It’s not every day that Rodrigues makes its way into a PNQ in the Mauritian National Assembly. That’s how high it figures in the plans of Xavier-Luc Duval’s PMSD. This week, Duval asked whether or not the prime minister would ask the Rodrigues Chief Commissioner Serge Clair to resign: in other words, asking the government to help clear the way for the PMSD’s reconquest of Port Mathurin.

The bad blood between the PMSD and Serge Clair goes back a long way. In 1967, the PMSD led by Gaёtan Duval organised an overwhelmingly successful political campaign there: unlike in Mauritius where the choice at the ballot was between independence and continued dependence on the UK, in Rodrigues, Duval pitched the choice as one between dependence on the UK or on Port Louis. The PMSD managed to secure 97% of the vote in Rodrigues and went on to dominate the island until 1976. During that time, to prevent other parties from poaching his support, Duval raised the cry of Rodriguan independence, posing as a flamboyant champion of the island’s rights against an oppressive Port Louis.

But that did not stop Duval senior from tapping into government funds to create an elaborate system of patronage to hold on to his Rodriguan fief. By 1976, no less than 89 per cent of all Rodriguan men were employed as ‘relief workers’ by the PMSD-dominated administration on the island. This had an unintended consequence: with such a steady supply of cash and jobs for the first time, Rodriguans were now in a position to begin resenting what they saw as the gulf in living standards and facilities between themselves and Mauritian mainlanders. In a paradoxical twist, Duval senior’s toxic admixture of fanning Rodriguan separatism and raising expectations through patronage – that neither he nor the Rodriguan economy at the time could fulfill – ended up hurting him and laying the ground for the emergence of a new political force.

Enter Serge Clair who founded the OPR party in 1976. Clair, the failed priest, fed off these contradictions: he turned resentment of Port Louis into the assertion of a new Rodriguan identity, one in which the PMSD – as a Mauritian party – had no place. Clair blamed Rodrigues’ problems squarely on a combination of Port Louis’ arrogance and the PMSD’s perfidy. Duval senior hit back by accusing Clair of being a communist who hated the Catholic Church for rejecting him as a priest for womanising. It did not work. The enthusiasm for Clair’s politics bred some strange happenings: in 1979, a local man became a celebrity after crosses mysteriously started appearing on his body. To the people flocking from all over Rodrigues to see him, the home-spun saint said that a cyclone was on its way to devastate the island unless the Mauritians left. Evidently, providence too was on Clair’s side. Seeing his stock fall in Mauritius just ahead of the 1982 election, Duval senior toyed with the idea of ruling Rodrigues as his own independent Ruritania. Instead, the election saw Clair wipe the PMSD out in Rodrigues.

And Clair is still there, determined to annihilate all remaining traces of the PMSD; in 2017, he wanted to wipe off Gaёtan Duval’s name from the local airport. And Clair has reached a modus vivendi with the MSM: the government wants Clair to continue backing it and Claire wants to roll back some of the PR in the Rodriguan electoral system to cut the Rodriguan opposition down to size. On a recent visit, Minister Mentor Anerood Jugnauth said he was prepared to oblige. Its wishful thinking if Xavier-Luc Duval thinks that the government will get Clair out of his way. And even then, unlike in Mauritius, where the PMSD can just wait to fill the shoes of the ageing Paul Bérenger, in Rodrigues Duval will have to contend with other parties, just as independent-minded as Clair. To win Port Mathurin, Duval will have to figure out a way to put the genies, let out by his own father, back into the bottle.

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