On 27 February 1960, the most powerful tropical cyclone in Mauritian history, Cyclone Carol, made landfall. The storm was catastrophic. It stripped trees of their leaves, choked rivers with debris, and pushed tens of thousands into the streets to look for shelter as winds raged overhead.Footnote 1 The official report compiled by the colonial state in the months after its landfall suggested that nearly a quarter of the island's homes — agricultural laborers’ barracks, stately nineteenth-century maisons creoles in Port Louis, and the huts of remote fishing villages — were swept into the Indian Ocean.Footnote 2 From that destruction emerged a new Mauritius. In the months after Carol's landfall, the colonial state embarked on a reconstruction project that would continue for nearly two decades, well into the postcolonial era. At the heart of this project was the question of housing, and more specifically an effort to construct colony-wide cyclone-proof housing estates known as cités.
The unprecedented destruction threw into stark relief the foundational racial character of social, economic, and political inequality in Mauritius — a colony that African, South Asian, Chinese, and European communities all called home. The present study examines how Afro-Mauritian Creoles reckoned with Carol and its effects. The ethnoracial term ‘Creole’ has long signaled an array of collective histories and relationships to power. To be Creole could mean, for example, to belong to a community of European-descendant elites who have wielded much political and economic power throughout Mauritian history. It could also accommodate those who trace their ancestry to continental Africa, Madagascar, and other western Indian Ocean islands. It is this community — those of African descent who today comprise around a third of the island's population — that are the focus of this study, for it was this community that was most exposed to the storm's violence and, subsequently, housed in the cités in the decades after. For ease and clarity, I employ the term Creole throughout the essay to signify those of African descent unless otherwise noted.
With this asymmetrical experience of suffering as a point of departure, this article asks how Cyclone Carol reshaped Creole life in a society marked by racial, ethnic, and linguistic difference. It is a truism that there are ‘no natural disasters’. Sociologists, ethnographers, and policymakers of environmental disaster are quick to point out that ecological vulnerability to the natural world is a reflection of the inequities of the social world.Footnote 3 This is undoubtedly the case in Mauritius. But rather than establish a causal link between a deep history of racism and the scale of suffering that Carol inflicted on Creoles, this article provides a broad contextualization of Carol by situating it within a moment of debate over decolonization and as part of a communal history of Creoles. In so doing, it argues two points. The first is that Creoles understood Carol as a catastrophe that would render their community both materially destitute and politically inert at a moment when the postcolonial future of the island dominated public discourse. Secondly, it shows that Carol and the building of the cités would later emerge as important points of reference in the formation of modern Creolité, primarily as recursive elements in communal narratives of Creole loss, displacement, and impermanence from enslavement to the present.Footnote 4 As Carol's winds laid bare how race shaped the material development of Mauritius, the cités became symbols of new beginnings in the established social worlds of the island.
Framing the destruction of cyclones as an element of political debate and, later, as a constitutive component of narratives of communal identity carves out new historiographical territory by insisting on the material and cultural importance of the environment in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. To be sure, historians of this region have long attended to the significance of the natural world. The much-analyzed ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the Indian Ocean is itself a product of the seasonal monsoons, the shifting wind currents that allowed for dhows to traverse the oceanic space between southeastern Africa, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia.Footnote 5 Similarly, regional scholarship has shown how scientific expertise and the management of landscapes, flora, and fauna was critical to the expansion of European imperial power, particularly in the Mascarenes (the Republic of Mauritius and the French department of Réunion). These two approaches — the monsoon lens and that of the botanical and climatological sciences — are also largely bookended in the late nineteenth century, when coal and steam power ‘unmoored’ Indian Ocean littoral societies from the rhythms of the monsoon.Footnote 6 This article offers a preliminary approach to understanding how the natural world continued to shape historical change in the region beyond the rise of motorized transport and the formal end of empire. It does so not by conceiving of the natural world as a structuring social element nor as a grid of power across which imperial and state power expanded, but rather as a proportional historical component of communal identity formation.
This analysis of how cyclones shaped popular notions of race and community reflects a consensus amongst scholars of the Mascarenes on the centrality of narrative and ‘recollection’ to the formation of diasporic identities throughout the region's multiethnic societies.Footnote 7 In embedding narrative within an ecological frame, this essay draws from Africanist environmental history, which has long attended to how communities have produced meaning from the natural spaces across which they have moved, farmed, built cities, and otherwise encountered. Work by Jan Shetler, Clapperton Mavhunga, David Gordon, and many others have analyzed landscapes in order to understand the significance of natural places as modalities of political territoriality, as idioms in the social worlds of the people who inhabited it, or as frames for autochthonous claims.Footnote 8 Here, similarly, the Mauritian landscape, or more precisely its meteorology, has long provided a rich discursive and intellectual terrain on which meaning was made and identities forged for Afro-Mauritian Creoles. Cyclones were a critical component of that terrain.
