The trouble with the God-making business in Mauritius is that no one learns anything. Nowhere is this more clear than in the televised nonsense that we were subjected to last week where our local cops swooped in to kick out some hapless Bangladeshis, all to the approving glare of the media (some of whom added some ominous music to sex up their viewership) and the MBC, and no one seems to have registered anything out of it. 

But first about God-making: political parties locally have the bad habit of elevating historical figures into demi-gods, to be worshipped blindly but never really learned from. One of the most prominent ones in this pantheon is the trade unionist Emmanuel Anquetil, tributes to whom are generously lavished, but about whom most know next to nothing. If they did, they would have remembered that Anquetil at one time was deported to Rodrigues for his role in helping organise the 1938 dockers’ strike. The tactic of using deportation to combat labour militancy is something that has long been utilised by the colonial authorities in Mauritius. The historical irony is that precisely those governments that unceasingly lavish praise on Anquetil after the 1988 Sinotex strike started importing foreign workers to serve the textile industry: they were more docile and if any developed any nasty ideas of workers’ rights, they could simply be deported. And since then, it has happened many times where troublesome foreign workers have been deported en-masse. If political parties spent more time teaching their history, rather than mangling it, it would have dawned on their voters that these are not the successors of Anquetil, but rather of those colonial administrators and bureaucrats that victimised him. And some would have started asking some uncomfortable questions. But alas, the God-making industry has been too proficient. Now, it’s not just an ugly side of the textile industry; it’s actually boasted about on television and has become entertainment. And all without a question, or even a slight unease that would have registered in a more reflective age. 

But this allergy to history is not just affecting foreigners. It seeps down and affects us all: people are still arrested under colonial era provisional charges, colonial anti-union laws are just touched up and everyone pretends that it’s something new. Even the press is subjected to advertising boycotts pioneered in colonial times: it was wielded for the first time in 1887 by the British administration against Le Cernéen, by the way. The ridiculous charade continues of paying ‘respect’ to people like Anquetil, while doing things that would have had him recoil in horror. But it’s not just political parties that are to blame; we have a local cottage industry of producing bricks that we call history books: these generally fall into one of three categories; nauseating hagiography, picture books with more pictures than words or simple chronologies all equally unencumbered by objective analysis. Unlike the beneficiaries of our modern politicians and ‘historians’, Anquetil would have instantly recognised our current system as just the same old one, but under a new, much more shameless, management. The question that we should be asking is this: after watching the MBC, would he have been on the side of the cops or those they were kicking out? 

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