The unemployed young Indian labourer or labourer’s son, seeing his twenties waste away, turns to studies, making unlettered attempts at the Cambridge School Certificate—always big news in the press, the arrival of the papers from England, the arrival of the results—preparing himself for a job that doesn’t exist. “I am twenty-nine. I am not married. I passed my School Certificate in 1965. I got a third grade. I applied for several posts. I never got it. Still now I am applying. I passed my School Certificate in 1968, when I was twenty-six. I got another third grade. I now work as a relief supervisor. It is not a promising job. According to my certificate it is not sufficient. I applied for Teachers’ Training College six times. I like that very much.” He is all right. But some break up. They yield to their headaches, give up the impossible goal of the Cambridge School Certificate and become horribly idle, at home or in the hospital.
The travel-writer, reporting on the happy-go-lucky island customs, will tell you that a bottle of rum will gain you admittance to a sega party. Local doctors will tell you that alcoholism is a serious and growing problem. Rum, at eight rupees a bottle, sixty pence, is expensive, almost a tourist luxury; the standard drink is the local banana spirit, which sells at nine pennies a bottle. A few years ago one out of ten patients sent to the mental hospital was an alcoholic; now it is one out of seven. These figures are unverifiable; the government, perhaps correctly, disapproves of such investigations.
It is no secret, however, that many cases of mental disorder are caused by malnutrition and severe anaemia. Just as it is obvious that this very thin young woman in the family planning clinic is starved and quite withdrawn. No amount of family planning will solve her problems now. This morning she had tea; yesterday, for dinner, she had a kind of soup: boiled rice soaked in tea. With lackluster eyes in a skeletal and already moronic face, she sits listless on the wooden bench. She wears a green sari; there is a small handkerchief in her bony hand, a trace of powder on her face. Mauritius is not India; there is no longer that knowledge of fate, karma, in which distress is absorbed. Everyone is responsible for himself, everyone is genteel.
Three years ago a woman of thirty-five decided to allow one of her children to starve to death, to save the others. She did so; then she fell into a depression.
For the past ten years and more economists have been visiting Mauritius and writing alarming reports, making “projections” of population and unemployment. Disaster has always appeared to lie in the future; it is assumed that at the moment people are somehow carrying on. A Mauritian journalist told me that the common people had their own little ways and could live on twenty-five cents a day, two pennies. It isn’t true. But how can the journalist, or anyone else who has to live in Mauritius, be blamed for not seeing that the disaster has occurred?
THE MAURITIUS economy, a government white paper says, “is not technically backward.” The sugar estates are as efficient as can be; they engage in continuous research and are far more efficient than the small farmers. Any plan for breaking up the estates into smaller units runs the risk of damaging efficiency, and it is uncertain whether it will actually create more jobs.
Such a fragmentation may be socially satisfying. The party of the young, the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM), says in its New Leftish manifesto: “On ne fait bien sûr pas d’omelette sans casser d’oeufs.”(“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”) That New Left omelette again; but the MMM’s analysis is not all that different from the government’s. They both recognize the efficiency of the economy, and its brutality. They both speak of the need to diversify agriculture and selectively to industrialize. They would both like to separate the sugar factories from the sugar estates, to separate, that is, management and money from the land. And they both seem to recognize that, at the end of the day, they will be left with what they started with: an agricultural colony, created by empire in an empty island and always meant to be part of something larger, now given a thing called independence and set adrift, an abandoned imperial barracoon, incapable of economic or cultural autonomy.
Both the MMM and the government speak, as they must speak, of a Mauritian nation. As though immigrant nations are created by words and exhortation and not by the possibilities of the land. No one has yet devised, or attempted to devise, a political philosophy for these independent island-barracoons; and it may be that their problems defy solution. The French, with their strange imperial-linguistic dreams, have made the nearby island of Réunion a department of France. Of what country can Mauritius be a department?
