Commissioner for Mauritius

Mauritius Times – 70 Years

By Peter Ibbotson

Recently the daily press reported that Mr Wall was to put a question in Parliament asking for the appointment of a commissioner for the Government of Mauritius in the UK. Mr Johnson, of course, did put such a question; in November 1955, in fact, when he was told by the then Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr Lennox-Boyd, “This is a matter for the Government of Mauritius, and I will draw the Governor’s attention to the hon. Member’s suggestion.”

Nearly five years have elapsed since then, and still there is no news of a possible Commissioner for Mauritius in the UK. Economic circumstances demand, I submit, that serious consideration be now given to such an appointment. If we do find that the local economy is to be diversified, there will be a need of commercial representation beyond the Chamber of Agriculture’s present representation; and we need a government commissioner who can deal with, in the name of the Government, such communications to the press as appeared recently in The Times from MM. Koenig and others. A man of good standing and business experience is needed, who has plenty of contacts and firsthand knowledge of the colony (this last is not essential if the man appointed is prepared to obtain it). He would work in close connection with the Crown Agents, the Colonial Office and the Tropical Products Institute; he would act in liaison with travel agencies and airlines where the tourist industry was concerned. He would act as business liaison officer for the Government, and as an information officer to the UK press. When necessary, he would act as a Government spokesman to defend the Government if it were attacked in the press or in Parliament, or to expound Government policy and to comment on Government plans when these were announced.

Many colonial territories already maintain such commissioners; the time is due for Mauritius to do so too.

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Sir Hilary Blood on the BBC

A popular programme on the BBC broadcast to schools is Travel Talks, aimed at 10- and 11-year-olds in primary schools. Recently Sir Hilary Blood gave a talk (20 minutes long) in Mauritius in the series. It was an excellent talk: one of the best I have ever heard in the series, and one of the best vignettes of Mauritius which I have heard. He made the point that Mauritius was rich in people and rich in sugar; and took a car drive from the airport to Port Louis as the peg on which to hang his talk. He spoke of the fields and fields of sugar cane and said that the labourers in the fields were mainly Indians whose fathers or grandfathers had come to Mauritius from India years ago. There are far more Mauritians of Indian origin than any others, he said. He described the physical characteristics of the typical Indian (and, later in the talk, of the other races). He spoke of their mud and straw huts with cane-leaf roofs; and referred to the stone or cement Hindu temples. A recording of typical ‘temple music’ was played.

He described the small trains which take the cut cane to the factories, and a recording followed of the noise inside a factory when the cane was being crushed. The factory workers, artisans were, he said, mainly of African origin. The car passed through a village where we were told of the schoolchildren lining up at playtime with their cups or mugs for their milk and biscuits. The village shop was at a corner; the shopkeeper was Chinese — most of the island’s shopkeepers are, in fact, he said of Chinese origin. He described the mixture of goods and smells inside a typical village shop; the overpowering smell being that of dried salt fish. The Chinese, he said, eat a lot of pork and run lots of restaurants in Port Louis.

He then said that the few white people in Mauritius work in offices, in charge of factories, or as merchants, bankers, senior government officials. The ratio of the races in Mauritius was, he told the listening children, 1 White to 2 Chinese to 7 Coloured to 20 Indian. He referred to the Governor’s ‘Open Day’ at Le Réduit when the Police Band would play for the guests; there was a recording of the band doing so.

The imaginary journey along the last 7 miles into Port Louis (where it is always hot and sticky, he said) gave Sir Hilary the chance to speak of the former Governor who planted the roadside with flamboyants, cassias and jacarandas, so that the red, white and blue would remind people of the Union Jack. But, he said, the cassias and jacarandas hadn’t grown so well as the flamboyants, so that the road went between red ribbons of flamboyants only.

