In English and in French “creole” applies to people born in tropical lands originally colonized by Europeans, and of various skin color and status passed down from this earlier era of racial mixing. Creating a creole island is a story of diverse peoples taking root and merging and in the process creating something unique in language, cuisine, house-style, and other aspects of culture. Creoles are different from the generation of immigrants who came from elsewhere, whether coerced or of their own will, and different too from those who still belong to ethnic communities with their own cultures. How this by-definition composite world was created is the subject matter of this book by Megan Vaughan, to whom we owe several innovative studies on contemporary East African history. The place she looks at is Mauritius, a small and lonely island of the Indian Ocean.
Today a fourth of the Mauritian population is officially considered “creole,” and creole is construed as “of black origins,” not as creole-speaking (which almost everybody is on the island). Until the 1960s, creole had the broader meaning we have indicated, as in other tropical lands once colonized by Europeans in Latin America and the Caribbean. Identity and origins are contested matters that fasten on language and ethnicity, and history is often enlisted in their discussion in a dubious way. As Vaughan notes, “concern with origins is also a concern with authenticity.” She prefers to take creoles as who they are in contemporary Mauritius: a minority for whom slavery is a key word, a residual group whose identity has dwindled over time, and to set the historical record straight on creole ethnicity and language in due course. Mauritian slaves were quite diverse ethnically, they came from East Africa, Madagascar, and India; moreover, evidence is hard to find about African inputs in the creole language, whereas its French roots have been more easily identified by linguists.
“Unlike other groups, writes Vaughan, creoles have little in the way of remembered origins (…) they feel and are perceived as lacking an authentic culture, one which comes from some identified origins, located elsewhere (…) as if nothing which the island has produced itself through its own complex history could be real.” It is this problematic creoleness of descendants from settlers and slaves (slavery was abolished in 1835), which intrigues Vaughan. Their “malaise” and alienation brings her back to Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, both Martiniquans and forceful exponents of what was once known as psychologie de la colonization, rooted in Shakespeare's Propero and Caliban and Hegelian master-and-slave dialectics. Vaughan wants to find out how it was to be creole in Mauritius before its earliest occupants (there was no native) were numerically and culturally displaced by the Hindus and Muslims who arrived as indentured workers in the nineteenth century, when the sugar industry took off.
The first three chapters set a peculiar colonial décor, but one that is familiar to specialists of seventeenth-century European maritime expansion. Mauritius began as a watering-place, then became a fort on the Dutch East Indies trade route. The French took over in 1715 and remained in Mauritius for a century, roughly the time Vaughan is chiefly interested in, when the “creole island” was “created” and the world of slavery with it. As in other European settlements, precariousness and poverty, a siege mentality, and incessant quarrels among settlers plagued Mauritius in the first fifty years of French rule. This was a rough, male, and mobile world which contrasted with the more agriculture- and settler-oriented island of La Réunion. The 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s saw the emergence of a thriving entrepôt trade, with ships flowing from the East African coast and Madagascar (both important source of slaves) and other more distant places in the Indian Ocean. A Crown rule and a stronger administration were also established.
As elsewhere in the colonial and creole world, justice and master-slave relationships were some of the areas in which more capable and enlightened administrators saw to increase State control and regulation in the last decades of the eighteenth-century. This provided the author (after other historians of Mauritius to whom she pays an unfailingly generous tribute), with rich criminal records for the period 1741–1794. From these Vaughan draws most of her material to sketch “the creole island.” Chapters 4–9 show individuals free and enslaved in front of the judge, the court mediating worlds often at a great distance from one another culturally. The litigious side of things is often murky, sometimes murderous. Each chapter focuses on a particular case and the facts of life that surround it. They allow the author to look at many issues: who the slaves were and where they came from, relationships between whites and slaves, male relationships in a masculine place of trade and war, the masters' use of violence in labor relations, creole speech and what it reveals of slave mental world, and the creole sense of identity in relation to ethnicity as played out in the new court of the French Revolution.
Vaughan's search for the lost creole island remains inconclusive. Was it ever real? Its diversity, complexity, contradictions, multilayered and unstable texture, all words the author uses repeatedly throughout her book, stubbornly eludes us. “Slavery,” she writes, “provided the central structuring principle of this society, but slavery itself was a highly diverse institution (…). The origins of slaves were peculiarly diverse.” Vaughan also makes abundant use of the subjunctive mode: it appears, it might have been, we must assume, it would be reasonable to conclude, it may be, it would be unlikely, apparently, and so on. This is perhaps her style of history writing, close to contemporary literature and anthropology. Or the expression of her underlying skepticism about what historians can actually explain of the past. A confirmed historian, she is also aware that origins and creolization are elusive categories and she won't give into easy and fallacious conclusions on this subject.
More importantly, Megan Vaughan chose to narrow down her enquiry to the realm of subjectivity. Her study is not about the social world of slavery but about communication; feelings and perceptions people have about themselves about others, and whether a small group of people that circumstances threw together in highly harsh and unequal conditions could work out their differences and become a society. Subjective experience and psychological interactions made the creole island, if it ever existed. That is a world in which, by definition, things rarely can be shown to be one way or another. Occasionally the author introduces demographic or occupational data as contextual information. This reviewer has found that simple quantitative data can be helpful in identifying cultural processes worth looking at; they can provide an entry into the subjective world that Vaughan wants to explore. She has also limited herself to criminal records, leaving aside—as she is the first to acknowledge—wills and other notary records, and also birth registers. The latter sources might have offered other clues about people's sense of themselves and behaviors towards others. As insightful as they are, her analysis—limited to testimonies and exchanges in court—read at time like textual commentaries, not the historical reconstruction announced in her title: Creating the Creole Island.
