Who came, and when?

The Dutch

The Portuguese knew of Mauritius but never settled it. It was the Dutch who first claimed the island in 1598, naming it after Prince Maurice of Nassau. They established a small colony, introduced sugar cane from Java, and brought the first enslaved people, from Madagascar and the East African coast, to clear the land.

The Dutch period was sporadic and ultimately unsuccessful. They abandoned the island twice, finally leaving for good in 1710. But their legacy was profound: they had introduced the crop that would define the island's economy for three centuries, and they had begun the forced migration of people that would create the Creole population. They also drove the dodo to extinction, a loss that would later become the island's most famous symbol.

The French: Isle de France

The French took possession in 1715, renaming the island Isle de France. Under the governorship of Bertrand-François Mahé de Labourdonnais (1735–1746), Mauritius was transformed, a single governorship influential enough to merit its own section, below.

The enslaved population came from three main sources: Madagascar, the East African coast (particularly Mozambique), and, less well known, the Indian subcontinent. Women from Pondicherry and other French trading posts in India were brought to Mauritius, many of them used as domestic and sexual slaves. This Indian strand in the enslaved population is often overlooked in the standard histories, but it is clearly visible in the DNA of Mauritian Creoles today.

The sugar economy demanded ever more labour. By the end of the French period, enslaved people vastly outnumbered the free population. The Code Noir, the French legal code governing slavery, applied in Mauritius, though its provisions were frequently ignored by slave owners. The conditions were brutal, and resistance took many forms: escape into the mountainous interior (marronage), sabotage, and occasionally open revolt.

Labourdonnais: builder, and slaver

Whatever else he was, Bertrand-François Mahé de Labourdonnais is arguably the single most influential figure in shaping Mauritius's population and society, and the island he found in 1735 badly needed shaping. One administrator of the time called it "the most awful desert in the world": a poor, discouraged plantation outpost that struggled to hold onto settlers or attract competent administrators. Labourdonnais, born in Saint-Malo in 1699, had gone to sea as a boy, joined the French East India Company as a lieutenant at nineteen, and earned the name "Mahé" during the 1724 capture of the Indian trading post of that name on the Malabar coast. In 1735 the Company sent him back east as governor of both Isle de France and Isle Bourbon (Réunion).

His first years were, by every account, transformative. Within five years the administration had gone from dysfunctional to, in the sources' own words, "vigorous and successful." He turned Port Louis into a proper port and naval base: warehouses, the Government Hotel, a dry dock and shipyard, fortifications, a hospital, an aqueduct carrying water down from the Pouce mountain, and the island's first stone church. He pushed sugar cane cultivation over his own Company directors' objections and brought in the first modern mills. A decade on, the island was being called the "Star and Key of the Indian Ocean."

None of that building happened without labour, and this is where Labourdonnais's influence on the population this project traces becomes direct rather than incidental. The island's total population in 1735 stood at 838, of whom 638 were already enslaved, leaving a free population, settlers and their families, of only around 200 across the entire colony. That figure grew by roughly 1,300 enslaved people a year under his administration, while the free population itself doubled within five years. A free population that small and that recently arrived is, in effect, a documented fact about who any white colonist on the island in this period is likely to have been: an immigrant, brought in by the same Compagnie des Indes settlement machinery, not someone who could simply have been born locally into an existing community, since no such community existed before 1721. This bears directly on two of this family's own founding parents, Antoine Coré and Noël dit Lajoye, profiled further down this page. At the same time, he recruited free Indian artisans, masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, from France's Indian trading posts, who in turn trained the enslaved workforce in their trades (see "Before indenture," below, for that free Indian population in its own right). Between the enslaved labourers he imported at scale and the free artisans he recruited to build and to teach, Labourdonnais did more than any single administrator to set the demographic template, African, Malagasy, and Indian, enslaved and free, that produced the Creole population this whole site traces. His infrastructure and his role in the slave system aren't two separate legacies to weigh against each other; they're the same project.