This article therefore begins not with the specifics of Carol, but with a framing of Creole history that foregrounds the role that the natural world, and cyclones specifically, has played in Creole understandings of their vulnerability in Mauritian society. It then turns to the political context of Carol's landfall and subsequent reconstruction efforts before closing with an examination of the role of the cités in Creole memory. There it explains how the cités emerged as disruptive elements in Afro-Mauritian narratives of displacement and impermanence in Mauritius, a condition of exclusion forged through slavery and its aftermath. The cités offered a material and discursive means by which to make claims for settled permanence through land occupation and home ownership in contemporary Mauritius. Taken together, these sections show Carol's significance as a moment of national reckoning and as a generative event in the history of Creole identity formation.
A cyclonic condition: History and nature in Creole worlds
Since the era of slavery, Mauritius’ Creole community has remained peripheral to processes of political and economic development, a condition of racial exclusion known commonly as le malaise Creole.Footnote 9 This first section offers an overview of the roots of this social marginality and does so with particular attention paid to how histories of slavery and social exclusion pushed Creole communities to the literal margins of society: into the island's mountainous southern costal peripheries. This history of separateness helps frame how Creole communities employed the natural world as a constitutive component of communal self-understanding, from the building of biomedical botanical knowledge amongst enslaved groups to a collective memory of cyclonic storms as forces of chronic social instability.Footnote 10
Eighteenth-century Mauritius was a society structured by race, where enslaved African peoples lived within a colony dominated by Franco-descendant elites. Despite evidence that Malagasy may have been the most commonly spoken language on the streets of Port Louis in the eighteenth century, Creoles were, as Megan Vaughn has argued, ‘those who [we]re . . . neither Hindus nor Muslims nor Tamils nor Chinese nor whites of either the Franco or Anglo variety’ but were ‘the residue of these racial, ethnic/cultural categories’.Footnote 11 ‘Creole’ was above all an identity forged through slavery, as peoples from multiple ethnicities traveled across the Mozambique channel and Madagascar to the Mascarenes, and in so doing adapted and transformed their languages, cultural habits, and modes of being to accommodate new surroundings and social proximities. By the nineteenth century, ‘Creole’ could accommodate a number of broader ‘African’ communities — ‘Malagasy’, ‘Mozambique’, and ‘Nyambanes’ — suggesting that race, more than specific point of origin or cultural practice, grew as a primary marker of social identity.Footnote 12
With the early nineteenth-century change of colonial ruler from France to Britain came the abolition of slavery and the beginnings of indenture.Footnote 13 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the racial demographics of the island inverted: what was once a colony comprised mostly of enslaved Afro-Malagasy peoples became a ‘Little India’ where the majority of the population were of South Asian descent and were often collapsed into a larger ‘Indo-Mauritian’ category created by British policymakers.Footnote 14 As South Asian indentured workers replaced African enslaved peoples on the island's sugar estates, the formerly-enslaved moved to the island's peripheries, to its coasts and rugged mountain interiors. It is difficult to produce a precise demographic picture of the racial landscape of mid-twentieth-century Mauritius in large part because census collection procedures in the late-colonial era collapsed Afro-descendant peoples into a category known then as ‘General Population’, which included ‘Europeans, mixed, and coloured’ and ‘African’.Footnote 15
Creole communities in Mauritius have, across time, produced meaning through nature.Footnote 16 As Vaughn has shown, for example, enslaved peoples’ expertise in the botanical landscape of Mauritius allowed for these communities to carve out spaces of resistance and autonomy.Footnote 17 Cyclones themselves have long been salient events for Afro-descendant Mauritians, particularly as touchpoints in collective histories of catastrophic loss and as transitional moments of emancipation.Footnote 18 Whether in songs, poetry, prose, or popular memory, cyclonic events both structure and animate narratives of Creole identity in Mauritius.
As enslaved peoples fled the island's sugar estates throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Creoles established maroon communities along the then-remote stretches of the island's mountainous southwestern coastline. These Creole villages were especially exposed to the winds and storm surges brought by cyclones well into the twentieth century. As one person who obtained a cité house late in their life noted, they have ‘moved’ more than a dozen times over the course of their life because of cyclones.Footnote 19 ‘Moved’ here is the operative term, as the historical record shows that throughout the early twentieth century the ramshackle homes of the island's poor — Hindu, Muslim, and Creole alike — were vulnerable to cyclonic winds. But these records also show that non-Creole communities often owned small plots of land and could therefore rebuild on territory they called their own.Footnote 20 As one woman interviewed by the Truth and Justice Commission (TJC) in the early 2000s described, Creoles had long lived in a kind of ‘cyclonic condition’ (kondition siklonik) wherein Creole families were chronically left destitute from these storms, forced to relocate and rebuild at regular intervals.Footnote 21 This lack of land ownership, chronic vulnerability to cyclonic winds, and political and economic marginality from nodes of power in colonial society suggest a notion of impermanence in Creole collective consciousness: that life in Mauritius was one of constant instability, uncertainty, and vulnerability.