The arrival in Port Louis gave the chance of speaking of Government House being built by a French governor, and of the fact that French is widely spoken. We heard sound effects of a tug towing a string of barges loaded with bags of sugar in Port Louis harbour; we heard that there isn’t any breeze for yachting at Port Louis, so yachtsmen have to resort to Mahébourg or Grand Baie. The inevitable reference to the dodo followed, the bird was described.

The programme ended with ‘Mauritius after dark’ — a sega party which, said Sir Hilary, was very popular with the Creoles descendants of ex-slaves. The segas, he said, was a curious dance with a distinctive rhythm; and the broadcast closed with a recording of a sega.

The whole broadcast was most informative and interesting, the sound effects and interspersed recordings were well-chosen and very effective, and the generalisations which had of course to be made were not at all misleading in the way that generalisations usually are.

Altogether, Mauritius can feel pleased with its representation by its ex-Governor to the children of the UK.

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Three Children

There is widespread delusion, carefully fostered by the unscrupulous opponents of family planning, that the government’s family planning proposals forbid anyone to have more than three children. This is manifest nonsense as anyone who is not imbued with doctrinaire opposition to family planning can see. What the Government has said is this: “Social benefits will be available on certain conditions – one of which is that you don’t have more than three children. If you don’t want the benefits, and prefer to have more than three children, that’s OK with us. It’s also OK by us if you don’t attend a family planning clinic and receive instruction on family planning techniques. If you don’t fulfil these conditions, then you can’t have the social benefit, that’s all.”

The choice is the individuals. Family planning and maximum social welfare benefits; or no family planning and not maximum social welfare benefits. It’s similar to legislation in Seychelles and the UK. In the UK, family allowances are available to parents with more than one child. If you don’t have more than one child (like my wife and me), then you don’t get any family allowance. Nobody compels you to have more than one child in order to get the family allowance; the choice is yours and yours only. All taxpayers, whether childless, with one child married, unmarried, or with more than one child, contribute to the general fund of taxation from which the family allowances (like other payments) are made; but only those who fulfil the conditions of more than one child get the allowance.

The Seychelles legislation to which I referred is an income tax provision. In Seychelles, as in Mauritius, taxpayers receive a child allowance deducted from their gross income before assessment for tax. But such an allowance is made for up to five children only. If you have six or more children, you can’t claim an allowance for those in excess of five. No one compels you to have five children or less; you can have as many as you like but the tax authorities allow a claim for up to five only. The choice is the individual’s; he makes it in light of the fiscal consequences.

Speaking of Seychelles, it is interesting to note two facts. First, that nine out of every ten Seychellois are members of the Roman Catholic Church; so that birth control although economically desirable is not a policy which the local Government has yet put forward. But 43 percent of the births in Seychelles are illegitimate — which doesn’t suggest that the people pay much attention to the moral teaching of the Church to which they belong. (Or are we to suppose that the non-Catholic 10 per cent, of the population have all the illegitimate children?)

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C.D. & W. Grants for Education

More than a million pounds were granted in April under the CD & W. Acts for educational advance. The largest single grant was £400,000 (say Rs 5.25 million) for developing 11 African secondary schools and 5 African teacher-training colleges in Kenya. Higher School Certificate classes are planned. Nearly £150,000 (say, Rs 1,850,000) has been granted to North Borneo for school building, mainly to help replace the inadequate aided school buildings erected with cheap local materials after the war.

The North Borneo Government pays half the cost of rebuilding or erecting an aided school; the CD & W. grant has been made to help meet this 50 per cent subvention. Aden received Rs 1.25 million to build a boys’ secondary school; the British Council received a grant towards the cost of its oversea students’ residences and amenities in the UK.

A non-educational grant which has some interest in Mauritius is a grant of well over Rs 1.5 million to Gambia for an experimental station which will explore the possibility of introducing alternative crops for peasant cultivation in order to diversify Gambia’s restricted agricultural economy.

7th Year – No 304
Friday 24th June, 1960

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