He didn't get to finish it on his own terms. Recalled to fight Britain when war broke out in 1740, he spent the next six years commanding French forces in India instead, defending Mahé, relieving Dupleix at Pondicherry, and taking Madras in 1746, while Dupleix worked to have him replaced as governor in his absence. He returned to fight that removal and was arrested in 1748 on charges of corruption, held in the Bastille for over two years without trial, and though acquitted in 1751, his health and his fortune were both broken by the ordeal. He died in Paris in 1753, aged fifty-four. He's remembered today in statues at Port Louis, Saint-Malo, and Saint-Denis, Réunion, and in place names across the island (Mahébourg, the Domaine de Labourdonnais); since 2020, the Réunion statue and a suburb bearing his name have both been targeted by anti-slavery protesters, a live reminder that the two threads of his legacy, builder and slaver, were never actually separate.

Madame La Victoire: settler, and slave-hunter

The marronage named above, in passing, in the French period section, had a human face on the settler side too, and hers is unusually well documented for a coloniser who was neither an administrator nor a man. She isn't one of this family's own ancestors; she belongs here as the clearest surviving portrait of what the hunting of escaped slaves actually looked like, corroborated independently by at least three eighteenth-century chroniclers who had no reason to coordinate their accounts, and drawn primarily from the Mauritian historian Amédée Nagapen's Le Marronage à l'Île de France – Île Maurice.

Michelle Christine Bulle was born in 1724 at Périgueux, in the Dordogne, daughter of Pierre François Bulle, dit Comtois, a sergeant in the Compagnie des Indes' own troops, the same Company machinery that brought so many of this site's own settlers to the island. She was already on the island with her family in 1727, at three years old. A CGMR birth extract for her brother, Jean Bulle, born at Grand Port on 19 June 1727 to the same two parents, fixes that arrival more precisely than the chronicle sources do, and carries its own implication: their mother was very likely heavily pregnant throughout the outbound crossing itself, by all accounts a perilous one, round the Cape of Good Hope — an inference the birth date supports strongly, though no surviving document states it outright. The family left again shortly afterward, this time with a newborn alongside a three-year-old, and Michelle returned in 1730 aboard the vessel Le Mars, aged six. Three ocean crossings by the age of six, each one roughly half a year at sea by the standards of the era, put her closer to eighteen months of her short life spent simply travelling — and her infant brother went through the same three crossings at an age too young to remember any of them. She was one of at least five Bulle children on record: an older brother, Quentin, born like her at Périgueux before the family's emigration and presumed the eldest for that reason; Jean, born on the crossing itself, as above; and two more born at Grand Port after the family's final return, Thérèse in 1735 and Louis in 1738 — arrivals that place the family's own ocean crossings behind them for good by the mid-1730s. In November 1731 she was raped by a soldier named Bellamy, who was tried and hanged immediately afterward, a swiftness of justice that stands out precisely because it was not the ordinary experience of enslaved women and girls on the same island, whose own assaults, where this site records them elsewhere, appear in the sources as an unremarked domestic arrangement rather than a crime to be punished.

Not yet fifteen, she married a neighbouring colonist, Joseph Le Masson, dit La Victoire, on 9 January 1739; from that day she was known only by his dit-name. The couple ran a prosperous estate at the foot of Montagne Bambous, Grand-Port, well enough regarded that the abbé Nicolas-Louis de la Caille stayed there in 1753 while conducting the triangulation survey that mapped the island. She herself, by her own account, went out fearlessly by pirogue as far as the reef to harpoon turtle.

It's her 1769 encounter with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, sheltering from the heat at the "pittoresque manoir des La Victoire" during his own circuit of the island, that fixed her reputation. She told him plainly, and proudly, that she went hunting maroon men in the woods; he signed off the visit with a line of pointed sarcasm rather than outrage, naming her for the Roman war goddess: "à quatre heures après-midi, je quittai cette Bellone qui chassait aux hommes." His fuller account, reproduced by Nagapen, is harder reading than the summary suggests: an enslaved woman posted at the door as a guard, naked but for a skirt, whipped across the bare shoulders with a barbed stingray's tail when a dog got back into the room. It's reproduced here in full rather than softened, because the baron de Vaux's own letters home, quoted above, make plain this was accepted colonial policy, not one woman's private cruelty; a nineteenth-century rebuttal by Thomi Pitot shows the account was contested even by other Isle de France colonists, on grounds that had nothing to do with the enslaved woman in the story.