The struggles that the Creole community felt most acutely at the occurrence of cyclones, particularly the insufficient construction of traditional housing, were also central themes in the island's iconic musical form séga. Unique to the southwest Indian Ocean, séga traces its roots to the songs and musical traditions brought by enslaved Africans. Similar to maloya in the neighboring island of Réunion, séga has long held a significant role in the everyday lives of Afro-descendant peoples in Mauritius and the broader southwest Indian Ocean; it has served as a tool to gather people, to narrate struggle or joy, and to affirm communal unity.Footnote 22 Séga is therefore parallel to another cultural object of the African diaspora, the blues, and holds similar social power by offering an analytical lens and ‘system of explanation’, what Clyde Woods has called the ‘blues epistemology’.Footnote 23 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the genre often takes up the figure of the cyclone. Serge Lebrasse, one of Mauritius’ most famous and prolific séga interpreters, penned a song shortly after Carol's landfall entitled ‘A cause sa siklon la’ (Because of the cyclone) which expressed the kondition siklonik:
Everyone knows that two huge cyclones Alix and Carol have ravaged our little country, made us suffer, from children to adults. Listen to one of them who has suffered the most tell us about his distress.
The year 1960 I will never forget. I was eating once a day. I slept wherever I could.
All this happened because of cyclone Alix and her cousin Carol swept over Mauritius.
Because of this cyclone, my house has turned into an accordion, my kitchen into a fan.
Because of the cyclone six days I didn't work . . . Sunday I rested.
I was the father of a child. I had my whole family. Carol took them. She took them with her.
Oh God! How did Mauritius sin for you to destroy our church to stop us from praying?
One day when they will get old, they will always tell the story of what this cyclone did.Footnote 24
‘A cause sa siklon la’ highlights the dangers that cyclones posed to the lives of Creole Mauritians by lyricizing the destruction caused to homes, families, and the broader community. Creole life was a critical component of Lebarasse's professional career. Indeed in the same year as ‘A cause sa siklon la’, he penned another piece ‘Moi mo ene ti-kreol’ (I am Black).Footnote 25 The thematic touchpoints raised by Lebrasse — the destruction of the home and the general impotence faced by Mauritians in the face of nature — are points in a larger historical narrative for Creoles, one marked by the repeated landfalls of cyclones and of the attendant loss of house, home, and property.Footnote 26 When applied to the experiences of the majority of Creole Mauritians, the ‘cyclonic condition’ that Lebrasse explores musically suggests a number of themes which define Afro-Mauritian history. Specifically, because of their disruptions to the geographical and temporal narratives undergirding notions of racial community, cyclones and the consequent imperial and postcolonial state efforts to mitigate the risks they posed hold significant space in the popular memory of Creole Mauritians.
‘A cause sa siklon la’ was not the only example of séga that emerged after Carol. In the pages of L’Épée, a weekly newspaper with an intended Afro-Mauritian audience discussed in more detail in the following section, weekly séga lyrics were published that both narrated the suffering of the island's Afro-descendant poor and articulated a politics of disaster. In July 1960 the paper published the lyrics to ‘Carol’, a séga song by well-known musician France Jémon that emphasized, like Lebrasse, how Carol had entered into the collective memory of the island. The song also emphasized the loss of food and the loss of home: ‘N'e pas la caz . . . pas connais kot pou resté’ (There is no house . . . there is no one where for us to go).Footnote 27 As both Lebrasse and Jémon's lyrics attest, Carol left Mauritians without a home.
This discursive emphasis on homelessness or, more accurately, rootlessness in times of disasters is exemplary of Creole notions of impermanence. Creole life in Mauritius was forged in diaspora, understood in relation to a forced exile from Madagascar and the African mainland. The psychic links between cyclones and Afro-Mauritian notions of an exiled community of formerly enslaved peoples are perhaps no better exemplified than in a poem written and performed four years after Carol's landfall as a celebration of African life in Mauritius, when a collective of Afro-Mauritian singers, poets, and artists convened a nuit de séga (night of séga) to celebrate Afro-Mauritian culture in the shadow of Le Morne, a monolith on the southwestern corner of Mauritius whose jagged cliffs and dense forests sheltered maroons for centuries from raids sent by sugar estate owners. To commemorate the event, the Mauritian poet Phillipe Lenoir penned a poem entitled ‘Ode au Morne’. In a number of stanzas he notes the deep connection between natural disaster, Le Morne, and African identity. He wrote:
The cry of the slaves who threw themselves from the heights of the cliffs
Searching in death for the freedom relinquished
Still sounds along the walls where insects cling
Swirling in the embrace of the cyclone
Shouting their inability stop it,
As it ravages its summits [Le Morne] with wind and salt
Engraving the hieroglyphs of time.Footnote 28
Embedded in this stanza are clear linkages between notions of enslavement, natural disaster, and trauma. The poem makes reference to a specific legend attached to Le Morne which describes a group of soldiers approaching the geological feature in the early nineteenth century to alert the maroon communities of their emancipation. Fearing reenslavement, hundreds of formerly enslaved Africans preferred to jump to their deaths instead of enduring a life in bondage. While perhaps apocryphal, the legend is well known throughout Mauritius and assigns tremendous historical significance to this part of the country by linking it to the trauma of slavery. Lenoir's poem explicitly tied together the legend of the mass suicide of maroons and the erasure of their voices through cyclonic winds, hailing a historical thread that ties enslavement to natural disaster. In the next stanza we see Lenoir push past those tropes, however, by heralding notions of rebirth and transcendence over nature and, in so doing, reaffirming African life in diaspora:
But let us leave these memories of nature for another day
Tonight the moon softens the edges of its [Le Morne] hard stone
The coldest of hearts opens this October night
As the drums reflect the ancestral rhythm held in the stars
And in ebony bodies trembling with an African soul.Footnote 29
The seemingly oppositional lines of argument embedded in this poem frame the broader conceptual arguments made in the remainder of this article — namely, that Cyclone Carol was, at its moment of landfall, understood to be an additional point of reference for a long history of Creole marginality. However, as the second stanza suggests, Afro-descendant life in Mauritius was not defined merely by tragedy but by the building of community; the cités were emblematic of this process in the wake of disaster. The remainder of this essay therefore broadly follows the arc of Lenoir's poem by demonstrating how, while at first Carol represented a potential political and indeed existential threat to Creoles at the time of landfall, the cités eventually came to be understood as sites of communal rebirth.
