Author: Kenneth Brower
Publication: Islands
Date: February 1994
URL: http://www.islands.com/articles/f05021994.asp?island=mauritius
Mauritius appeared ambiguously,
as distant islands often do. It might have been an island. It might have
been the shadow of a great bank of cloud. I would have voted shadow, I
think, except that there was no corresponding bank of cloud to cast it,
just scattered trade wind cumuli. And then my plane was over the island.
Morning light was on the mountains,
and Mauritius had color and shape. The color was unbroken green. The shapes
were familiar from high volcanic islands I had known all across the tropics
- rugged ranges of fast-eroding basalt, the peaks looking taller, in their
ruggedness, than they really were, the walls much too sheer to be so green,
the highest cusps wreathed in mist.
The mid-Indian Ocean was for me
mare incognita, and Mauritius was a new island, so this familiarity surprised
me. Lying off the coast of Madagascar, which in turn lies off southeastern
Africa, Mauritius should somehow have been more African, perhaps, yet everything
below the plane had looked just Carib-Indo-Pacific.
My first image of Mauritius, in
childhood, had been a scene in an engraving: several Dutch settlers and
their dogs confronting a giant, flightless, soon-to-be-extinct Mauritian
pigeon called the dodo. Thus, I had expected, illogically, a landscape
more flat and dull and Dutch; I had not expected these Polynesian landforms.
From the airport I drove north across
the island with a Mauritian cabbie named Gervais Bêche. In Gervais's
car I had the same feeling of déjà vu that I had from the
air. The lower slopes of the mountains were planted in sugarcane in the
same irregular, spring green rectangles one would see in Hawaii, or in
the Virgin Islands, or in Martinique. There was a single difference: At
odd intervals in the cane fields stood dark tumuli of basalt. A few of
the tumuli had been shaped into ziggurats, but most were rough piles of
basalt stones and boulders.
"Our fields grow stones," Gervais
told me, laughing. He explained that every five years or so, between plantings
of cane, the newest crop of stones is bulldozed into piles to get them
out of the way. Just exactly where the stones came from was more problematic.
It could not be, we agreed, that the soil simply eroded away to expose
boulders and stones. Clearly, there was some postvolcanic terrestrial dynamic,
some sort of geophysical oomph, that pushed the stones to the top.
Gervais was Creole, a descendant
of the African slaves who first worked the cane. The island was uninhabited
when discovered in the tenth century by Arab seamen, who named it Dinarobin
but never bothered to settle here. In the early 16th century it was rediscovered
by the Portuguese, who made landfall repeatedly and renamed the island
three or four times. They introduced pigs, cattle, monkeys, dogs, and rats
but never lingered long themselves.
It was a Dutch admiral who renamed
the island Mauritius in 1598, and his countrymen established the first
small settlements, then the sugarcane plantations. They ushered in slaves
to work the cane and ushered out the native ebony forests and the odd,
overfriendly ground bird called the dodo. In 1710 after a succession of
cyclones, floods, droughts, and pirate attacks, the Dutch abandoned their
colony, which was soon claimed by the French - who, in turn, brought thousands
of new slaves from Africa and Madagascar to work the fields.
Eventually the British took over,
abolishing slavery in 1835. The freed workers, having seen more than enough
of sugarcane, dropped their cane knives and headed for the coast, where
they became fishermen, artisans, and farmers. To work the empty cane fields,
the planters brought in contract laborers from India - both Hindus and
Muslims - luring them to Mauritius with a fine assortment of promises and
lies.
Independence came in 1968. Today
English is the official language, although the majority of islanders are
more comfortable in French, and Creole is the lingua franca of Mauritius.
"Bonjour," a Creole speaker greets you (or "Bonzour," as it is pronounced
most often). For farewell he says "Salaam."
Mauritius has a reputation for racial
harmony, and I asked Gervais if this was deserved. He assured me that it
was. And what, in his opinion, I asked, was the secret of Mauritius's success
in this age of racial strife? Gervais was at a loss: Racial harmony seemed
as natural to him as cane fields sprouting stones, and he had not thought
much about it.