Worn down by repeated raids on her own estate, Madame La Victoire eventually moved from defence to offence: an able horsewoman, she organised an expedition with her two sons and a dozen or so of her own slaves and, as a Polish traveller named Maximilien Wiklinsky recorded in his own Mémoires, led them down on the maroons' own stronghold, killing several and taking others alive. Governor Desroches was, in Wiklinsky's words, "étonné et charmé du courage de cette guerrière" (astonished and charmed by this warrior-woman's courage), and put a price on the hunt: a hundred livres per maroon killed, a hundred and fifty for each one brought back alive. Desroches reported her exploits to the Minister of the Navy in Paris, who in turn secured from Louis XV himself "honneurs, faveurs et récompenses," honours, favours and rewards, along with a pension of six hundred livres and a royal brevet praising her bravery.

Nagapen treats Wiklinsky's own framing with real scepticism, though, and this site follows his lead: Wiklinsky's claim that she single-handedly rid the colony almost entirely of maroon communities is, in Nagapen's own words, "vraiment exagéré," truly exaggerated, part of the admiring, over-praising style in which the memoirist cast her as "l'amazone de Grand-Port." The bounty and the royal recognition rest on Wiklinsky's account alone, relayed through Nagapen; no independent archival correspondence or the brevet itself has surfaced to confirm the figures or the king's own involvement, and they're recorded here as reported rather than as settled fact.

She remarried in 1777, to Jean-François Villard, a Norman settler; by 1779 a visiting governor-general reviewed what Nagapen calls "la compagnie des chasseurs volontaires composée d'une seule famille, les Bulle," the volunteer hunters' company made up of a single family, the Bulles — her raiding party had become a standing institution. She died in 1793, aged sixty-nine, probably of smallpox; five months later the Colonial Assembly approved funding for a new detachment of twenty-four hunters under her own brother, Jean Bulle — one of the two infants who'd made those early crossings between France and Mauritius alongside her — continuing what Nagapen calls the family's own "tradition anti-marronne." What her actual campaigns involved beyond the one raid Wiklinsky describes still isn't part of the record available to this project, even in the chapter Nagapen titles "chasseresse," huntress — an honest gap this site would rather name than paper over.

Before indenture: the island's first free Indians

The enslaved Indian presence described above was never the whole picture. From 1728, the French colonial government also brought free Indian artisans and contract workers to Mauritius: the first group, sent by Governor Dumas of Pondicherry, arrived that November, and a larger shipment of some 165 Tamil artisans reached the island the following February aboard the Sirène. Over the following decades, more than 2,000 free masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and other skilled workers came from Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanaon, Mahé, and other French trading posts on India's Coromandel and Malabar coasts, alongside a much larger number of enslaved Tamil labourers. Together they built much of French-era Port Louis: its fortifications, the first stone cathedral, the government buildings, and its cobbled streets.

Most free Indians were settled in Port Louis's Camp des Malabars, later absorbed into Plaine Verte, whose old street names, Goa Street, Calicut Street, Madras Street, still trace the ground it once covered. It sat alongside separate camps for other communities, Lascars, Wolof, Malagasy, and free Blacks, in the town's segregated eastern suburb. But Camp Malabar wasn't the whole story: a legal change in 1767 let free Indians on the island buy land, start businesses, and own slaves in their own right, and some used it to move well beyond the camp. One documented case, a freedwoman named Marie Rozette, held cash, slaves, and substantial landed property in a rural district by 1790, evidence that prosperous free Indians settled the land itself, not only the town quarter set aside for them.

Their trades ran from skilled manual work, masonry, carpentry, blacksmithing, tailoring, to white-collar posts: clerks, engineers, and administrative roles opened up under Governor Labourdonnais. This project's own research turned up a dated, named instance of the latter: a birth register from Port Louis in 1795 records a free Indian clerk, Pierre Moutou, "commis demeurant au camp malabar," standing godfather to a child in a family this site traces, Antoine Emmanuel Coret's son André. Pierre Moutou himself isn't an ancestor, but his entry is a rare, dated glimpse of an individual free Indian's working life.

What became of this earlier free Indian population is itself instructive. Unlike the roughly half a million indentured labourers who arrived after 1834, and who worked hard to preserve caste, language, and religious identity, Mauritius's much smaller French-period Indian population, free and enslaved alike, assimilated into the general Creole population over succeeding generations, through intermarriage and, in many cases, the same slow erosion of names and origins this site traces elsewhere. It's a real, if usually invisible, part of the story: Indian ancestry entering Mauritius's Creole population three or four generations before the word "Indian" came to mean something quite different in Mauritian life. Whether this pattern touches this family's own history directly is still an open question, not a settled one: elsewhere on this site, the Tamil great-grandfather Joseph Arnassalon is flagged as a possible, unconfirmed descendant of this same free-Indian population, rather than of the later indenture system usually assumed for Indian ancestors on Mauritius.