Carol, race, and the contexts of decolonization
In the modern era, it is an oft-repeated observation that Mauritius is a ‘plural society’: a space without an indigenous population, where both no one and everyone are local.Footnote 30 On an island with large Afro-descendant, South Asian, European, and Chinese populations, tension between ethnoracial particularisms and unitary conceptions of the ‘national’ has figured as an animating force in the modern history of this island country.Footnote 31 Emerging from an era of wartime scarcity and top-down colonial development that had marked the 1930s and 1940s, the 1950s saw the growth of domestic political parties committed to moving beyond strategic engagement within the limitations of the colonial state towards national self-determination. Driven by the writing and organizing work of intellectuals and labor leaders, Mauritians began to envision an independent Mauritius free from British colonial rule in the midst of a global political moment defined by anticolonial nationalism, Afro-Asianism, and national self-determination. National independence was by no means a shared goal amongst the various racial and ethnic groups of the island, as many — in particular European-descendant Creoles — feared the rise of a Hindu political elite under the Labor Party of Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. But even for those who did support political independence, the 1950s was a decade when anticolonial leaders offered divergent visions of an independent Mauritius, from a state still loosely associated with the British empire, to one that would cast its lot with the growing Third World, to one committed to embracing the South Asian civilizational inheritance and a Hindu character resonant with country's demographic majority.
These debates of the 1950s were by no means settled by the 1960s. Indeed, Carol crashed into the midst of colony-wide divisions between various political constituencies over the postcolonial future of the island. In 1960 the political landscape of the island evidenced what many at the time derided as ‘communalism’, a political reality where the main parties represented different ethnoracial constituencies: the Labour Party, nominally that of Hindu Indo-Mauritians; the Comité d'Action Musulman (CAM), that of Indo-Mauritian Muslims; and the Partí Mauricien Social-Democratique (PMSD), that of elite European-descendant Creoles, in which Afro-Mauritian Creoles fit awkwardly and unequally. Much like neighboring East African societies, debates between these parties triggered conversations about who fundamentally belonged in a national polity and how a postcolonial future could accommodate a politics of ethnic self-determination.Footnote 32 Afro-Mauritian Creoles were therefore faced with the dual struggle of emerging anew from a storm that did immense and disproportionate damage to their community alongside a growing realization of the need to stake a claim as equal actors in the political end of empire. Inasmuch as cyclones rendered Creole communities acutely aware of their vulnerability in Mauritian life, so too did the politics of decolonization highlight their perceived political precarity.
At the time of Carol's landfall, the utopian vision of Mauritianisme emerged as an antidote to the much-criticized communalism. A Mauritian iteration of what Jonathon Glassman has described as a ‘creole nationalism’, Mauritianisme was a vision of racial coexistence ‘conceived as a synthesis and at the same time a superseding of the cultures and the traditions of the different ethnic groups constituting Mauritian society’.Footnote 33 Proponents of Mauritiansme understood the term to be a local iteration of the global Afro-Asian moment. In the heady days of Bandung and cooperation across the Indian Ocean, Mauritian intellectuals offered Mauritius as a scaled-down version of the political moment; Mauritius was, at its core, Afro-Asia.Footnote 34
Despite the aspirational vision that Mauritianisme offered at midcentury, many Creoles understood it as little more than a glossy bit of sloganeering that did nothing to address the structural inequalities that had produced racial difference. The language of racial coexistence could do little, for example, to correct the asymmetries that lay at the center of one significant vector for the formation of ethnic identities in Mauritius: landownership. This was a process marred by racial preference. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the division and disbursement of plots of sugar estate land to South Asian indentured agricultural workers, known then as morcellement, lay the groundwork for the generation for historically distinct Indo-Mauritian identities in the small villages that grew around these plots of land.Footnote 35 With these villages came new economies and markets separate from the estates as well as the formation of a distinct set of social, religions, and cultural norms amongst both Hindu and Muslim workers. Similarly, in previous decades free people of color (gens de couleur libre) also benefited from the ability to own plots of land, a development that allowed for them to make a claim for permanence in country with no indigenous peoples.Footnote 36 At the same time that these ethnoracial groups benefitted from the systematic disbursement of land, however, Afro-descendant Mauritians were largely excluded from these processes.
