Mauritius

• 1. Introduction

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  Mauritius sits roughly 1100 nautical miles off the southeastern coast of East Africa, east of Madagascar, an island country in the Indian Ocean. The main island was, for most of its history, completely empty of people. No human had set foot on it until Arab sailors are thought to have reached it around the year 975, naming it Dina Arobi. It carried no native terrestrial mammals at all. That emptiness shaped everything that followed. It allowed flightless birds to evolve, including a creature whose name would become a byword for extinction. And it made the island a prize, passed from Portuguese to Dutch to French to British hands, each leaving a name behind. How does an uninhabited volcanic rock become the only country in Africa where Hinduism is the most practised religion? How does it become the only African nation the Economist Democracy Index ranks as a full democracy? And why is a tiny archipelago more than a thousand miles to the north still the subject of a fight reaching the world's highest court?

• 2. A Procession Of Names

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  Dina Arobi was the first name recorded for the island, appearing on a 1502 map called the Cantino planisphere. That map was smuggled out of Portugal for the Duke of Ferrara by an Italian described as a spy, Alberto Cantino. In 1507 Portuguese sailors reached the uninhabited island after being blown off course on their route to India through the Mozambique channel. The navigator Diogo Fernandes Pereira is named as the first European known to land there. He called it Ilha do Cisne, the Island of the Swan. The name appears on early maps garbled as Cirne or Do-Cerne, where the letter s of the Portuguese Cisne became an r. The Mascarene Islands themselves took their name from Pedro Mascarenhas, Viceroy of Portuguese India, after his 1512 visit. Rodrigues Island was named for the explorer Diogo Rodrigues, who came upon it in 1528. The name that stuck arrived in 1598. A Dutch squadron under Admiral Wybrand van Warwyck landed at Grand Port and named the island Mauritius, honouring Prince Maurice of Nassau of the Dutch Republic. The French later renamed it Isle de France. When the British took it on the 3rd of December 1810, the name reverted to Mauritius. In French it is still called Maurice, and Moris in Mauritian Creole.

• 3. Settlers And The Enslaved

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  The Dutch first inhabited the island in 1638, drawn by its ebony trees. From this base the navigator Abel Tasman set out to find the Great Southern Land, mapping parts of Tasmania, New Zealand and New Guinea. The Dutch East India Company brought enslaved Malagasy in 1639 to cut down ebony and work tobacco and sugar cane plantations. The first settlement lasted twenty years. Repeated attempts to make the colony pay failed, and the Dutch abandoned Mauritius in 1710. A 1755 article in the English Leeds Intelligencer claimed the island was given up because of long-tailed macaque monkeys that destroyed everything, earning it the name Island of Monkeys. France took control in 1715 and renamed the island Isle de France. In 1723 the Code Noir was established to regulate slavery, categorising one group of human beings as goods. The 1735 arrival of the French governor Bertrand-Francois Mahe de La Bourdonnais brought a prosperous sugar economy. He made Port Louis a naval base and shipbuilding centre, raising buildings that still stand, including part of Government House and the Line Barracks. Under French rule slaves were brought from Mozambique and Zanzibar, and the population leapt from 15,000 to 49,000 within thirty years. By the early nineteenth century there were 60,000 slaves on the island. In early 1729 Indians from Pondicherry arrived aboard a vessel called La Sirene, and their work contracts were signed in 1734 when they gained their freedom. The writer Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre lived here from 1768 to 1771, then returned to France to write Paul et Virginie, a love story that made the Isle de France famous wherever French was spoken.

• 4. Sugar And Indenture

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  Two million pounds sterling went to the planters as compensation when slavery was gradually abolished after 1833. The enslaved people themselves received nothing. The abolition reshaped the island's economy and population. To replace the lost labour, planters brought a vast number of indentured workers from India to the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers passed through the island, working sugar estates, factories, transport and construction. The British also brought 8,740 Indian soldiers. Aapravasi Ghat, in the bay at Port Louis and now a UNESCO site, was the first British colony to serve as a major reception centre for indentured servants. These labourers were not always fairly treated. A Frenchman of German origin, Adolphe de Plevitz, made himself their unofficial protector and in 1871 helped them write a petition to Governor Gordon. A commission followed and recommended measures that shaped Indian labourers' lives for the next fifty years. World War I brought a boom in sugar prices and great prosperity, and in 1919 the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate formed, including 70% of all sugar producers. The post-war recession reversed it. Sugar prices fell sharply and many estates closed, marking the end of the era of the sugar magnates who had controlled both the economy and political life.

