The openly divisive remarks the prime minister, Pravind Jugnauth, made in his speech at the Aapravasi Ghat last Friday, to mark the 184th anniversary of the arrival of indentured labourers, should revolt every one of us. Yet, we do not seem bothered, let alone surprised by this rhetoric. Jugnauth’s supposition that “some people still have a mentalité colon (a coloniser’s mindset) and think they’re superior” – the French ambassador and the British high commissioner, both present in the audience, must have appreciated the prime ministerial remarks – is a classic condition of Mauritian politics we can rightly terms as “the colon syndrome”. Every five years, as election time nears, politicians show symptoms of ethnic partisanship and try to appeal to what they believe is ‘their’ electorate’s most basic instinct: resentment against the colonial authorities and the supposed surviving racism of the white Franco-Mauritians. 

Pravind Jugnauth is not the first and unfortunately not the last politician to use the sectarian discourse of coloniser vs. colonised, of Ram vs. Ravan, of us against them. While Jugnauth was evasive about who had this mentalité colon, others have been more specific. No later than September, MP Danielle Selvon left the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM) stating in an open letter to its leader, Paul Bérenger, that “the era of the 18th century “colons” is over and you must realise we are living in the 21st century and I will never accept this kind of humiliation from you”. Bérenger has, not surprisingly, been the main target of this sort of remarks which remind us of the latent racism within our society.

Remember the recurrent libellous double entendre that Bérenger’s ‘cousins’ won the jackpot with the Illovo deal which saw the government take over the land of the eponymous company in 2001 and the construction of the Cybercity in Ebène? Rewind to August 2000 and the electoral campaign and you will find records (see l’express of 22 August 2000) of aspiring Labour candidate and then-Minister of Public Infrastructure Deva Virahsawmy, now a Grand Officer of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean (GOSK), referring to Bérenger in Rivière-du-Rempart and declaring that “Faudé péna disang dan ou lécor pou donne sa blanc la ministère Finances (You ought to be bloodless to give the Ministry of Finance to this White”).

On another note, forward to a few days prior to the 2010 general election and you might recall the Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), the mouthpiece of any reigning regime, broadcasting movies showing British colonisers mistreating Indians. 

The only conclusion we reach is that for there to be colonisers, there ought to be colonised. Fair to say that our politicians are still psychologically colonised. They find it hard to move beyond appealing to colonisation as an electoral lightning rod. They fail to realise that our political destiny has been in our hands for the past 50 years now. As Kaya rightly put it in his song Racine pé brilé (Roots are burning): “To mentalité rest touzour captivité (Your mentality remains captivity).”

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