This history shaped notions of Creole identity at midcentury and emerged most saliently in the pages of a newspaper published by an unsuccessful PMSD Creole politician, Joseph Coralie. Coralie lost a municipal election in 1949 in part, he suggested, because he was ‘trop p'tit nasyon, parcequi li ene z'homme di peple, parcequi li trop mazambique’ (Too Creole, too much an everyday man, too Black).Footnote 37 His newspaper L’Épée (The Sword), which ran from 1953 to 1964, was ostensibly a newspaper meant to advance the interests of Afro-descendant peoples (if also, at times, Coralie's own political aspirations). It is difficult to gauge the extent to which this paper is representative of a coherent singular ‘Creole’ identity at midcentury, but all records indicate that it was the only newspaper in that era to specifically cater to an Afro-Mauritian audience.Footnote 38 With this limitation in mind, L’Épée does offer a unique glimpse into the salient debates of the era and in particular how Afro-Mauritians reckoned with a growing national conversation on the colony's postcolonial future, the role of race therein, and the many roads towards political freedom in an era of global political realignment. For the writers of L’Épée, there was little question that Mauritianisme was code for Hindu domination; many editorials expressed clear doubts about the viability of a multiracial postcolonial Mauritius in the face of ascendant Hindu political power in the colony. Anything purported to be nonracialist was, in L’Épée, code for anti-Creole. Whether it be questions of family planning techniques, food preparation, political change, or cyclone recovery (as later sections will show), L’Épée often interpreted government policy as implicitly eliminationist.Footnote 39
Carol appeared to confirm that racial domination was the most salient issue facing Mauritius. The paper called for martial law, arguing that it was the only way for aid to be distributed equitably and warning that Carol would be a boon for landlords, for the Creole community was primed to be exploited in the wake of the storm.Footnote 40 In one series of fictionalized conversations between ‘Gaby’, a Creole, and ‘Sondroon’, a Hindu Indo-Mauritian, the paper expressed frustration with the speed with which Indians received aid. As Gaby observed, ‘the very next day [after the earlier cyclone, Alix], the government rushed to find any piece of sheet metal around’ to help Indians to rebuild. Sondroon's reply — that urban residents needed more immediate assistance — while fictional, revealed how Mauritians conceived of the racial geography of the island, of urban Indians and rural Africans with distinct housing needs and therefore differential relationships to the colonial government. Gaby insisted, however, that while Creoles were poor before Carol, ‘there was no more miserable people than Creoles after Carol’.Footnote 41
In the months following landfall, the paper continued to take special interest in how the storm had affected Creoles. Through a series of editorials, the paper argued that the reconstruction efforts were evidence of the ‘the systematic destruction of the Creole community’.Footnote 42 The paper made this argument through a three-part series arguing that the destruction and reconstruction process in Roche Bois, a peri-urban neighborhood of Port Louis that had traditionally housed Creole dockworkers. As Roseabelle Boswell has noted, Roche Bois had long held a prominent place in Creole life in Mauritius: it was a place populated by Creoles, but it was also underdeveloped and ‘wild’, a place where pigs roamed.Footnote 43
Carol flattened Roche Bois. In the weeks following landfall, L’Épée reported that little had been done to mitigate the suffering of the people there. Freshwater was hard to come by, and the dirt roads had been washed away by the storm. Where there was freshwater, it was being used by dhobis (Indo-Mauritian clothing washers), the paper accused. The general lack of response led the writers of the paper to suggest this was not mere government mismanagement of the disaster, but a concerted anti-Creole strategy.Footnote 44 In a smaller, anonymously written article immediately adjacent to the Roche Bois exposé, however, the paper celebrated the final step towards the decolonization of Madagascar in March of 1960. Although nominally an article about Madagascar, it was written in relation to the expose on Roche Bois. Indeed, the paper suggested that this was a ‘new dawn’ for the ‘bande de p'tit zoreille’ (Africans) who resided in Roche Bois because it signaled that Africans around the world, and in particular their neighbors, were actively engaged in liberation from the ‘yoke of colonialism’.Footnote 45 While the article offers a familiar brand of pan-African anticolonial politics that was common in L’Épée, what is worth noting is the broader context in the wake of Cyclone Carol. At a time when a terrible tropical cyclone was understood to have inflicted tremendous suffering on Afro-Mauritians, the community's hope lay not necessarily in integration into a what many feared to be a Hindu-dominated Mauritius, but rather in the global liberation of Africans.Footnote 46 Imperialism and disaster response were two sides of the same coin.
