I thought that this piece would take a couple of days to research. Two months on and I’m still interviewing people, still gathering information on what was possibly the most traumatic series of events in 20th century Mauritius.
For the sake of length I’ve also cut this newsletter into three. The first part, today, is a tentative narrative of what happened; the second gives more political context re. the fight for and against independence, and the third is made up of witness accounts of the events which enrich and question the first narrative you’ll read today.
Before I begin to talk about the riots, I have to define the terms you’ll see often in this piece and in Mauritian written media (newspapers, books, social media etc.)
(a) ‘Creole’: Mauritian Creoles are descended from Africans and Malagasy people, both enslaved and free. Rosabelle Boswell wrote in Le Malaise Créole: Ethnic Identity in Mauritius (2006) that Creoles have experienced ‘both fragmentation and hybridization, such that three hundred years later, Creoles are a people of mixed African, Indian, Chinese and European heritage.’ They identify and are identified as Creole and represent about 30 percent of the Mauritian population, or approximately 360,000 people.
This figure is not exact because (i) we haven’t had an ethnic identity census here since 1972 (ii) Creoles are agglomerated into an essentially meaningless, colonial-era term called ‘general population’, along with Franco-Mauritians, Indo-Mauritians who have converted to Catholicism and other mixed-race Mauritians who do not have African ancestors.
In Mauritian media you will often hear of Creoles identified as ‘Catholic’. It is common practice here to use one’s religion as a blanket term for one’s ethnicity. We see this in the case of Indo-Mauritians (‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’) and Creoles (‘Catholic’) –but not for Sino-Mauritians (‘Chinese’) and Franco-Mauritians (often just referred to as ‘blan’ – ‘whites’) – and though many (if not most) Creoles are Catholics, it’d be wrong to subsume an entire ethnic population under the religion.
Unlike other ethnicities, too, there is also the distinct impression that ‘Creole’ is a pejorative term and that it is somehow more polite to say ‘Catholic’.
(b) ‘Muslim’: Indo-Mauritians of Muslim faith, who represent about 17% of the population or 204,000 people (a figure is only a gross estimate, once again, because of the country’s failure to provide a proper ethnic and religious census since 1972).
In 2018, l’express published a number of articles to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mauritius’ independence. A few of those pieces were on the racial riots. They quickly went viral, and the comments on social media were incendiary: some accused l’express of wanting to cause another ‘bagarre raciale’; others interrogated, once again, the narrative of the riots, the lore that surrounded them; some said that for the sake of the country, no-one should bring those riots up again.
In Mauritian history books I’m often surprised to find the racial riots summarised in one or two paragraphs, described in cloudy, obscurantist language. Some of these ‘accounts’ are careful to depoliticise the events by blaming thugs on ‘both sides’. Some highlight only the brave stories that emerged from the riots: Creole and Muslim families working together, hiding and protecting each other.
Though the intricacies of the 1968 riots are still unclear, it is crucial for us as a country to examine what happened as precisely as we can. The riots are arguably the most traumatic event of the 20th century in Mauritius. They were sporadic, and though the height of violence occurred in January, the people I interviewed said that the violence had broken out over several months – this wasn’t a one-time conflagration.
And the riots engendered a thorough cultural and ethnic remapping of the island, as Creoles left the capital en masse for towns in the Plaines Wilhems, abandoning their homes and entire livelihoods. A significant amount of those who fled would also leave Mauritius for Australia. This migration of Creole families is the story of one of the biggest displacements in Mauritian history.
The most thorough narrative I’ve found so far on the riots of 1968 is written by Jean-Claude de l’Estrac, in his book Passions Politiques: Maurice 1968-1982. He draws on newspaper reports, a variety of books and, crucially, the British administration’s report on the riots – we were still a British colony at the time, though in just three months after the worst of the rioting we’d be an independent nation. The report, ‘Background and reasons for outbreak of communal violence between Muslims and Creoles in Port Louis in January 1968’ (part of a dossier named Internal security and riots in Mauritius, 1968) is not available in the National Library of Mauritius – a marker of how sensitive the events still are, given that this dossier is of national importance – and is housed in Kew Gardens instead.
I’ve translated extracts from pages 13-28 here, with a number of amendments in the order of paragraphs to establish a clear timeline.
I: Gang Wars
A police communiqué on the 13th January 1968 reads as follows: ‘at about 9.50pm, the Venus cinema in Bell Village was attacked by a group of hooligans. The screen, the sound system and seats have been damaged. Windows have been broken. A car parked outside the building has been lightly damaged and one of its passengers has been injured.’
“Take cover when the ‘Mafia’ strikes” wrote local journalist Shah Nawaz in the daily newspaper Star on Wednesday 17thJanuary 1968, in an article that described the scene at the Venus.
Creoles belonging to a gang named Mafia had come to punish the owner of the Venus cinema. The owner was an Indo-Mauritian man of Hindu faith. He accused his Creole employees of letting Creoles into the cinema free of charge; he’d sought the help of a rival gang named Istanbul to ‘resolve’ the issue.
Istanbul’s members were Indo-Mauritian Muslims residing in Port Louis; the ‘Mafia’ gang was newer, its members brought together from different suburbs in the West of Port Louis, particularly La Butte, Bain-des-Dames, Cassis and Vallijee.
These two rival gangs had long sought to control the drug trade and prostitution in the capital. Attacks and retaliations of one gang to another were regularly signalled to the police.
The fights escalated into warfare in 1968, and had been two years in the making.