Slavery: the human cost

The story of slavery in Mauritius is not simply a story of oppression, though it was profoundly that. It is also a story of complex human relationships that defy simple categorisation. Some slave owners freed individual enslaved people, sometimes their own children, while the system itself continued. The legal mechanisms of manumission were labyrinthine, and freedom, when it came, was often conditional or partial.

My own ancestor Pierre Jerome, born into slavery around 1798, was freed in 1812, aged fourteen and a half, by Jean-Pierre Galichet, most likely his biological father. But the price of Pierre's freedom was paid by his mother, Jeanne Clarisse, who was substituted as "compensation" and remained enslaved. When Galichet died in 1822, he left nothing to Pierre. Pierre subsequently petitioned the Governor, Sir Lowry Cole, for his mother's freedom, citing her wish to return to Madagascar; no record has surfaced showing she ever made the journey.

These individual stories reveal the intimate cruelties of the system: a father who could free his son but not without re-enslaving the mother; a freed man who had to petition for what should have been a birthright; a woman from Madagascar whose name survives in colonial records only because of the legal machinery of her bondage.

The British: abolition and its aftermath

Britain captured Mauritius in December 1810, staging the final invasion from Rodrigues, taken the year before, after an earlier attempt at Grand Port had ended in a French victory. The terms of surrender Governor Decaen signed with the British guaranteed French colonists their language, law, and religion, an assurance the incoming administration honoured and never revoked. It was this 1810 capitulation, not the Treaty of Paris that followed four years later, that gave the French plantation owners grounds to interpret the guarantee as protecting their right to own slaves.

The Treaty of Paris in 1814 confirmed British sovereignty at the level of international law: Article VIII ceded "the Isle of France and its dependencies, especially Rodrigues and the Seychelles" to Britain, while Bourbon (Réunion) was restored to France. The same clause bundled in Mauritius's smaller dependencies too, Chagos, Agaléga, and the Cargados Carajos shoals. Chagos in particular has an unfinished coda: Britain detached it from Mauritius in 1965 to build the Diego Garcia base, and its return under a 2025 UK-Mauritius sovereignty treaty remains stalled, still awaiting the agreement of the United States.

Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, but slavery itself persisted in Mauritius until 1835, and enforcement of the trade ban was weak in the meantime. The island's own slave registers record individuals judged, in the registrar's own words, to have been "imported since the capture of the island," years after the trade was supposed to have stopped. The delay in ending slavery altogether was deliberate: the sugar economy was too valuable to disrupt, and the colonial administration moved cautiously against the powerful French planter class. When abolition finally came, it included a system of "apprenticeship" that kept formerly enslaved people bound to their former owners for years, and compensation was paid to the slave owners, not to the enslaved.

Freeing a single enslaved person, not just the colony-wide abolition described above, came with its own price tag. Governor Farquhar's Proclamation of 30 December 1814 required whoever granted a manumission to hand over a cash sum, nominally so the newly freed person would not become a burden on the colony, before a certificate would be issued. Governor Sir Lowry Cole's Ordinance No. 21 of 27 January 1827 reduced that sum from 100 to 25 rix dollars but kept the requirement itself in place, and it was Governor Colville's Ordinance No. 43 of February 1829 that finally abolished the fee outright and created the office of the Protector of Slaves. Vendredi Chaillet's manumission by his own daughter on 4 May 1827, just months after Cole's reduced fee took effect, shows how families worked around the requirement in practice: rather than pay the cash sum, she gave her father one of her own slaves in its place.

The UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database records these compensation payments in meticulous detail, linking named slave owners to specific sums. For researchers tracing Creole ancestry, this database is both an invaluable genealogical resource and a sobering reminder of how the system valued property over people.

Abolition freed a population the colonial church had baptised into Catholicism by law, under the Code Noir, but had done little to serve in practice. Jacques-Désiré Laval, a Norman-born priest of the Holy Ghost Fathers who had trained and briefly practised as a doctor before entering the priesthood, arrived on the island on 14 September 1841, six years after final emancipation, to a parish of the poorest and least educated among the newly freed. He learned Kreol, lived among his parishioners rather than apart from them, and treated the sick with his medical training alongside his pastoral work.

