Port Louis - Post Report Question and Answers

Mauritius is a country of "communities" descended from the various groups who settled here, either willingly or unwillingly, and although there is no outright antagonism it is a de facto segregated society. Whites are primarily the descendants of French settlers, own most of the arable land, and control the big corporations now expanding into Africa. Kreols are the descendants of African and mixed-race slaves brought by the French and are the least represented in government and business, despite having contributed the most to music (sega and seggae) and culture. The Sino-Mauritians, mostly descendants of Cantonese, have been here since at least the 1790s and control the retail/commercial trade. The Indo-Mauritians, the most recent arrivals due to the British Empire's "Great Experiment" now control government, administration, and are major players in the business community. Other than rioting in 1999 after a popular activist and seggae singer, Kaya, was beaten to death in police custody, I know of no race riots or ongoing, explicit discrimination. The Muslim community suffers some suspicion due to the fact that most of the imams are expats and the Hindu-controlled government is extremely wary of Islamic extremism, but there is no terrorism threat here. You will occasionally run into a Franco-Mauritian (or an expat white South African) with some nasty things to say about the other groups, but I've not encountered it personally and I'm told this occurs less and less as people travel abroad and bring back European spouses. There are social clubs around the island that operate similarly to US country clubs. The Dodo Club down south seems to be lily-white and the Gymkhana Club is reported to be more friendly to white foreigners than white Mauritians, but all these issues are word-of-mouth. The most important thing to remember is that as an American, your status as a foreigner trumps any racial or religious category within Mauritian society, so we get treated better than our co-religionists or people with the same skin tone as us. My language teacher told me flat out that I wasn't white, I was foreign. - Jun 2014

No. - Feb 2009