À l’heure du tout à l’image et du buzz sans suite, «l’express» souhaite faire découvrir la plume de poètes, de chanteurs, d’écrivains et de tous ceux qui jettent leur âme sur le papier, et qui mettent en mots des réflexions profondes.

In sixteen forty two were brought here

hundred and five slaves to clear

the forests and to grow food,

to feed the ‘colons’, to bear their mood.

Then came the banished, the exiled,

prisoners from Madagascar, from Bengal.

Followed European pirates of the Indian Ocean

with John Bowen and his contingent

of not one or two

but of two hundred men who

greatly frightened further visitors

to enter here at any odd hours.

Seventeen twenty one on Xmas day

from Bourbon arrived planters and slaves at bay

at Port Sud Est, now Vieux Grand Port,

entered with Governor Denyon some thirty more.

Without negroes, no colony’ the whites chanted,

this man-power, became a necessity to be granted

Each year increased the arrival rate

of slaves who counted in 1730 six hundred and forty eight.

Indispensable for the white settlements,

two thousand were captured by La Bourdonnais and sent

from Madagascar, one thousand from African coasts.

It was now 1740 and settlers could boast

of possessing 3,300 in all

in a primitive island, so small!

The ‘pieces d’Inde’, the Negrillons, the ‘Capores’

the ‘Negresses’, the ‘Noirs’

were creations with bones and hearts

of the Creator’s great Art!

Bio

Dr Anitah Aujayeb

She has been writing for a long time and her latest book is entitled “The Last Pilgrimage”. A long-standing educator in Literature in English at both secondary and tertiary levels, she devotes her time to the promotion of literature, in all genres, and literature in all languages has always been her passion. This poem is from her book, “Mauritius in Rhythms”.