Laval is credited with converting some 67,000 people over the more than two decades he spent on the island. He died on 9 September 1864; thirty thousand mourners are recorded at his funeral, and he was buried at Sainte-Croix, where his tomb still draws an annual pilgrimage every September. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1979, the first member of his own religious order to be so honoured, and he is venerated today as the Apostle of Mauritius: the man credited with making a faith imposed on the enslaved by law into one their descendants kept freely.

British rule itself lasted until 1968, and the century and a half between abolition and independence carried Mauritius through indenture, two new waves of immigration, a world war, and a hard-fought political transition, each covered in its own section below.

The great experiment: Indian indenture

On Sunday afternoon, 2 November 1834, the ship Atlas sailed into Port Louis harbour carrying 36 Hill Coolies of the Dhangar people, recruited from the hill country of Bihar and then living in Calcutta, under a five-year contract signed with George Charles Arbuthnot of Hunter-Arbuthnot & Company. Arbuthnot's letter asking Governor Nicolay for permission to land them echoed the same language the manumission law used for freed slaves almost word for word, requesting they be allowed ashore "under guarantee that they shall not become a charge on the Colony." Permission came through the following afternoon, and on the morning of 4 November the labourers stepped onto Mauritian soil near the old Custom House, a few hundred metres from where the Aapravasi Ghat immigration depot would later stand, before being marched to Hunter-Arbuthnot's Belle Alliance sugar estate in Rivière du Rempart to work the cane fields alongside the 190 to 200 enslaved people already there.

Arbuthnot's shipment was a private arrangement between one company and one estate, but it served as the proof of concept for what the British government came to call "the great experiment": whether Indian labour could replace what abolition had taken from the sugar colonies. Mauritius went first, and went alone for years. It was not until January 1838, some four years later, that the first government-sanctioned shipment left Calcutta for the Caribbean, the Whitby and Hesperus, carrying labourers to British Guiana under a scheme organised by the planter John Gladstone and sanctioned by Act of Parliament. By the time indenture reached the West Indies, Mauritius had already been running the system, and refining its practical machinery of contracts, wages, and shipping, for years, a head start that made the island the empire's working model for how the whole scheme could function elsewhere.

What began with 36 men grew fast: by May 1839, less than five years after the Atlas, more than 25,000 Indian labourers had arrived in Mauritius. Between 1834 and 1920, approximately 450,000 in total were brought to the island, fundamentally transforming its demographics. Mauritians still mark 2 November each year, Arrival of Indentured Labourers Day, at the Aapravasi Ghat, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The conditions of indenture were often barely distinguishable from slavery. Labourers were bound by contract, their movement restricted, their wages frequently withheld. Many never returned to India. Their descendants today form the majority of the Mauritian population, and their arrival reshaped the meaning of the word "Creole," which increasingly came to refer specifically to those of African and Malagasy descent, distinguishing them from the Indo-Mauritian majority.

This era's worst single event had nothing to do with indenture itself: on 29 April 1892, a cyclone struck Mauritius directly, killing over 1,200 people, injuring roughly 4,000, leaving some 50,000 homeless, and destroying a third of Port Louis. It remains, to this day, the deadliest natural disaster in the island's recorded history. It touches my own family: my grandfather Millen, then ten years old, lived through it, and the detail that came down in family memory is a small one, the butter-bean curry, kari gro pwa, that was dinner while the storm raged outside (see his profile on the Genealogy strand).

Chinese Mauritius, and the laboutik sinwa

Chinese arrivals in Mauritius predate indenture by decades. A small number came from Sumatra as early as the 1740s, but the sustained migration began in the 1780s and grew through the 1820s, when most new arrivals came from Guangdong (Kwangtung) province in south-eastern China. Two groups, Cantonese and Hakka, made up the bulk of this migration, and the numerical balance between them shifted over time: the earliest arrivals were mostly Cantonese, but Hakka speakers from Meixian came to dominate numerically as the community grew, with a long-running rivalry between the two groups that echoed divisions from the mainland. Many Cantonese families eventually moved on to Réunion and Madagascar rather than remain a minority within the island's own Chinese community. By the 1940s, immigration had concentrated a large Chinese community around Port Louis's Royal Road, establishing one of Africa's oldest Chinatowns.