• 5. The Road To Self-Rule

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  In 1885 a new constitution called the Cens Democratique created elected positions in the Legislative Council, though the vote was restricted mainly to the white French and a fair-skinned Indian elite who owned property. The following year Governor John Pope Hennessy nominated Gnanadicarayen Arlanda as the first Indo-Mauritian member of the ruling council, and he served until 1891. After that there was no Indo-Mauritian representation until 1926, when Dunputh Lallah and Rajcoomar Gujadhur became the first to be elected. The Labour Party was born in 1936, launched by Maurice Cure. The Belle Vue Harel Sugar Estate labourers went on strike on the 27th of September 1943, and police fired directly into the crowd, killing four labourers in what became known as the 1943 Belle Vue Harel Massacre. The 1947 Constitution widened the franchise dramatically. At the general elections of the 9th of August 1948, every adult who could write their name in one of the island's 19 languages could vote, and the previous gender and property qualifications were abolished. Also in 1948, Emilienne Rochecouste became the first woman elected to the Legislative Council. Voting on the basis of universal adult suffrage first took place on the 9th of March 1959, won by the Labour Party under Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. Six weeks before independence, the 1968 Mauritian riots in Port Louis left 25 people dead. Independence was proclaimed on the 12th of March 1968, with Ramgoolam as first prime minister and Queen Elizabeth II remaining head of state as Queen of Mauritius.

• 6. Republic And Rivalries

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  Paul Berenger founded the opposition Mauritian Militant Movement in 1969, and by 1971 its union-backed strikes in the port had triggered a state of emergency. Two apparent assassination attempts against Berenger in 1971 killed his supporter Fareed Muttur and the dock worker Azor Adelaide. Members of the MMM, Berenger among them, were imprisoned on the 23rd of December 1971, and he was released a year later. The power struggle between Berenger and Anerood Jugnauth peaked in March 1983. When Berenger proposed constitutional changes to strip power from the prime minister, Jugnauth asked Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to plan an armed intervention by the Indian Navy and Army to prevent a coup, under the code name Operation Lal Dora. In 1981 United States newspapers reported that the CIA planned a covert operation to support the Mauritian government during the Cold War, described as a quiet effort to slip money to it, out of fear that the island could become a Soviet naval base. On the 12th of March 1992 Mauritius was proclaimed a republic within the Commonwealth, and the last Governor-General, Sir Veerasamy Ringadoo, became the first President before being replaced by Cassam Uteem later that year. The country kept the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the United Kingdom as its final court of appeal. In 2003 Paul Berenger became the first Franco-Mauritian prime minister of the post-independence era. On the 10th of November 2024 the opposition Alliance du Changement won 60 of the 64 seats, returning Navin Ramgoolam as prime minister.

• 7. The Chagos Question

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  In 1965, three years before independence, the United Kingdom split the Chagos Archipelago away from Mauritius to form the British Indian Ocean Territory, formally established on the 8th of November 1965. Between 1968 and 1973 British officials forcibly expelled over 1,000 Chagossians to Mauritius and the Seychelles. As part of the deportation, officials have been accused of ordering the island's dog population of 1,000 to be gassed. The largest island, Diego Garcia, was leased to the United States to establish a military base, and since 1971 it has been the only inhabited atoll, home to some 3,000 UK and US personnel. The UK told the United Nations there was no permanent population, describing those removed as contract labourers. Mauritius fought back through the courts. On the 25th of February 2019 the International Court of Justice ruled by thirteen votes to one that the UK must end its administration of the archipelago as rapidly as possible. Only the American judge, Joan Donoghue, voted for the UK. The court's president, Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, said the 1965 detachment had not been based on a free and genuine expression of the people concerned. On the 22nd of May 2019 the UN General Assembly affirmed that the Chagos Archipelago forms an integral part of the territory of Mauritius, with 116 states in favour and only Australia, Hungary, Israel and Maldives supporting the UK and US. A transfer agreement was signed on the 22nd of May 2025, with Diego Garcia leased back to the UK for at least 99 years.

• 8. An Island Of The Lost And Saved

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  Before the Portuguese arrived in 1507, there were no terrestrial mammals on Mauritius. That isolation let flightless birds and large reptiles evolve, and the most famous was the dodo, a species found nowhere else. It became extinct soon after human settlement, a representative example of human-driven extinction, and it now appears as a heraldic supporter on the national coat of arms. The island is geologically young, created by volcanic activity some 8 million years ago. Its lagoons are protected from the open sea by the world's third-largest coral reef, and its highest peak is Piton de la Petite Riviere Noire at 828 metres. Less than 2% of the native forest now remains, concentrated in places like the Black River Gorges National Park in the south-west. Over 100 species of plants and animals have become extinct there. Not every story ended in loss. The echo parakeet, the Mauritius kestrel and the pink pigeon survived and are subject to intensive, successful conservation efforts that began in the 1980s. The Mauritian flying fox is the only mammal still endemic to the island. It has been threatened by government-sanctioned culling introduced in November 2015, and in October 2018 authorities approved killing 20% of the population, about 13,000 of an estimated 65,000 fruit bats. On the 25th of July 2020 the bulk carrier MV Wakashio ran aground on a coral reef, leaking up to 1,000 tonnes of heavy oil into a lagoon, one of the worst environmental disasters to strike the western Indian Ocean, a reminder of how fragile this young island's recovery remains.