Green Island
My time as a 'volunteer consultant' in Mauritius (10 minute read)
The Pacific might be a larger ocean, but the Indian Ocean is the more inhospitable to humans. While the Pacific is scattered with islands, and has spawned many languages and cultures, the Indian Ocean is largely empty from the east of Madagascar to Australia’s western coast. The only land is a few clusters of tiny, remote islands, most of which few people know about.
One island that has made the news for all the wrong reasons is Christmas Island. It’s around 350 km south of Indonesia and 1500 km from Australia, and it’s mostly known as an Australian migrant detention centre (although currently empty). It’s also notorious among those who study invasive species, because the yellow crazy ant, which arrived there in the 1990s, has wiped out about a third of its population of red crabs, a crucial part of the ecosystem (check out this great segment from David Attenborough).
Another thousand kilometres to the west, are the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, currently inhabited by a few hundred people descended from Malay plantation workers taken there in the nineteenth century. The next land is nearly 7000 kilometres further west again, the remote Chagos Islands, the largest of which is Diego Garcia. These, too, had plantation workers, but they aren’t there now, and that’s a story in itself.
If you’ve never heard of the Chagos Islands, you’re not alone. I was 30 when I first heard of them and their bitter history. I’ve never been there, and I certainly never will, but since I’m passing them on my imaginary journey across the Indian Ocean, I’ll pause and share what I know, because the people of the Chagos Islands deserve to be heard.
Although people from the Maldives knew about these islands, they were uninhabited until the 18th century, when the French brought African slaves to work on coconut plantations. When Britain invaded and took over Mauritius from the French in 1810, they also took possession of the Chagos Islands. The British added to the Chagos population by taking indentured workers from India, who were nominally volunteers, but in reality suffered terrible conditions.
When Mauritius became independent in the late 1960s, Britain kept the Chagos Islands, by then inhabited by around 2000 people descended from the slaves and indentured workers. But it was the height of the cold war, and Britain had plans for the Chagos Islands. Or rather the Americans had plans and Britian was happy to oblige them. In order for the Americans to establish a naval base on Diego Garcia, Britain forcibly removed the residents. Although the British High Court ruled that the government acted illegally in removing the Chagos Islanders, known as Chagossians, they are still unable to go home despite fighting for decades to return.
The Chagos Islands are some of the most remote in the world. The Maldives are the closest land, and they are 1000 kilometres to the north. Mauritius is more than 2000 kilometres to the south-west, and that is where most of the Chagossians were dumped by the British (technically, they were offered the choice of Mauritius or the Seychelles, but it’s clear that what they actually wanted was to stay where they were). When I was in Mauritius, I was told they were living in abject poverty. One of their settlements was pointed out to me, made up of corrugated iron shacks. This was notable, because Mauritius is not a poor country and the Chagossian settlement was the worst housing that I saw.
It is actually Mauritius that I wanted to tell you about, because I spent three months volunteering there and I’ve got so many stories. However, I thought it was important to highlight the remoteness of the Indian Ocean islands first, and then I got sidetracked by something which had a great impact on me when I heard about it. What shocked me at the time was the recent nature of the events. I was in Mauritius in 2002, when I was 30, and the expulsion of the Chagossians had happened around the time I was born.
Mauritius is another 2000 kilometres west of the Chagos Islands (there’s one other island in between, Rodrigues, but I’ll return to that in a couple of weeks). It’s the size of Rakiura/ Stewart Island in the south of New Zealand, but has a population of 1.2 million. Like the Chagos Islands, Mauritius wasn’t inhabited until the French took slaves there. Later, the British took indentured Indian workers too, and it’s their descendants who make up most of the population – nearly 70%. Descendants of the African slaves make up just over 25%, and people descended from the French and Chinese make up the rest.
In Mauritius, I had a fascinating introduction to linguistics, when I began learning the local language. Most Mauritians are trilingual, they speak English, French and their unique local language, Kreol Morisien (check out this video to hear it spoken). The way things work is that there are different languages for different circumstances. In government, the language is English. In banks and shops (but not market stalls), the language is French. In the home and on the street, including markets, the language is Kreol. I spoke no French, so made an effort to learn the local Kreol. I can still remember my delight in being able to request my dal puri en tigit piman (it’s a lentil flour pancake with curry and I always asked for a little bit of chilli, because otherwise it came with far too much). Another useful thing I learned was how to ask what various food items were by saying ki ete sa? The first time I used that phrase, I pointed to something battered and deep fried. The answer I got was piman, meaning it was a whole chilli. I decided not to have that and had the brinzal (eggplant) instead.
My voluntary work in Mauritius was with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation. I’d heard about their work, and it seemed as if there was a lot of overlap between my work in New Zealand and the situation in Mauritius. I really wanted an adventure, but not a tourist adventure. I wanted to do something different. So I emailed one of the managers there (someone I’d met at a conference) and asked if there would be something useful I could do if I came and volunteered for three months. He said sure, so I saved my money and negotiated leave without pay from my job, and off I went.