Unlike the indentured Indian labourers who arrived in the same period under contract to the sugar estates, most Chinese immigrants came independently, and overwhelmingly into trade rather than agricultural labour. Their most visible and lasting institution was the laboutik sinwa, "la boutique chinoise" in French, the Chinese-run corner shop that became, for a hundred years, the commercial heart of almost every Mauritian neighbourhood, selling everything from groceries to hardware from a small wooden-and-tin building at the local crossroads. Chinese shopkeepers extended credit to their customers through the carnet laboutik, a running tab settled when the harvest or the month's wages came in, effectively acting as the neighbourhood's informal bank as much as its grocer. The establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 sharply curtailed contact between Mauritius and mainland China for the following three decades, and it was only after China's economic reforms from around 1980 that new migration resumed.

This history touches my own family, though not through direct ancestry. My great-aunt Lisa, Louisa Victorien, married a Chinese Mauritian, Emile Lam Yee Song, who like so many of his community ran a laboutik sinwa. Lisa herself went to live in his family's home in China for twelve years, a rare, lived connection back to the country most Sino-Mauritian families had otherwise left behind for good.

A cousin once removed of mine, Solange, likewise married a Chinese Mauritian, Pierre, who also kept a laboutik sinwa. They had three children, each given both a Christian name and a Chinese name, the everyday bilingual identity common to Sino-Mauritian families of the period. Pierre travelled to China during the Communist era to visit his brother, and took with him the gift of a shirt, which his brother declined, preferring to wear the plain, collarless Communist-style shirt instead. It's a small moment, but a telling one: two brothers, one in Mauritius and one in China, who had grown into different worlds.

Interwar Mauritius, and the road to independence

The decades after Indian indenture wound down in 1920 were lean ones. The sugar economy that had underpinned the island since Labourdonnais's time was increasingly exposed to volatile world prices, and the political infrastructure that would eventually deliver independence, trade unions, the Labour Party, an organised Indo-Mauritian political voice, was built gradually across the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, well before independence itself was a realistic prospect.

The Second World War isolated Mauritius further. Between 1939 and 1942 its maritime trade routes were largely cut, deepening shortages and pushing up prices on an island already dependent on imports for basic goods. At the same time, its strategic position in the Indian Ocean gave it real military value: it served as a British naval base for anti-submarine and convoy operations and, from 1942, as the site of a new British-built airfield. The economic strain of the war years, layered on top of long-standing tension between sugar-estate owners and labourers, fed directly into the labour unrest of the 1940s that helped build the political movement for self-government.

The war touched my own family directly. My father Noël volunteered for the British Army and served with the Eighth Army across North Africa and up through Italy (see his profile on the Genealogy strand). My grandfather Reginald, known in the family as Zinal, also served with the British forces, as a despatch rider in the Middle East in the years following the war.

Constitutional reform followed in stages after 1945. Universal suffrage arrived in 1959, and the election that followed brought Dr Seewoosagur Ramgoolam's Labour Party to power, with Ramgoolam serving as chief minister and minister of finance from 1961. In 1963 he formed an all-party government with British backing, an attempt to bridge the island's ethnic and political divisions, but by 1965 economic crisis and communal tension between Hindu and Creole communities had escalated into violence serious enough that a state of emergency was declared. Ramgoolam's title changed to "premier" for the final stretch to 1968, reflecting Mauritius's growing autonomy while Britain retained formal oversight.

A pro-independence coalition won the 1967 general election with 54 per cent of the vote, and the Mauritian parliament passed the independence bill that followed. On 12 March 1968, at a ceremony at the Champ de Mars racecourse in Port Louis, Mauritius became an independent state within the Commonwealth, with Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who had led the movement for over a decade, as its first prime minister.

Thirteen founding parents

Everything in the sections above, the Compagnie des Indes' land grants, the slave ships from Madagascar and the Coromandel Coast, the Atlas and indenture, is general history until it is tied to a name. This family can make that tie thirteen times over: thirteen individuals, identified so far, who were the first of their own line to actually set foot on Mauritius, as distinct from the generations born on the island after them. Each is profiled in full on the Genealogy strand; gathered here, together, they are the concrete, personal edge of every wave of arrival this page describes.