The MMM talks of “a global solution.” Faced with the problems of Mauritius, even the New Left founders, and compromises. Tourism is degrading, the MMM manifesto says; and for two well-documented pages it catalogues the disasters that have befallen some Caribbean islands. But, the manifesto concludes, the situation in Mauritius is so desperate that tourism must be developed, though of course “un tourisme visant non la classe très riche des pays étrangers, mais la classe moyenne de ces pays [a tourism aimed not at the very rich class in foreign countries, but at the middle class].” The MMM would like to see 300,000 tourists a year, fifteen times the present number; this is also the stated target of the government.
In the circumstances, the concrete plans that are put forward often have a Robinson Crusoe, boy-scout quality. Set the unemployed to plant trees on riverbanks, create a National Youth Service (to do what? to be financed by what?): these were ideas put forward by the Labour Party at the seminar on unemployment.
Mr. Duval, the Black Power man, has his own Projet Cochon, Operation Pig. He distributes piglets to potential minders and hopes in this way to create a pig-rearing industry. A good idea, I was told, with export possibilities; and there have been some successes. But it happens that pork is the Negro’s favourite food; and the Chinese of course dote on it. In an island of hungry Negroes and epicurean Chinese a piglet-distributing scheme runs certain risks. I could get no figures; but it seems that enough of the distributed piglets have been eaten for Projet Cochon to be known now to some people as the cochon projet.
THE TENEMENT stands on the site of a great house in Port Louis, the capital. The high concrete wall of the great house survives; within, the front of the yard is rubbled, with faded cigarette packets, dusty cellophane wrappers and dead leaves between the stones and crushed old masonry. In one corner, right against the wall, some boys and young men, seated on boxes, are playing cards, in the middle of this hot morning. Beyond the rubble, and below two old trees, the tenement sheds of corrugated iron and wood, much repaired and added-to, run down in two parallel lines, past the communal tap and many ancillary little sheds, to the communal lavatories. The ground is rocky here; the earth, where it shows, damp and black.
A red-tiled floor in the first room on the right, quite dark below the naked corrugated-iron roof. A bed, two tables, some boxes, a clothesline. A Playboy pin-up above the bed, a little bundle on the bed: a tiny red-brown baby, ten days old. The mother went out this morning to get some milk from the Child Welfare Centre, but was sent back because she hadn’t taken the correct papers. Yet the “papers,” frail with handling, are there, on the table, in a little plastic envelope. She will go again tomorrow. Her fourth child: now six sleep in that room.
Her husband, an electrician, has been out of work for ten months. Once he worked in the Fire Brigade; and his Fire Brigade belt hangs on the line, the only unnecessary object in that room. He is out on the wharf this morning, hoping to get fifty cents, three and a half pennies. Yesterday there wasn’t even fifty cents; and this morning she borrowed twenty-five cents from a neighbour. She sent a girl to buy some food, but twenty-five cents couldn’t buy enough for a meal. So the girl bought a loaf and some chutney for eleven cents—that loaf there—and brought back the change, fourteen cents, there, on the table, next to the tin of Nivea Creme, the broken comb, the worn powder puff, the half-full bottle of Cologne Impériale (a gift to the baby from the hospital nurse), the rubber dummy, and a pencil. Possessions.
She used to do family planning. But she quarrelled with her husband once and he threw away the pills, and she didn’t go back to the clinic. Her husband gets angry when there is nothing to eat. He beats her then and she goes away. But then she thinks: what can the poor man do? So she stays outside for a little, cries for a bit and then goes back. She thinks now she’ll put the children in a nursery and see if she can’t get a job. According to her customs—she is a Tamil—she shouldn’t go out for forty days after the birth of her child. But she has already broken that rule, and she needs money. So now she will go out. She will go from house to house, asking whether there are clothes to mend or dishes to wash. She’ll probably make about three or four rupees a week, between twenty and thirty pennies.
