For people and organisations who enjoy a false sense of status quo and stability, Coronavirus and its sequels bear bad news. And yet experimentation has always been the name of the game. It is just that we are currently living through an intensely accelerated mode of experimentation, hence the discomfort. When Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa, for millennia their status was one of just one animal species cohabitating with others, and this until they evolved what remains, to date, the most powerful of human technologies. Our brains developed the capacity for language, a medium which does not merely allow us to describe what is, but one that allows us to imagine and bring into being the unseen. It is language which enabled us to organise ourselves, build collective dreams, society, polities, thus catapulting humans to the top of the food chain roughly 70, 000 years ago. I will not be alone in firmly believing that we, as Mauritians, and as human beings globally, have the resilience and the creativity to birth new worlds into being post Coronavirus.

To state the obvious, the areas that we will need to address are areas that have always been priority areas: an inclusive economic policy, food security, education for all and not just literacy, civic education, a basic understanding of responsibility to self and others. The problem is that these are areas of responsibility that are relegated to the political arena. I have revised my theories of change over the past years. Politicians rarely intend to, or at best are rarely able to, bring change for a whole host of reasons mostly related to the fact that it is difficult to change the underlying power dynamics of local and international lobby groups, both established and emerging ones. 

But transcendence is something else, something much bigger than the political arena can contain or retain. When we are hit by a catastrophe so large and unexpected that it renders everything about our lives petty and irrelevant, except our survival, and this in turn is dependent on how we act towards each other, then we have a space for transcendence. Just as 70, 000 years ago our capacity to evolve language took humanity to heights until then unimaginable, we have a space where we can boldly reinvent Mauritius. I am thinking especially in terms of an inclusive economic policy in a country that has never been a level playing field. In the UK, following the Equality Act of 2010 and Brexit there is a new freedom to call a spade a spade, to name white male privilege, to address it and find ways of redressing it. The University of Glasgow is the first public institution to acknowledge and quantify, in current monetary terms, the benefits it has accrued from slavery. Theirs is not a report that lies dormant next to Truth and Justice. Glasgow have rolled out a number of socio-economic, reparative action measures with a view to empowering the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean and in the UK. What bold, peaceful, consensual, creative forms might reparative justice take in Mauritius to bridge the growing economic gap, to create fairer, more resilient society? 

Coronavirus does not remind us that in the end we will all die. That much we already know. It is telling us we will die alone.

Roshni Mooneeram, Consultant in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.