"We're peaceful people here," he
said finally. "The largest group is the Hindus, and the Hindus are known
to be peaceful people."
This seemed to me an unusual answer.
Few of us are in the habit of crediting other races for our national success.
Mauritius passed outside the taxi
window. I saw flame trees, golden-shower trees, hibiscus, papaya, ginger,
plumeria, mango, breadfruit, tropical almond, taro - all of them brought
here, just as they have been introduced to islands from Hawaii to Palau
to St. John.
I spotted wild tamarind, the kudzu
of the Pacific (and of the Caribbean as well). Wild tamarind is called
koa haole in Hawaii and tangan-tangan on Guam and tan tan on St. John.
Introduced as cattle feed, the scrubby shrub takes over whole islands and
becomes an uneradicable pest.
I recognized lantana, the escaped
ornamental that is also such a plague
in Hawaii, and strawberry guava,
another Hawaiian plague. I noticed some bottle palms native to Mauritius,
but mostly I saw palms that had been introduced - coconut palms, royal
palms, traveler's palms.
As for animals, there was the mongoose,
which had been introduced here, as it was in Hawaii and the West Indies,
to control rats in the cane fields. On Mauritius, as everywhere else, it
did a poor job on the rats but an excellent job on native birds.
Before the day was done, I also
came across the West Indian toad, and the giant African snail, pests in
every archipelago I have ever visited.
And so what? The dodo went extinct
more than 300 years ago, and it is senseless, probably, to hold a grudge
against its replacements. Continuing to lament the dodo's demise is a curious
and suspect kind of nostalgia. It is hard, though, for a student of the
natural history of islands not to hold grudges and lament, and I had written
articles, and even books, about the decline of island ecosystems.
Now, as I saw the familiar alien
plants and animals in a third ocean, some sort of final piece fell into
place. I was ready to formulate a law: Oceanic islands, once remarkable
for their uniqueness - the Galápagos for its finches and tortoises,
Australia for its marsupials, Hawaii for its honeycreepers, New Zealand
for its moas, Komodo for its dragons, Mauritius for its dodoes - are remarkable
now, across vast stretches of the planet's waters, for their sameness.
Halfway across mauritius i began
to notice the scattered groups of pilgrims marching alongside the road.
The pilgrims were Hindus. In woven baskets or plastic bags they carried
offerings, alongside teams of men holding kanwar - airy, foot-powered floats
of bamboo, paper, and mirrors.
I had arrived, I learned from Gervais,
on the last day of Maha Sivaratri, a festival in honor of the god Siva.
For the week of the festival, Hindus walk from homes all over Mauritius
to Grand Bassin, a crater lake in the south, where they perform ablutions
and make offerings. Grand Bassin means "Great Pond" in French, but in the
Hindu view, the lake is bottomless and has subterranean connections with
the Ganges.
This was something new. There are
no artesian upwellings of the Ganges in Hawaii, so far as I know, nor in
Polynesia, nor Melanesia, nor Micronesia, nor the Caribbean.
I had read about the festival, and
was happy not to have missed it. Checking into my hotel, I dumped my things,
shrugged off jet lag, and, with Gervais driving, doubled back to Grand
Bassin on a pilgrimage of my own.
Traditionally, Hindu pilgrims dress
in pure white, but this Maha Sivaratri was polychromatic. The women we
passed wore saris of every color - red, saffron, silver, gold - with gold
studs in their pierced noses. Married women wore their hair parted down
the middle, the scalp of the part dyed red or orange.
It was raining intermittently, and
many of the women marched under umbrellas. Hiking up their saris slightly,
they waded flooded sections of the road. The Mauritian rain was warm, and
most of the men and boys ignored it, striding along with shirts plastered
to their flesh.
At the shore of Grand Bassin, a
throng of supplicants crowded a shoreline temple. A second temple perched
atop a hill above the crater, and a colorful river of barefoot pilgrims,
descending the steep temple path, passed a river of pilgrims ascending.