Ultimately, however, Roche Bois would be rebuilt. It became the site of one of the many cités that blossomed in the years following Carol. The following section begins with the planning for and construction of these estates.
Changing the social landscape: The politics of reconstruction
In the months following the storm, the starkest lesson that Carol offered the colonial government, led by then-Governor Colville Deverell, was the need for housing infrastructure. Initial figures between the two storms of 1960 placed the number of residences destroyed as between 80,000 and 100,000.Footnote 47 This level of destruction revealed the weakness of most Mauritian housing structures and the relative disinterest of the colonial state in providing adequate housing. The 1952 census demonstrated as much. Despite aborted attempts at instituting a nationwide housing plan, housing infrastructure across the colony was practically nonexistent.Footnote 48
Approximately two weeks after the landfall of Carol, debates began in the Legislative Assembly to devise measures to better confront the threats to substandard housing that cyclones posed.Footnote 49 There was an almost immediate consensus amongst British colonial officials and Mauritian politicians about the urgent need for housing. And, indeed, many political parties at the time saw the landfall of Carol as a political moment to be seized. Almost immediately, Labour Party leader Seewosagur Ramgoolam and Minister of Labour Veerasamy Ringadoo traveled to London to lobby for reconstruction funds. Ramgoolaam and Ringadoo's trip was viewed with suspicion by many of the other political parties, who saw Labour as the party that had most strategically embraced British plans for gradual independence. Their trip for assistance appeared to be a way to position Labour as the delegator of reconstruction funds and political largesse. One opposition party, the Independent Forward Block (IFB), was officially excluded from governmental negotiations on reconstruction, and as such it vehemently insisted that loans be extended to people who lost their homes and that reconstruction begin immediately.Footnote 50
The charge for the colonial government to take up the task of providing cyclone-proof housing, or at least access to it, was taken up by most vociferously by Gaëtan Duval, a young and politically dynamic Afro-descendant Creole PMSD politician from the town of Curepipe. Duval figures prominently in the debates in the Legislative Assembly as a champion for specific housing policy directed towards Afro-Mauritians.Footnote 51 In the weeks after the cyclone, Duval pushed for the government to assume responsibility for reconstructing a cyclone-proof island.Footnote 52 In November of 1960, the assembly created the Central Housing Authority (CHA), a governmental body purposed to oversee the reconstruction of the island. Its creation was an important bureaucratic step, as the move centralized housing policy throughout the colony after nearly twenty years of increasing delegation of city and town planning organization to anemically-funded village and town councils created in the 1940s. Now housing policy would be federalized under the initial leadership of the newly-created position of housing minister, the first of whom was Abdul Razak Mohammed, a politician and member of the legislative council. However, the planning and construction decisions to be made through the CHA would initially come from metropolitan and other colonial housing experts, in large part brought from other colonies in Southern and Eastern Africa.Footnote 53
In early 1962 the CHA settled on the construction of 15,000 homes as part of its Cyclone Housing Scheme. Of these, 12,000 were to be built on estates (what would become the cités), 3,000 on land that was already owned by individuals whose homes had been destroyed, and one thousand on Crown land that would be for renters. The majority of the homes were mortgaged at 25 years, with the Mauritian government paying half of the principle and loaning the rest at just over 6 per cent interest. Priority was first given to those who were housed in temporary cyclone refugee shelters scattered across the island. But access to these shelters was itself quite strict. In the days following Carol, government officials fanned out across the country with registration cards, on which residents were asked to list their address on the day before cyclone Alix hit. Later in 1962 more homes were built and the conditions for applying for a cité home were extended to allow those who lost homes in cyclones Beryl (1961) and Jenny (1962) to also make claims.Footnote 54
For Creoles, the question of reconstruction was a question of correcting historical injustices, in particular with regard to landownership. In the months following Carol, L'Épée asked, ‘What would happen to the poor Creoles rendered homeless by Carol? Particularly those who reside in [sugar] estate barracks with no plot of land on which to rebuild?’Footnote 55 This issue would be front and center in the building of the cités. Allocating homes on estates compelled the CHA to draft a system of institutionalized landownership. This process effectively amounted to constructing a system for distributing land outside any sort of market through the gradual transfer of Crown lands to residents of the cités. Footnote 56 It is hard to overstate the significance of this process, as land in Mauritius had been, and indeed continues to be, at a premium. In the centuries before the construction of the cités, the sale and control of land was highly regulated. It was, in large part, under the control of Franco-Mauritians and, in the case of small farmers, some Indo-Mauritians by the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 57 This system advanced by the CHA attempted to pair homeownership with landownership by lending home mortgages over a 25-year period at 6.5 per cent interest. Because in most cases the land of the estates was Crown land, it would initially be leased to the homeowner for a period of 99 years.Footnote 58 Purchasers of estate homes, then, were to sign leases for both the house and the land.Footnote 59