In the records of the police, it had all started with a complaint lodged on the 28th November 1966 [nb: before the birth of either gang]. A maid of Muslim faith had been kidnapped by a well-known pimp in Port Louis, also of Muslim faith. He’d taken her to Roche Bois in a Creole-owned brothel, where she was raped by the owner, an ‘Indo-Creole’ man. Police reports indicate that the officers didn’t believe the woman’s testimony. Regardless of whether they believed her or not, this version of events made its way to the Muslim community of Plaine Verte, who were incensed. A week later, a group of young Muslims from Plaine Verte attacked the brothel and injured the owner’s brother-in-law.
A new organisation called Hizbullah was then formed: its members claimed the organisation would defend Muslim moral values. The police report stated that the supposed ‘real objective of the organisation is to prevent Creole brothel owners from employing prostitutes of Muslim faith.’
The members of Hizbullah were often in conflict with another Creole gang named Texas, which controlled a prostitution network in Roche Bois, Cité La Cure and Grande Riviere Nord-Ouest.
Hizbullah dissipated after the arrest and incarceration of several of its members. The Istanbul gang took its place.
In the beginning, Istanbul and Texas collaborated together in order to collectively fleece brothel owners and infamous restaurants in Fort William and Pointe aux Sables. Their relationship soured upon the advent of the Mafia. The new Creole gang appointed themselves as protectors of Western Port Louis, defending the Creoles who were patrons of the Venus cinema and who had been harassed and terrorised by members of Istanbul. They claimed that the Venus Cinema was Mafia territory, too.
II Escalation
Gang warfare rapidly turned into racial riots, pitting Creoles and Muslims against each other. Mauritians would wake up to reports of a shattered country throughout the month of January 1968.
On the 19th of January 1968, some Creoles attacked a Muslim family in Camp Yoloff during a funeral wake. The family called upon Istanbul’s aid. Instances of sporadic violence broke out throughout the capital, and police used tear gas to break up the crowds. The following evening a Creole man was attacked by some Muslims in Cité Gabriel Martial; he died from his injuries, the first reported death from the fights. The riots begin in earnest on the 21st with an explosion of violence.
A piece from Le Mauricien on the 23/01/1968 reads as follows: ‘The city of Port Louis wakes up, this morning, in mourning and in sorrow. Never before in our history have Mauritians fought each other in this way, in the nerve centre of the nation, where they live and work together […] Innocents – peaceful inhabitants of a neighbourhood in the city, who were simply walking on the street – were attacked with bladed weapons […] The toll of these bloody fights: seven dead and several wounded, some grievously so.”
The authorities declared a state of emergency. Armed policemen patrolled the streets and opened fire on rioters upon occasion.
The number of dead and wounded continued to increase; there were reports of fights across the country but the violence was concentrated in Port Louis. Hundreds of families found refuge among relatives and friends in Coromandel, Beau Bassin and Rose Hill. Port Louis became a dead city; offices slowed down their operations, and shops closed. The city was awash with rumours, such as the assassination of imams or Catholic priests.
III The Politicians
Leaders of the main political parties desperately called for peace. The Prime Minister of the Labour Party, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, asked Gaetan Duval – the head of the PMSD and ‘leader’ of the Creole community in Mauritius – and Abdul Razack Mohamed of the Comité d’action Musulman (CAM) to stand by his side and calm the nation’s spirits. The initiative failed.
[Duval, as we’ll see next week, was rumoured to have had quite the role in the riots. His party, the PMSD, had a strong Creole and Franco-Mauritian base; the PMSD leadership stood against independence and fear-mongered about the ‘Hindu peril’, saying that Creoles, Franco-Mauritians and other minority groups would be threatened by the Indo-Mauritian population – then, as now, the majority population by the late 1960s – if independence came to pass. Of course, on the surface, this doesn’t explain why the violence was between Creoles and Muslims, who according to this rationale would be united against independence and against the so-called ‘Hindu hegemony’. This is the same rationale that Duval used to exonerate himself when accused of fuelling the riots.]
The police report stated that politicians had their share of responsibility in the riots. They described Duval’s ‘excited and furious’ rhetoric, his animosity towards Muslim youth of Port Louis and his lack of respect for the law; Razack Mohamed was ‘uncontrollable’ with a ‘violent temper’ as per the policemen. And both men had ties to the gangs: Mafia to Duval, Istanbul to Mohamed.
(The Mauritian secret police also believed that antagonism between both communities had aggravated in 1967, after the kidnapping of a politician’s wife. The kidnapper had been a notorious activist of the PMSD; the politician was one of the party’s leaders. The kidnapper was an Indo-Mauritian Muslim man; the politician Franco-Mauritian; his wife Canadian. The PMSD base was primarily Creole and Franco-Mauritian and felt particularly ‘aggravated’, according to the report.”)
Ramgoolam, urged by Mohamed, quickly accepted to call upon British forces to quell the riots. The Mauritian police – staffed mostly by Creoles at the time – were believed to be biased. The British troops arrived on the 23 January 1968. Slowly, they were able to restore a sense of order on the island, but the toll of the riots was heavy: an unestimated number of dead, hundreds of houses evacuated and pillaged, whole neighbourhoods abandoned, exiled families in both ethnic/religious communities.
Of the 1022 arrests made in January, 152 were for murder; 245 for dangerous driving; 188 for weapons possession.
And on the 12th of March 1968, we celebrated the birth of Mauritian independence.
This didn’t mark the end of the riots; violence broke out between April-June 1968 (de L’Estrac doesn’t give an exact date), where two people were killed, ten injured and around thirty incidents of arson were reported. Port Louis was under curfew, and police organised daily raids where they seized weapons of all kinds, including homemade bombs.
Next month, I’ll explore the possible political ties to the riots and the links between the 1968 riots and the ones of 1965. See you then! - A
fascinating material, once again. This is very presumptuous of me but it might be easier for those seeking content on Mauritius and the Indian Ocean to find you if you had "Mauritius" and "Journalism" in your Substack title, perhaps after a colon? All best!