The crater was a babble of Hindi and Creole as loudspeakers cranked out
recorded religious songs, tinny and nasal. The air was fragrant with incense
and jasmine and camphor.
There was a nice informality to
the ritual. Few of the pilgrims seemed exalted or transported. Some, standing
knee-deep offshore, with their fingertips pressed together in prayer, appeared
to find private, introspective moments in the crush of humanity. Some seemed
to find those moments by splashing Ganges water on their foreheads. But
there was no great show of gravity. Instead, there was laughter and the
occasional joke.
The sacred water was scooped up
in silver pots most often, but sometimes it was carried away in cheap tin
teapots, or in ribbed plastic bottles that originally held eau de source
- springwater of a more mundane and secular nature. And once I saw the
waters of this remote tributary of the Ganges go burbling into a vodka
bottle.
The Maha Sivaratri is a strange
marriage of elegance and squalor. Hindu women in shimmering saris, bangled
and braceleted, their hair braided meticulously, their golden nose studs
exquisite, the red dots of their tikas just so on their foreheads, wade
out into a greenish slop of previous offerings to spill milk into the lake.
Or they smear the shoreline stones with white, guanolike paste. Some smash
coconuts, light candles of camphor inside the husks, then send them out
onto the water on banana- leaf rafts. Others spear bananas with sticks
of incense until they are like pincushions and commit wreathes and leis
of yellow flowers to the lake. When they are done, they walk away, leaving
it all to Siva.
Cleanup crews collect great mounds
and windrows of bruised fruit and faded flowers and coconut fragments.
The sacred monkeys of the crater - iris macaques - wait in the wings for
their biggest feast of the year. But neither man nor monkey can keep up.
A greenish sludge of leaves and harpooned bananas and plastic bags and
empty Popsicle sleeves spread out over large areas of the lake leaving
me to ponder the considerable puzzlement it would cause in Mother India
if this stuff ever resurfaced on the Ganges.
Hindi-speaking Hindus are the most
numerous of the religious groups on Mauritius - about 300,000 of them annually
make the pilgrimage to the lake - but there are many thousands of Tamils,
too, on the island, and Indian Muslims, Catholic Creoles, and Chinese Buddhists.
Mauritius is an island of religious
festivals. In mid-January the Tamils hold their largest cavadee processions,
the penitents walking on shoes of nails, their tongues and cheeks skewered.
Catholics make a less masochistic pilgrimage in honor of their Mauritian
saint, Père Laval. Then there is the Chinese Spring Festival, the
Muslim Id al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, the Hindu Divali, or Festival
of Lights, and countless others.
Traveling around the island, seeing
tower of mosque, steeple of church, white onion dome of Hindu temple, polychromatic
facade of Buddhist temple in nearly every town - and watching the colorful,
heterogenous crowds on the village streets - I developed another theory
of Mauritius. My theory ran counter to old biases. The human richness and
diversity on the new Mauritius, I began to think, must be nearly as interesting
as the unspoiled natural diversity that greeted the Dutch.
There is plenty of nature still
on Mauritius. More than a million people inhabit the island, but civilization
is clustered, leaving great areas open and green. The mountains are pristine,
from the small matterhorn of Montagne du Rempart that rises on the west
coast of the island, to the green, conical spires of Trois Mamelles, the
Three Breasts (with contours as exaggerated as Madonna in one of her pointy
bras and half again as numerous), to the sheer face of the coastal peak
called Le Morne Brabant, off which escaped slaves are said to have thrown
themselves to avoid recapture. On a windy day you can hear the ghosts of
the slaves moaning and keening around that cliff.
The most remarkable peak of all
is Mount Pieter Both, which has a balancing stone atop its summit spire.
In a sandstone desert a great boulder balanced so delicately might seem
less strange and miraculous, but in country carved of basalt I have never
seen anything like it. There are any number of stories to explain the stone.
It is a petrified milkman, according to one account. (The milkman went
back on his word to some fairies he met crossing the surrounding mountains
of the Moka Range.) It will fall off the spire at the end of the world,
according to a second account. It was supposed to have fallen at the end
of British rule, according to a third.
