrounding it as pink as smoked salmon. Finding at breakfast that the bleak vision I had seen on arrival had given way to a scene of Alpine freshness, I pulled on my walking boots and headed straight off in to the hills.

  Three hours later I was passing up a wooded mountain path, with wild strawberries and meadow campion underfoot; in the valley below I could hear the bells of the convents of Cilaos. In contrast to the geological pyrotechnics of the passes on the way up to Cilaos, the mountainsides above the town were surprisingly gentle: conifer forests gave way on the steeper slopes to bamboo and flowering bromeliads. Unseen birds were singing in the forest canopy, the ground was soft and springy, and the sun shone brightly overhead.

  Then, turning a corner, I found myself in a meadow, at the top of which was a thatched hut. A tall Créole farmer was standing beside it, feeding his two donkeys. He was lean and wiry, and on his head he wore a Homburg hat; but he had no shoes, and his feet were large and dusty. He introduced himself as Loulou, and invited me inside his shack. There he offered me a glass of orange juice, squeezed before my eyes from his own oranges. I was hot and thirsty after the walk, and as we sat and savoured the cold liquid I asked Loulou about himself.

  He had been brought up in this meadow, the Îlet des Trois Salazes, he said, and since finishing his national service he had rarely left it: it was over thirty years since his last visit to Saint-Denis, even though the bus from Cilaos could get him there in a morning.

  ‘Why should I go?’ he said. ‘I have everything I need here. And the people down on the coast …’

  ‘What about them?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re all z’oreilles.’

  I had not heard the island’s French immigrants called this before. I later learned that z’oreilles – literally ‘ears’ – was supposedly a reference to the immigrants’ habit of cupping their ears to catch the islanders’ Créole patois, though one Réunionnais friend I talked to believed it actually derived from a more sinister source: the old French predilection for cutting off the ears of slaves, leaving the plantation-owners as the only people with their oreilles intact.

  ‘To us it seems the z’oreilles have a totally different mentality,’ continued Loulou. ‘They’re always rushing about here and there. They’ve got no manners. Down bottom, if you ask directions they’ll not answer – or they’ll send you the wrong way. And they call anyone with a Cilaos accent a choux choux-eater. So why go and risk trouble? Better stay here with my family. Us yabs [highlanders] shouldn’t mix with the z’oreilles … It never does any good.’

  As Loulou talked, I looked around the hut. It was a classic mountaineers’ den, low and cosy, with a fire licking at the logs on the hearth. A coffee-pot, a kettle and a couple of pans containing rice and cari poule rested on a steel grill suspended over the embers. From the roofbeams hung Loulou’s worldly goods: an axe, two rainproof capes, a box of candles, a torch and a guitar.

  Loulou’s father, so he told me, had been a palanquin bearer. His job had been to carry invalids up the mountains from Saint-Louis to Cilaos; until the building of the road in 1935 it had been impossible for carriages or cars to make it up, so impassable were the mountain tracks. In his childhood, said Loulou, there were seven families living in the Îlet; now it was just him and his sons.


  ‘The young are all leaving this area,’ said Loulou. ‘Things are changing so fast. In the old days we would say that Réunion was like a book: every now and again the page would turn. Now it’s like a wind is blowing and all the pages are changing at once. Even up here, things are changing like you can’t imagine. They say that we’ll soon have electricity. And after that, who knows? Maybe even the telephone.’

  When Loulou came back from his national service, he found the Îlet virtually deserted. Only his widower father was left; everyone else had given up and gone to seek work on the coast. Moreover, in his absence the French forestry agency had removed the Îlet’s right of pasture over the mountain; they had planted trees on the grazing land and fenced the area off. There was no compensation.

  ‘We lived off our sheep,’ said Loulou. ‘But after our pasture was taken away we had no option but to shoot them. After that everyone moved away. I came home to find that everything had broken up. I had to start again from scratch.’

  Since then he had devoted his waking hours to trying to coax a living from the Îlet, to turning the thin soil of the mountainside in to productive land. As he took me around, he proudly showed me where he had built terraces, planted fruit trees and established herb and vegetable gardens. He now had two patches of grain and maize, and apricots, cherries, plums and quince hung heavily from boughs covered in thick grey lichen. There was watercress in the stream and sweet-smelling passionflowers hanging from a trellis in front of his hut. In addition he had two milk-cows, a bull and his donkeys. In summer his sons joined him in the Îlet. Life was hard, he said, but he managed to make ends meet.

  As we said goodbye he showed me the ruined hut where the village sorcerer had lived when he was a child. It was then that Loulou told me one of the most extraordinary stories I heard on Réunion.

  Some time in 1931, a box of sacred relics arrived in Réunion from the Vatican.

  It seems that somewhere in transit the label detailing the saint’s name had been removed from the box, and the only indication as to its contents was a stamp on the side reading, in Italian, ‘SPEDITO’ (expedited). So began the cult of St Expedit, whose popularity grew year by year, until what had started as a clerical error ended with St Expedit becoming Réunion’s unofficial patron saint, a saint whose unwritten biography has come to crystallise the most profound hopes and fears of the island’s multiple ethnicities. There are now around 350 shrines on Réunion dedicated to St Expedit. They sit beside every road junction, crown every hilltop, lie deep in the bottom of the island’s wildest ravines. They act both as oratories for the faithful and as sacred sentry-boxes, guarding against the terrors of the night.

  For it is not just Réunion’s Catholics who look to St Expedit for help: all the communities of the island pray to him, and each has brought something to his cult.