Eleven of the thirteen sit on the paternal side, spanning the full length of the French colonial and slave-owning period this page covers; two, Adrien and Philomène, sit on the maternal side, arriving over a century later under indenture. Three other ancestors with documented or inferred non-Mauritian ancestry, Alcide François, Amélina Allibacus, and Joseph Arnassalon, are not on this list: the evidence available so far points to all three having been born on the island themselves, which makes their own, still-unidentified immigrant parents the true founding generation on those threads, not yet named. Philomène Salomah's own place is the one genuine open question in the list as it stands: her name carries a Tamil identity (Lachimee, almost certainly a Mauritian rendering of Lakshmi) as clearly as her husband Adrien's immigration record does, but no document yet says whether she arrived from India herself or was born in Mauritius to Tamil immigrant parents, the same open question that applies to Alcide, Amélina, and Joseph. She is included here provisionally rather than settled either way.

What does "Creole" mean?

The word "Creole" has meant different things at different times in Mauritius. In the early colonial period, it referred to anyone born on the island, including the children of French settlers. Gradually it narrowed to mean those of African, Malagasy, and mixed descent. After Indian indenture changed the island's demographics, it became an ethnic marker distinguishing the Afro-Malagasy population from the Indo-Mauritian majority.

"Creole" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere it's used, and even within the West Indies the term is genuinely contested rather than settled. In Louisiana, the traditional benchmarks of Creole identity were native birth, the French language, and Roman Catholicism, a definition wide enough to include both white descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers and people of mixed Black and white ancestry, which is exactly why the term has long been contested there along racial lines. The wider Caribbean is no more settled on the question: the word is embraced in St Lucia and Dominica, where French influence runs deep, but used only rarely, and often pejoratively, in Jamaica. The Jamaican-British scholar Stuart Hall, who wrote extensively on Caribbean identity and creolization, treated the term as inherently unstable, a product of abrupt, often violent ruptures in history rather than a single settled culture anyone could simply opt into. In Trinidad, the word usually means something narrower still, Afro-Trinidadian, in implicit contrast to the island's Indo-Trinidadian population, a usage critics have called Afro-centric for excluding a community nearly as large as the one the word is taken to cover.

In West Africa, the word points somewhere else again, and its history resists the easy story of freed slaves too. The Krio of Sierra Leone descend from several distinct groups resettled in and around Freetown from 1787 onward: the free Black poor of London, evacuated there by British abolitionists rather than freed from slavery on British soil, where large-scale slavery was never practised; Black Loyalists who had fought for Britain in the American Revolutionary War and were resettled first in Nova Scotia and then, in 1792, in Sierra Leone itself; Jamaican Maroons, the free descendants of self-liberated escaped slaves, deported after an uprising in the 1790s and landed at Freetown in 1800; and, after Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, tens of thousands of "Liberated Africans" rescued by the Royal Navy from intercepted slave ships. Krio traders later carried the identity, and the name, along the West African coast into Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea; a small Creole community descended from them, numbering in the low thousands, still lives in Senegal today.

Mauritius took a narrower path than any of these. Here, a Creole is someone descended from slavery, or from the free non-white population of the colonial era, sharing (at least nominally) the Catholic faith the enslaved were required to adopt under the Code Noir. Mauritian Creoles span the full range of colour from black African to very light-skinned, but not European: the island's white minority belongs to the census's "General Population" alongside Creoles, yet is not itself considered Creole. Descent, not colour, is what draws the line.

Today, the Mauritian census uses the term "General Population," a category that encompasses Creoles and others who do not identify as Hindu, Muslim, or Sino-Mauritian. It was this category that I named when a teacher asked my ethnicity on my first day at school in England in 1967. She told me it was not an ethnicity. In a sense, she was right: it was a bureaucratic residual category, not an identity. But what it contained was one of the most complex and remarkable stories of human mixing in the world.

The rainbow nation, and the malaise créole

Mauritius is often described, by visitors and by the island's own government, as a "rainbow nation": proof that a population built from slavery, indenture, and successive waves of immigration can still cohere as one people. Joseph Stiglitz gave that description its most widely read recent statement in his essay "The Mauritius Miracle," published on 7 March 2011 and syndicated to newspapers on several continents, crediting the island's growth to universal education, a functioning welfare state, and what he read as a deliberate political choice to build unity out of a population with, in his own phrase, "potential religious, ethnic, and political differences." It is a genuinely admiring piece, and much of its economic argument holds up well over a decade later. But it takes the cohesion largely as given, a background condition the policy argument works from rather than a claim that itself needs testing.

