Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 30

Anjali Prabhu

Île de France (today’s Mauritius) and Île Bourbon (Réunion island) occupy an important, if often still overlooked, place in colonial and African history and literature. Mauritius is 550 miles east of Madagascar and about 2,300 miles from the Cape of Good Hope. It is a small island that was traversed by Arabs before the Portuguese arrived as they made their way to India. But it was the Dutch, the French, and the British who would follow, with aspirations for trade in East India. Ships would halt at the islands after passing the Cape of Good Hope and then taking the inner, and more sheltered, route (between Madagascar and Africa) on their way to the Indies. Due to the relative safeness of Mauritius’ harbor compared to Réunion’s coast, Mauritius’ Port Louis became a coveted and contested port, “stella clavisque maris indici,” or the star and the key to the Indian Ocean.¹ Of course, the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, would change the island’s privileged position. As Britain and France became key players in the Indian Ocean and on the Indian subcontinent, Mauritius and Réunion were tossed between them. In 1810, Britain annexed Mauritius while leaving Réunion island to the French. By this time, a French India was a lost dream and France focused on its African strongholds, having no interest in disputing Mauritius or winning it back. There is no significant population on Mauritius with British ancestry because Britain never settled the island. The presence of a governor and other administrators who were posted there for limited periods sufficed to retain this strategic “French” island, where, nevertheless, ships docked and were replenished throughout its maritime history. It is for this reason that we see uninterrupted French colonial culture in Mauritius and Réunion, although British policies would radically change how the same culture developed in Mauritius through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.