While this act did not initiate an immediate shift in wealth from the state to private citizens given the length of the lease, it signaled the possibility of significant legal and economic inclusion for Afro-Mauritians who had to this point been marginal to all bureaucratic efforts to institutionalize wealth through land ownership. Much like for free people of color in the eighteenth century and Indo-Mauritians in the late nineteenth century, access to land on the estates after Carol should be understood as a transformational moment when a historical marker of belonging — laying claim to land — became officially extended by the colonial government to Creole Afro-Mauritians.Footnote 60
And although there were significant initial problems in populating the cités — lack of infrastructure, non-payment of mortgages, and squatting — the colonial government, and in particular politicians who were beginning to jockey for leadership roles in the political decolonization of the island, recognized that it was in the economic and political interests of most parties involved to ensure that most Mauritians were granted access to cyclone-proof housing. On the floor of the Legislative Assembly in Port Louis, Duval's star rose as a vocal defender of the right to access cheap public housing, cementing his growing persona as ‘King Creole’: a stalwart defender of his own people. In the midst of the crises of unoccupied homes or unpaid-for homes, and in the wake of some of the CHA homes suffering damage from cyclone Jenny in 1962, the CHA came under heavy scrutiny by the Legislative Assembly, in particular by Housing Minister Mohammed. Duval swiftly came to the defense of the organization, arguing that the CHA needed more funding and oversight, but that its core mission remained unchanged. Two years later, Duval would replace Mohammed as minister of housing.Footnote 61 His role as housing minister would become enshrined in Creole popular memory on the island. As one elderly resident of the cités noted, ‘There are many Creoles in the cités. It's after Carol that the cités were built. Duval did look after us very well.’Footnote 62
‘We are the new Mauritians’: The cités and Carol in popular memory
In the decades following Carol, the cités would become enshrined as sites of communal transformation. That much was clear when a young research assistant working on a sociological study of the cités walked into Barkley, a cité just outside of Port Louis in the town of Beau Bassin, in the early 1970s. Upon entering she saw a young man, a cité resident, who declared the estates to be sites of rejuvenation and experimentation. ‘We are the new Mauritians!’, he declared. ‘In the cité we are not tied to the traditions of the past, we look ahead.’Footnote 63 Nearly forty years later, when I interviewed a woman by the name of Nicole Papeche in a cité in the southwest corner of Mauritius, she offered a similarly provocative analysis. When I asked about how her life had changed as a consequence of Carol, she responded that the storm had ‘saved my family from slavery’.Footnote 64 By the time Carol made landfall in 1960, slavery had been abolished in the southwest Indian Ocean for nearly 130 years. Like the resident of nearly forty years prior, Papeche interpreted Carol not as a moment of destruction, however, but rather as one of rebirth.
But just as the Lenoire poem discussed previously suggests, the popular memory of cyclones in Mauritius evokes both emancipatory pasts and memories of racialized subjugation. Indeed, shortly after their construction, the cités were not uniformly understood to be sites of the utopian reconstitution of a discrete Afro-Mauritian identity. Rather, they became sites of material inequality and racial difference, a fact that threatened a growing national discourse of racial utopianism in the years surrounding political independence. At the time of their construction they quickly became points of anger and resentment for non-Creole Mauritians. On the southern outskirts of the town Quatre Bornes, in the shadow of Kennedy (one particular cité associated with drug use and violence), a Hindu Indo-Mauritian man observed to me that when the cités were built Creoles ‘were given the key’ to their new homes. ‘Why didn't I get the same amount of money?’ he wondered.Footnote 65 And indeed, as Roseabelle Boswell has noted, Carol is largely associated with le malaise Creole because cités are evidence that the government ‘did not encourage Creoles to fend for themselves’.Footnote 66 A series of race riots in 1967 and 1968, the latter just weeks before independence, were thought to have originated in the cités, in Roche Bois in particular, and cemented the notion that the housing estates were hotbeds of aberrant behavior and failed social engineering. An editorial in one of the island's papers even suggested that the cités were a form of unofficial apartheid, an observation that was sure to be bracing given Mauritius’ proximity to nearby South Africa and the great interest that many of its non-European citizens had in the ongoing anti-apartheid struggle.Footnote 67
In the decades following Carol, however, a different story would emerge, one in which the cyclone and the cités became important elements of a new vision of what it meant to be Creole; as constituent components in a diasporic reimagining of African identity in Mauritius. This story is most salient in La Mivoie, a small estate in the Black River District in the southwest of the island. The first settlement in the estate began in 1962 and 1963.Footnote 68 Testimonies collected as part of the TJC in La Mivoie evince the perceived injustices that the cités attempted to correct. But they also are remembered as spaces for negotiation, where ‘new Mauritians’ were to be produced. One participant noted: ‘There is a family life in the cités. There is mutual help. Many descendants of slaves live in the cités’.Footnote 69 Within La Mivoie the notion that the cité marked a definitive break from the past framed how many people explained the estate's development. While popular discussions of the cités are replete with references to the legacies of the evils and deprivations of slavery, the growth of the cités to become peri-urban and urban areas that housed descendants of the enslaved was also interpreted as a potential threat to communal morality. As one resident observed.:
Those who live in the cités have lost their home as a result of Cyclone Carol. There are many descendants of slaves in the cités. The people from the coasts are different from those of the cités. They are more hospitable.Footnote 70
The conclusion that the cités incubated antisocial behavior was not uniform, however. Fanfan Calfir and Ambrik Zaly, two residents of La Mivoie, noted with enthusiasm that the ‘new neighbors’ and ‘good relationships’ that were forged in the cités were points of moral uplift.Footnote 71 ‘Life was improved,’ Nichole Papeche mentioned.Footnote 72 Indeed, one TJC interviewee went so far as to note that ‘townsfolk [in the cité] are more civilized than those on the coast.’Footnote 73 Taken together, these observations on life in the cités point to ways in which Creole life changed as a result of Cyclone Carol. They gesture towards both a history of loss and a historical emancipation: the loss of a generalized morality that developed within small coastal communities and an emancipation from a perceived material and intellectual backwardness, hence the references to urbanity as a more ‘civilized’ way of life. But ultimately, what the cités did was to break, in the words of an earlier interviewee, the vulnerability of the ‘cyclonic condition’.Footnote 74
Breaking this condition disrupted foundational notions of community. Geographical and temporal notions of Creole identity affirmed a shared collective history of trauma through slavery and collective displacement from continental Africa. The construction of cités undid these narratives in ways that fundamentally changed what it meant to be Afro-Mauritian. The observation of one cité resident whose life was transformed by cyclones on the interstices between natural disaster, race, space, and history in Mauritius evidences the powerful social resonances of cyclones within popular conceptions of African identity in modern Mauritius:
There are still many families from slave ancestry who don't even have a house today. Indians came for sugar cane fieldwork and they had priority to have lands. Creoles were left behind. They struggled but had nothing and still have nothing. Creoles are those who don't have houses. The land they lived on was not theirs. They lost it. Many families have lost their lands . . . I have moved 14 times in my life because of cyclones. Today I have a small cité house. Mother bought it after cyclone Gervaise [1975].Footnote 75
Embedded in this observation are a number of important social and historical arguments that link histories of race, land, homeownership, and natural disaster. But more specifically, the observation evidences two parallel thematic touchpoints that lie at the heart of articulations of racial belonging in Mauritius: the question of claims to space and that of temporal permanency. First, the historical narrative embedded here reveals the importance of land and home ownership as metrics by which racial difference became marked in the twentieth century. The explicit observation that ‘Indians’ (Indo-Mauritians) ‘had priority to’ landownership gestures to morcellement and the development projects of the postwar era that aimed to build Indo-Mauritian cultures of subsistence agriculture.
Secondly, the housing instability experienced by this particular observer points to a broader conception of temporal insecurity. Said differently, Afro-Mauritian life was understood to be impermanent in the era between maroonage and the landfall of Cyclone Carol. Informal housing, little visibility in state development schemes, and marginality within the major political parties in the country effectively removed Afro-Mauritians from the historical touchstones of Mauritian history after emancipation. The cités, however, through their cyclone-proof fortitude and their financial integration with the state, offered a sense of temporal place and of physical permanence in modern Mauritian society.
Conclusion
Cyclone Carol was a fundamental event in the history of twentieth-century Mauritius because it revealed the extent to which any postcolonial political future Mauritians could imagine would have to reckon with histories of race. Despite the aspirational vision that Mauritianisme offered, midcentury Mauritian Creoles understood themselves to be materially, socially, and politically peripheral. These cleavages were further carved open by Carol's winds and rains. But as this essay has shown, the cités — themselves long-term effects of Carol — offered perceived material paths towards economic integration and physical spaces for the building of community.
Today many Mauritians who do not reside in the cités regard the estates as emblems of the deeper pathology of le malaise Creole. For the estate residents themselves, conclusions are less absolute. Notions of a break with a past defined by slavery still endure, while there is also a frank assessment of the social problems of drug and alcohol abuse in the estates. But what is clear is that the trauma of Cyclone Carol and the process of rebuilding after the storm have been integrated into the popular history of the island and the ways in which race is conceived of and rhetorically affirmed. Words and names like Carol and cité have become imbedded into the vernacular of contemporary Mauritius in ways that signal distinct historical experiences as well as a broader collective experience of the transformation of the island after the storm.
As the preceding pages have shown, the natural world has continued to be a central element in the history of the western Indian Ocean world. While communities from the Swahili coast, the Horn of Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands are no longer dependent on the monsoons for regional mobility, the climatic and meteorological conditions that prevail in the region continue to shape how societies develop, how communities understand their relationships to each other, and how governments relate to their citizenry.