The historian Megan Vaughan tested it, in Creating the Creole Island (2005), and reached a different conclusion. Mauritius, she wrote, remains, in her own words, "deeply anxious and divided, containing many different islands of exile and exclusion." Her subject was the Creole community specifically, the very category this page has just spent several sections defining, and she found in it the same grammar of absence already visible above in Barbara Brown's classroom question: Creoles, in her phrase, "are those who are not," not Hindu, not Muslim, not Tamil, not Chinese, not white, a residue said to lack any culture of its own and to carry what is known on the island as la malaise créole, a stigma of poverty and marginality laid on top of the ordinary poverty itself. Every other community on the island traces its origin outward, to India, China, or Europe, however much embellishment that tracing sometimes involves; only the Creole community's own African, Malagasy, Indian, Chinese, and European origins have simply been allowed to be forgotten.

Vaughan's argument is not only definitional. Benjamin Moutou, the historian and former civil servant who later sat on Mauritius's Truth and Justice Commission investigating slavery's long afterlife, described an institutional episode to me directly, from a period when he was advising Navin Ramgoolam. A final list of civil service promotions to Assistant Secretary, the grade immediately below Permanent Secretary, was brought to Ramgoolam for his approval: fifty-four names. Ramgoolam went through it and tore it up. He could not see a single Creole on the list, he said. The reply he got, from either the minister responsible for the civil service or a Permanent Secretary, Moutou was not certain which, was direct: "But I don't know any Creoles." Fifty-four promotions, and whoever had compiled the list had apparently not needed to notice the absence until a Prime Minister pointed it out.

I did not need Vaughan's book to tell me which account was closer to the Mauritius I had actually lived in and returned to. I had it confirmed directly, in a conversation I neither invited nor expected, at Sir Anerood Jugnauth's own home in Vacoas, sometime in the early months of 2012. He was serving as President of Mauritius, a post he had held since October 2003, while his son Pravind led the MSM in his place. Jugnauth and Paul Bérenger's MMM were in talks at the time to remake the coalition the two parties had run together, on and off, since 1991; the alliance did reform that April and collapsed again two years later, in April 2014. Jugnauth stepped down from the presidency that same March and returned to office as Prime Minister in December 2014, at the head of a different coalition.

I asked him what he saw as the real difference between the MSM and the MMM, the two parties then negotiating to run together. He said there was none of any consequence. Then, unprompted, he told me what he did see as a difference: between himself and Paul Bérenger personally. Bérenger, he said, believed the role of government was to raise the standard of the population as a whole. He believed that individual leaders within a government should aim to raise the standard of their own community instead. In the same conversation, unprompted again, he told me he was tired of people talking about la malaise créole. It did not exist, he said.

I had not expected either answer from a man who had already spent some sixteen years, across two earlier terms, as Prime Minister of Mauritius by the time he gave them. Neither was campaign language, and he offered neither as a criticism of himself. Both were simply how he saw things, said plainly, in his own home, to a visitor he had no particular reason to impress.

I put it to Paul Bérenger myself, later, at his own home in Floréal. He was not surprised: he told me he already knew this about Jugnauth. What surprised him was that Jugnauth had told it to me at all, a visitor he barely knew.

Between them, the two men who led Mauritius's government for most of its independent history, and the historian who watched a Prime Minister tear up a promotions list over exactly this question, describe, from three different vantage points and without much ceremony, precisely the tension Vaughan's book identifies from the outside. A leader can believe, as Jugnauth told me he did, that raising his own community is part of the job, and in the same breath insist that the very grievance Vaughan writes about does not exist. A Prime Minister can act, as Ramgoolam did by Moutou's account, on the assumption that Creole underrepresentation is real and worth tearing up a list over, while the machinery beneath him runs on people who, by their own account, simply don't know any Creoles to promote. Stiglitz's cohesion and Vaughan's malaise créole are not, on this evidence, two incompatible readings of the same island. They are closer to two levels of the same system: a state that funds one national health service and one national school system for everyone, exactly as Stiglitz describes, resting on top of a political and administrative culture in which, by the accounts of three people who worked inside it, a community's absence from the list could still go unnoticed until someone with the standing to tear it up happened to look.