The next room is larger, brighter, lighter: pale ochre walls, lino on the floor. No kitchen area at the front: the kitchen is in an adjoining room: this is an apartment. An Indian girl, a Bihari, pale and fine-featured, lives here, with a Negro girl, a friend perhaps, who has now cast herself in the role of maid. They are both very young, about eighteen, and both very small. The black girl looks shrunken and undersized. A transparent pinkish blouse shows her brassiere and the simplicity of her bony body. No sexual intent there; there is a curious guilelessness about the black girl. She is the maid; she lives through her young mistress. The Bihari girl is perfectly proportioned, even plump-thighed as she sits on the edge of the bed, occasionally nervously rocking her knees together in the Indian way. The mistress is obviously as anaemic as the maid, and perhaps even more unwell; she has the sunken, too-bright eyes of the hysteric.
A large photograph of a sailor hangs on the wall. The Bihari girl says he is Swedish.
“Is why she take two rooms,” the black girl says in English. “She cook in other room. She stay here all day.”
The Bihari girl says in patois, “My mother is at home in Petite Rivière. She lives alone since my father disappeared. My father went mad.” It is said just like that. “Five years ago my father stopped working. He used to work as a cane-cutter. Then he began to get headaches and went to hospital. And then he disappeared. I was fourteen. My mother did a little cleaning and washing to get some money. In December of that year I came here to Port Louis. I told my mother I was coming to Port Louis. But it was my own idea. I go to see my mother sometimes; she doesn’t come here. I have two brothers in school. One does a little work in a magasin. Here now I just sit and read and talk.”
“She no tell you,” the black girl says. “But she no work. All month this man”—the man on the wall—“give this girl money. Fifty, sixty rupees, I don’t know. She have baby for this sailor. The baby die. Two years now.”
There are other photographs of men stuck in the door of the glass cabinet. All the men are Europeans.
“No Mauritius!” the Bihari girl says in English, seeming to shriek as she switches language. “No have job here for man.”
On the oilcloth-covered table, a Post Office savings book.
“Fini,” she says. “Fini. All fi-neshed.”
She began to save in 1967. Twenty rupees after a year; fifteen rupees after eighteen months. Then the regular monthly deposits—ten, twenty, twenty-five, even thirty rupees—until the later months of her pregnancy and the miscarriage. For six months the account bleeds, and for a year after that it seems dead. In February 1971 a miraculous transfusion: six hundred rupees, £45, from an English boy, commemorated by that coloured snap in the glass cabinet: a family snap, clearly from England. Only forty rupees remain now. She has paid off her debts. She has bought a transistor, and she has bought medicines. She feels tired. She has bought Sanatogen, for her nerves, and Sirop des Chiens, for her blood. All there on the table, with the savings book. Above the door, a Sacred Heart, to protect this Hindu girl and her maid.
They are free now, and independent. But the pimps and gangs of Port Louis await, and the new Chinese-run brothels at Pointe aux Sables. It was at one of those places, some days later, that I saw the two girls: the maid, very demure, keeping an eye on her mistress.
A lawyer says, “I’ve seen many people going into prostitution just to give a chance in life to their eldest brother or youngest brother. The girls who go aboard the ships are from the best schools in the colony.”
THE GANGS started four or five years ago. They grew out of job-seeking and job-sharing street brotherhoods; they became pimping groups; they became gangs for hire. A recent gangster’s job: throwing acid on the face of a manager who sacked a worker. The fee: sixty-five rupees, £5.
In this country court consider this gang, had up for damaging property: three black boys, brothers, and a badly mutilated young red-skinned mulatto. Consider the procession of shabby youths with bright faces had up for the pettiest of petty larceny. The scene is almost domestic. Much of Mauritian official architecture is on a domestic, plantation-house scale, and the little wooden court-house is as small as a drawing-room. The magistrate sits against the back wall; there is a window on either side of his chair; and there are fruit trees just outside the windows.