  Probably due to a confusion with the popular French cult of St Elpiduce, the local Catholic Church has given the saint the trappings of an early Christian martyr, and his image has stabilised as that of a young Roman legionary, with a silver breastplate and a red tunic. In one hand he holds a spear, in the other the martyr’s palm; under his right foot he crushes a raven, a symbol of his victory over the demons of temptation. But to this conventional image of Catholic piety have been added a number of more exotic trappings. Hindus have adopted in to their pantheon this image clothed in the Hindus’ sacred colour, and now treat St Expedit as an unofficial incarnation of Vishnu; those wanting children come to his shrine and tie saffron cloths to the grilles. In the same way, Indian-Réunionnais Muslims tie short cotton threads to his shrine, just as they would at Sufi shrines in the subcontinent.

  The cult has also proved popular with the descendants of those slaves who clung to the old spirit-worshipping beliefs of their Malagasy ancestors. In Madagascar the palm is associated with death, while St Expedit’s spear and raven are taken to be symbols of sacrifice, as if he were a white witch-doctor. More exotic still, some of the island’s sorcerers have given the cult a slightly sinister aspect by decapitating the saint’s image, either to neutralise his power or to use the head in their own incantations. According to Loulou, the sorcerer at Îlet Trois Salazes had a small oratory in which he kept several heads of St Expedit.

  ‘He used them to cast spells,’ said Loulou. ‘He thought that by cutting the saint’s head off he was taking his power and stealing it for himself.’

  ‘Did you believe he had power?’

  ‘We were all terrified of him: everyone believed he had very strong powers. But in the end the people kicked him out. He was too dangerous – he began to demand bribes not to cast spells on us all. In the end we had enough.’

  ‘Weren’t you frightened that he would take revenge on you for throwing him out of the Îlet?’

  ‘We took precautions,’ relplied Loulou.

  ‘What sort of precautions?’

  ‘We used stronger magic. We sent someone to the grave of La Sitarane in Saint-Pierre. It is the most powerful grave on the island. With La Sitarane on your side, no one can harm you at all.’

  On my last evening on Réunion, I drove in to Saint-Pierre to look for the grave of La Sitarane.

  Beyond the mosque, just before the Hindu temple of Kali, a group of old Créole men were playing boules on a square of carefully clipped grass; through the palm trees I could see the surf exploding on the coral reef out to sea. After the clear but chilly air of the mountains, the coast seemed gloriously hot and humid.

  Graves seemed to form a grim symmetry to my journey through Réunion. I had visited the tomb of La Buse the night I arrived; now here I was, on the eve of my departure, making for another cemetery, intent on seeing the grave of an even more reprehensible character than the piratical Buzzard. For La Sitarane, it emerged, was not just a sorcerer, but also a murderer who had been executed after committing a number of bloody killings at the turn of the century.

  ‘He only killed three people,’ said a Réunionnais historian I quizzed on the subject, ‘but according to legend he first drugged his victims with datura [a sleep-inducing poison derived from herbs], then afterwards drank their blood. Just before he was guillotined, he made a speech vowing that he would return from the dead to punish his captors. It caused such a shock in Réunion that La Sitarane has never been forgotten. But I’ll tell you an odd thing.’

  The historian leant a little closer to me: ‘When I first visited his grave, twenty years ago, there were no visitors, no offerings and no burning candles. But now the grave is more visited than even that of La Buse. All these offerings, this sorcery: far from dying away with development and education, it actually seems to be on the increase.’

  This idea fascinated me, for it touched on something that had become clearer to me the longer I stayed on Réunion: that the island’s ever-increasing métissage was leading to a fundamental metamorphosis in its character. Réunion had been born and shaped by the accidents of French colonial history, and three hundred years after the French flag was first raised at Saint-Paul, the island was still supported by an umbilical cord from Paris. Yet with Réunion’s customs and traditions continually evolving through the intermixture of its different communities, it seemed that the island was visibly becoming less and less French every day. Certainly the façade was still there – the croissants, the baguettes and the burgundy – but at its heart the island seemed to be fast evolving its own quite separate identity, spinning off in to its own orbit, as the métissage led to a constantly shifting fusion of faiths, ideas and superstitions.

  Inside the cemetery, the cross head of La Sitarane’s gravestone had been broken off, and the remaining shaft was painted bright red. On the graveslab, just as the historian had said, was piled a mountain of bizarre offerings: rice, potatoes, oranges, radishes, wine gums, milk, coconuts and incense sticks, as well as the inevitable bottles of rum and packets of Gitanes.

  ‘You see, people here think La Sitarane is alive,’ explained Jean-Claude, the gravedigger, who was busy preparing a plot nearby.
‘That is why they bring these presents: cigarettes for him to smoke, rum for him to drink, and so on. They think that if they honour him in this way La Sitarane will help them in their work – or help them punish their enemies.’

  Jean-Claude hauled himself out of his grave and wiped his hands on his trousers.

  ‘So who is it who comes here?’ I asked.

  ‘We get all sorts,’ replied Jean-Claude. ‘An hour ago there was a woman dancing on the grave. First she cut the head off a chicken, then she started dancing. She was Créole, I think, but lately it’s been mostly Tamils who’ve been coming. They stand by the grave in groups and their priests read from their bad books. All the Tamils believe in La Sitarane’s power. They are great sorcerers.’

  I walked over to La Sitarane’s grave and reached down to pick up a coconut that someone had left on it, but Jean-Claude restrained my hand.

  ‘It’s better not to touch,’ he said. ‘There was a gravedigger here when I was a boy. One day he drank some wine from the grave. The next day his mind was finished. Now he’s in the asylum in Saint-Denis. Or so they say.’

  ‘So you actually believe in La Sitarane’s power?’ I asked.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ said Jean-Claude. ‘Of course. Everyone does.’

  He smiled at the question, as if it were something only a z’oreille could possibly ask.

  ‘This is Réunion, not Paris,’ he explained. ‘Here things are – how do you say? – a little different from La Métropole.’