As visitors the South Africans are popular. And not all the South Africans who come are white. BLACKS IN SOUTH AFRICA SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN: this is the front-page headline in the Mauritius Times over a question-and-answer interview with a visiting South African Indian, Mr. Ahmed Cajee Khan.
Q: Mr. Khan, how do Indians fare in South Africa?
A: Very well economically integrated with the government … Some of our people are multi-millionaires.
Q: How did this powerful position come about?
A: It’s traditional among Indians …
Q: Would you say that a lot of what we hear against South Africa is incorrect?
A: … In Mauritius I was surprised when somebody told me there were separate toilet facilities on board South African Airways. This is false …
Q: But surely there are some inflexible situations?
A: All countries have their domestic problems.
Q: Mr. Khan, there is a school of thought which believes that the political battle in South Africa is lost. Do you subscribe to this view?
A: Not for a minute …
Q: Your happiness about this régime baffles me. Would I be right in saying that it’s because you don’t feel the pinch like the blacks?
A: No! Nobody feels the pinch. Everybody has a job … although we should make allowance for the eternal grumblers.
Earlier this year Black Power slogans in French and the local French patois appeared in many towns and villages: C’est beau d’etre noir, Noir ene jolie couleur, Noirs au pouvoir. It was the idea of the Foreign Minister, Gaëtan Duval. Duval himself isn’t black. He is a brown-skinned, straight-haired man of forty, as handsome as a pop star and with a pop star’s taste in clothes. As part of his Black Power campaign he took to wearing black leather and making public appearances on a black horse called Black Beauty. For many years Duval was regarded as the leader of the island’s blacks. But then two years ago, forgetting pre-independence disputes, he took his party into a coalition government; and since then, as the government’s popularity has gone down, so has Duval’s.
Black Power was Duval’s way of fighting back. It was intended, so far as I could gather, to scare off political poachers. It certainly wasn’t intended to frighten ordinary white people. Duval supports the idea of trade with South Africa, and he would like to see more South African tourists. He would like to see South Africans buying houses in special tourist developments. Statistics showed, he told me one day at lunch, that a hotel room provided employment for only two servants. A house provided employment for four.
THE GOVERNMENT recognizes a problem of unemployment. A White Paper says that 130,000 new jobs will have to be created by 1980. The government doesn’t recognize a problem of over-population and discourages investigation of its effects. It disapproves of “crude” family planning programmes on TV. Mauritius is a conservative, wife-beating society and the government doesn’t want to offend anybody.
There are also good political reasons. At a seminar on unemployment, which began the day after I arrived, a spokesman for the Labour Party, the major party in the ruling coalition, said: “We have rejected the all too facile and simple explanation that unemployment is a consequence of overpopulation and the lack of capital and investment possibilities … In fact it is clear that the holders of economic power, either for fear of inadequate protection of their interest or again out of a carefully elaborated political strategy, refused to be involved in the necessary political process … The Mauritian situation, therefore, presents a picture where the holders of political power are separated by a wide, almost unbridgeable gap from those holding economic power.”
So, by stressing unemployment and by playing down overpopulation, the government defends itself and seeks to remain the instrument of protest, as in colonial days. Protest against the rich, so often white, whose talents and money are yet needed; protest against the sugarcane, the slave crop, hateful yet indispensable.
But the government is unpopular. If there were an election tomorrow the government would be overthrown, not by its old enemies, most of whom it has anyway absorbed, but by the young, those people who have grown up during the years of the population explosion.
The Prime Minister, an Indian in an island with an Indian majority, is seventy. The political party of the young, whose sudden popularity has rocked the government, was founded in 1968 by a French Mauritian student, then aged twenty-three and fresh from the events of Paris. The Prime Minister has a background of rural Indian poverty. Education and self-education, the long years in London in the 1920s, first as a student, then as a doctor, trade union work on his return to Mauritius, politics: it has been a long haul, against an almost “settler” opposition, and his achievement has been remarkable. Over the last twelve years he has created a rudimentary welfare state in Mauritius. There are extensive social services; there is a system of “relief work” for the unemployed (four rupees, thirty pence, four days a week); there is a monthly allowance of ten rupees, about seventy-five pence, for families with three children below the age of fourteen.
This rudimentary welfare state has saved the society from collapse; and the people who have benefited are the young. They are better educated and better fed than their parents. An excellent television service keeps them sharp and well informed. Their expectations are higher; they are no longer an uncomplaining part of the old serf society. The flaw is that this welfare state has been created, perhaps at the expense of development, within a static colonial economy where sugar is still king. The higher skills are not required in Mauritius. Elsewhere, only those with really good characters and a love of nursing need apply.
“They blame the government. Once they have the certificate in hand they never think of anything else except securing a job with government. There are organized groups in agriculture, but the bulk would like to sit behind a desk and have papers to scratch all day.” “The government has made the people of Mauritius beggars. The thing is we had an extended family system here we could have made better use of. What has happened is that all this government relief has weakened the family system.” “Our people have no sense of adventure.” “People are becoming accident-conscious. Malingering. My surgery is pestered with malingerers hoping to get compensation from the government for their ‘accidents.’”
These are middle-class comments on the Mauritius welfare state, and they are supported to some extent by a White Paper. Too many people, the White Paper says, live at the “relief” level; too many people do “unproductive” relief jobs (sometimes relief workers are sent to clean the beaches); and as a result “the will to work among those employed, who see it is possible to live with less work or even without working, is being affected.”
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, jus
t 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.
Femme qui fume cigarettes
Mo’pas ’oulé.
Li a coule la mort tabac
Dans ’ous la gue’le.
(Woman who smoke cigarette I don’t like.
She leaking stale tobacco in your mouth.)
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.
THE 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 Writer and the World Page 15