The law is the law, and in Mauritius a job is a job. But the police officer is depressed by his duties. He says, “This district is one of the poorest in the island. After the crop season they have nothing to do. They fish a little and they collect acacia seeds, for which they get twelve cents [one new penny] a pound. So life is hard. It takes a lot of acacia seeds to make one pound.”
A Muslim lawyer says, “We were more serene in 1962. We hope this is a passing phase. But that is what everyone says: ‘It cannot last, it cannot go on.’ And now this new party, the MMM, adds to the desperation. People withdrawing their capital. Prices going up. Taxes going up. Probably once a month we say, ‘It is only a passing phase.’”
A mulatto doctor says, “The boy who in a richer society might have gone into another, mixed social group, in the end here, through depression and frustration, collapses into his old society and resigns himself to it. It is what is saving Mauritius, this climate of acceptance of fate, of things as they are, which the Indians irradiate to the others. We are ruled by two myths. The government; and the sugar estates, the malignant white god. The white man has become a myth. If the white man didn’t exist, in Mauritius we would have to invent someone like him.”
A HUGE SWASTIKA is painted on the main road that runs through the little Indian town of Triolet. The swastika is the Indo-Aryan good-luck sign and part of the decoration of a Hindu house, but here it is used politically, the emblem of a new party called the Jan Sangh, which seeks to remind Indians of their racial loyalties. Both swastika and Mr. Duval’s Black Power are responses to the inter-racial, New Left MMM. Fantasy responding to fantasy: it was in Triolet that the MMM won its first election victory, but in this clubhouse, just a few weeks after the election, nothing seems to remain of MMM doctrine.
There are the standard stories of Mauritian weariness, of School Certificate people who cannot get jobs and “just stay at home pursuing their studies. They are sick with life, tired with life.” About thirty or forty have gone to England to do nursing. “But most of us don’t get it. That depends on the minister. Sometimes he doesn’t allow us to go. They give favours to their families.” There is the story of the boy—that young man just passing in the road outside—who “drank away” the little land that was his patrimony and is now like everybody else. “Now he is in crisis.”
And there is a version of the Mauritian legend of the missed job. This is the story of a boy who two years ago lost a government job through the trickery of a clerk: a job as a messenger, worth 5½ rupees a day, 40 pence. Everyone in the clubhouse knows this story and has his own version; and the failed messenger, when he appears, a handsome, energetic young man, is clearly a glamour figure. His neighbour got the job. “I am not angry with him. I leave the matter in the hands of God.” In the meantime he wears a mauve MMM shirt, to express his defiance of the government.
Someone says, “People here help one another in cases of accident. But it
’s different when it comes to jobs. Then families are jealous. And the bad blood comes out when they’re drinking.”
They have such a developed sense of injustice. Have they no sense of danger? They have such confidence in their rights, their votes, the power of their opinions. They regard their independence as settled and permanent; they do not see its fragility. An internal coup, an armed takeover from outside: neither hard to imagine in this area: have they no thoughts of that?
The young men in the clubhouse say, “The government will look after that.”
But as the afternoon fades and the traffic lessens and many radios are turned on to the Indian music programme, as the talk becomes slower and less aggressive, it becomes clear that these young men are beyond the sense of danger. They see themselves, profoundly, as victims; the enemy won a long time ago.
“Today in Mauritius there is the rhinoceros beetle which can damage a coconut tree. These beetles were introduced deliberately for the medicines to be sold. Our forefathers never knew these beetles. So they made money two ways. They destroyed our coconuts and they sold the medicines. We can’t suppose that the Ministry of Agriculture did this. We can suppose that some strangers did that.”
“They uprooted our orange trees, in order to get us to buy oranges from South Africa. We suppose it. They came and told us that our orange trees had a certain fungus.”
“Day after day now we hear of our people being struck down by illnesses which we did not possess.”
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 16