Slavery and marronage, the memory of an island

The history of slavery in Mauritius begins with the French colony. It was with enslaved labour brought from Madagascar and Africa that the French developed the island after settling there in 1721. The figures show the scale of the system. In 1767, of nearly twenty thousand inhabitants, fifteen thousand were enslaved; in 1797, there were fifty thousand slaves out of nearly sixty thousand people. The island’s slaves came mainly from Africa and Madagascar, but also from India and South-East Asia.

The first great building works in Port Louis bear the mark of this. During the first six years of his governorship, from 1735, Mahé de La Bourdonnais had a windmill, a bakery, workshops, fortifications, warehouses and a large hospital built, using slaves and contract workers. The military hospital of 1740, one of the colony’s first major buildings, was built by slaves. Not far away, the Civil Hospital was put up in 1854 on the site of the bagne, the French prison for slaves.

The daily reality of servitude can be glimpsed in objects. At the National History Museum in Mahébourg, a sedan chair and a palanquin recall that, before proper roads were opened in the early nineteenth century, it was slaves who carried people. Their condition was laid down in a legal text, the Code Noir, drawn up under Louis XIV; an original copy, lent by the Carnegie Library in Curepipe, is on display in Port Louis.

Faced with this system, some chose flight. Maroons was the name given to slaves who escaped to live in hiding, beyond the reach of their masters. The most famous of their refuges is Le Morne mountain, in the south-west, whose isolated, wooded and almost inaccessible cliffs sheltered small communities in caves and right up to the summit. Oral tradition attaches to it a story that is still told: when officials came to tell the maroons that slavery had ended, the maroons, believing they had come to recapture them, are said to have chosen to throw themselves from the top of the cliff. The Le Morne Cultural Landscape has been on the World Heritage List since 2008.

Marronage cannot be reduced to a single mountain. In 2001 an inventory recorded the sites and places of memory linked to slavery and marronage. From June 2002 to February 2004 an archaeological programme explored around a hundred of the two hundred and fifty or so caves recorded on the island, looking for the traces left by the maroons, and took up the study of their history in the archives. In 1999 Monsignor Amédée Nagapen had devoted a book to the subject, Le Marronnage à l’Isle de France, Île Maurice : rêve ou riposte de l’esclave, which won the Grand Prix littéraire de l’océan Indien et du Pacifique.

Slavery was abolished in Mauritius in 1835, under British administration. The planters received two million pounds sterling for the loss of their slaves; around three thousand of them shared this compensation, paid by the Bank of England. In the nineteenth century the island also received liberated Africans; the quarantine station on Flat Island would take some of them in, as it would the indentured labourers from India.

Abolition did not erase what the enslaved had passed on. Sega, of African origin, was already danced and sung in the days of slavery, to the beat of the ravanne, a round drum; it has been adopted by all Mauritians, and traditional Mauritian sega has been inscribed since 2014 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The public holiday of 1 February commemorates the abolition of slavery, and the Constitution of the Republic expressly protects against slavery and forced labour.

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Places of memory

Since 4 September 2023 the Intercontinental Slavery Museum has occupied the former military hospital in Port Louis. The building was not chosen at random, since it was slaves who built it. The museum sets out to give the enslaved a voice and to show their resistance rather than their material condition alone. Visitors hear old segas that were never written down as scores. They see buttons, bone tools, earrings and a rosary unearthed in 2021 and 2022 in the old cemetery at Albion and, in digital form, sixty-three busts cast in 1846 by Eugène de Froberville from the faces of slaves from Mauritius, Tanzania and the Comoros. The museum carries forward the work of the Truth and Justice Commission, set up to reconcile the Mauritian people with their history.

Other places mark the island. At Pamplemousses, a slavery heritage trail received in 2019 the UNESCO label for sites of memory associated with the Slave Route, and the slave cemetery there is listed as national heritage. In Mahébourg a monument to the slaves stands near the waterfront, and Pointe Canon has a monument commemorating abolition. At the foot of Le Morne rises the Slave Route monument. In Port Louis, the Company’s Garden holds a monument erected for the hundred and forty-first anniversary of abolition. Finally, the Nelson Mandela Centre for African Culture, opened in 1986, helps Mauritians trace their enslaved ancestry through a genealogical database open to the public: a way, two centuries later, of giving back their names to those who built the island.