Mauritian Creoles Erotic

On an island with no indigenous population, where everyone descends from someone who came by ship, Mauritian Creoles are the people whose ancestors came in chains. They descend mainly from Africans and Malagasy enslaved on the sugar estates of French and then British Mauritius, taken from Mozambique, Madagascar, the East African coast and, in smaller numbers, West Africa and India. They make up roughly a quarter of the country's population, though nobody can say exactly: the census stopped recording ethnicity after 1972, and the constitution files Creoles under General Population, a leftover category they share with the small Franco-Mauritian elite whose forebears owned theirs.

Their language won the island. Kreol Morisien, a French-lexicon creole forged on the plantations, is the first language of nearly every Mauritian whatever their ancestry, yet it reached the school curriculum only in 2012. Their music did the same. Sega began as the after-hours music of the enslaved, driven by the ravanne, a goatskin frame drum warmed over a fire before playing, with a rattle and triangle alongside. It is now the national sound, and its traditional form sits on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. The singer Kaya fused it with reggae to make seggae; his death in police custody in 1999 set off days of rioting that showed how much resentment had built up in Creole neighborhoods.

Abolition came on February 1, 1835, now a public holiday. Once the forced apprenticeship that followed ended in 1839, the freed largely walked off the estates and settled the coasts as fishers, artisans and dockers, while planters replaced them with indentured labor from India. That exit shaped everything after: Creoles ended up with little land, thin representation in government and business, and a persistent poverty that a Creole priest named in 1993 as le malaise créole. The phrase stuck because it was accurate. Most Creoles are Roman Catholic, and the faith is lived in public. Each September, crowds walk through the night to the tomb of Père Laval, the French missionary who worked among the newly freed from 1841, and Mauritians of every religion join them.

The label covers several communities. Rodrigues, the smaller island to the east, is almost entirely Creole and Catholic, with its own accent and an accordion-led music. The Chagossians, expelled by Britain between 1968 and 1973 to clear Diego Garcia for an American base, landed mostly in the poor quarters of Port Louis. On the main island, Creole life centers on the capital's working-class suburbs and the fishing villages of the southwest, under Le Morne Brabant, the basalt mountain where runaway slaves once hid and which is now a World Heritage Site and the community's chief monument.