Nearly continuous white-sand beaches
run around the island. It is this sandy margin, more than anything, that
draws the tourists - Germans, French, South Africans, some Brits and Australians,
the rare American - and tourism is now the island's third biggest industry,
after sugar and textiles.
Beyond the sand Mauritius is bordered
by 90 miles of fringing reef. The reef is the worse for wear - overharvesting,
fish dynamiting, and sedimentation have taken their toll - but it is famous
still for its mollusks and healthy enough to support dive tours and fisheries.
Remnants of Mauritius's original
vegetation survive in the gorges of the Grande Rivière Noire and
in the low, lovely cyclone forest at Macchabée Nature Reserve. In
both places an enlightened captive breeding program seeks to restore rare
endemic birds - the Mauritius kestrel, the pink pigeon, the echo parakeet
- to healthy numbers in the wild.
Meanwhile, the introduced vegetation
of Mauritius forms a kind of climax forest in the botanical gardens at
Pamplemousses. Old tropical botanical gardens are the best kind, and Pamplemousses,
with its huge baobabs, figs, raffia palms, and giant Amazonian water lilies,
has been around for centuries.
But the longer I stayed on Mauritius,
the more it seemed to me that it is not the natural world of the island
but its people, in all their cultural variety, that are the distinction
of the place.
One night at my hotel a troupe of
Creole women danced the séga, an old African dance that has been
commercialized into a Mauritian version of the hotel show hula. The young
women were wasp-waisted, without an ounce of fat. Indeed, if the dancers
had anything on them that quivered or shook, the séga would be a
very raunchy dance, unsuitable for family entertainment.
Another night four young Tamil men
performed yoga on broken glass, to music.
On a third night a band entertained
us. The lead female singer was Indo-Mauritian, the lead male Creole. They
sang a Michael Jackson song, then Belafonte's "Island in the Sun," and
then Toto's "Africa." The music was all derivative, like the new Mauritian
ecosystem. Now and then, one singer or the other would stroll to the lectern
and flip through the music to select the next borrowed song.
There was a break between sets.
The speakers fell silent, and the night filled with a chorus of West Indian
and Malagasy toads. I had to smile. There must have been 20 or 30 of the
alien toads in the hotel's artificial pond, all singing lustily under the
stimulus of recent rains. The exotic amphibian love songs were fine counterpoint
to the exotic human love songs just now finished.
The set of the toads ended; rather,
the toads were drowned out, as the humans returned to the microphones,
launching into Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." Occasionally the night
breeze thumbed through the music on the lectern, flipping five pages at
a time, or a dozen. The Creole singer would stroll over, singing, and flip
back to the right spot. But in truth neither he nor his partner needed
to read the notes. A whole library of other people's songs was filed away
in their heads.
The wind gusted again and, watching
it race through pages of music from other lands, I found myself suddenly
doubtful about my Mauritius Theory. How could all this derivativeness replace
the biological originality that had been Mauritius?
The next evening a group called
the Beach Boy Band entertained at dinner. The four dark-skinned Creole
and Hindu musicians moved among the tables serenading the guests. One of
the Creoles had his hair in dreadlocks and played a very good flamenco
guitar. After his flamenco riff, the group did a Beatles' number, and then
The Drifters' "Stand by Me."
The Beach Boys passed by my table,
and I saw with surprise that the guitarist in dreadlocks was not Creole,
but Hindu. Hindu dreadlocks! I marveled. It seemed to me that this man
summarized perfectly the new, post-dodo polyculture of Mauritius.
The derivativeness was not lamentable,
I realized. The derivativeness was wonderful. In the new Mauritius it is
so rich and layered and unexpected that it amounts to originality.
And this, of course, is nothing
new on islands. This is exactly how things were in all remote oceanic ecosystems
before the coming of man. In their floras and faunas, the islands of the
Galápagos, Hawaii, New Zealand, Seychelles were each one a triumph
of derivation.
Mauritius has come full circle and
is now a special place again.
