Island of Sweetness

Mauritius Times – 70 Years

By Peter Ibbotson

One way and another, Mauritius gets into the papers. On January 8, for example, The Times carried a half-page advertisement for the Hawker-Siddeley Group (and other quality papers may have carried the same advertisement for all I know). It showed cane fields in the shadow of mountain peaks; with a small map of Mauritius and a small picture of bags of sugar being carried on brawny shoulders.

Mauritius was headlined as “Island of sweetness and light”, and the text accompanying the picture read “Sail south across the Indian Ocean and, 500 miles east of Madagascar, you’ll come to the sweetest island in the world, Mauritius. Coral-reefed, palm-fringed, and beautiful. An island where half a million people live and work and read — by sugar! The entire economy of Mauritius depends on this one main crop. Sugar supplies work, trade, light and heat. For Mauritius, without fuel or any source of power, solved the problem of a one-crop economy by burning bagasse, the fibre that remains after the sugar cane is crushed. Bagasse is burnt to drive the turbines that supply power to the sugar crushers, and the same turbines provide a bonus of light and heat to the island.”

Then follows the advertising puff for Hawker Siddeley turbines.

Whatever one may think of the references to an island of sweetness and light, and to the coral reefs and palm-fringes, one must admit that it is useful even in an advertisement — to have the basic problems of Mauritius spotlighted: the one-crop economy on which the whole island depends, and the lack of natural resources to provide power. But “the sweetest island in the world”! I’d like to hear the opinions of some of the army of unemployed, underemployed, or underpaid labourers on that!

Mauritius also figures in the January number of Family Planning, the quarterly journal of the Family Planning Association. Mrs Nina Mackenzie has written about her visit to East Africa and Mauritius on behalf of the FPA. After referring to the people who met her at the airport, Mrs Mackenzie goes on “Mauritius has a large sugar growing industry and the population is over 600,000 with an annual birth rate of 44 per thousand. In the report of the Committee on Population 1954 the birth rate was said to be the highest in the world. The FPA of Mauritius and its 26 branches are faced with this vast problem of over-population and I found that much publicity had been given to my visit. I was invited to broadcast and received much encouragement when I called on important officials in the Government.”

Mrs Mackenzie goes on to say that she was able to meet different sections of the community and was made to feel how much her visit was appreciated. She refers to the problems facing the Mauritius FPA: “A much needed centre to be built at Port Louis; a paid social worker needed to travel around the island, a change of name to the Family Welfare Association thought to be more acceptable to the people and the Government; and the overwhelming need for more education and help to be given to the villagers… with the constant thought of how to find sufficient money. The sugar industry is very rich but with most of the large estates owned by Roman Catholics an appeal to them for help did not seem possible.”

The recurring theme in people’s minds was, says Mrs Mackenzie, that “The Government must help.” She feels that the Government will help, but in its own time. Meanwhile people should join the Association so that there is a strong association which “would be of inestimable value when the decision was taken.” As in News of Population two months ago, Mrs Mackenzie refers to the glove-puppet play in Creole. “On leaving,” she says, “I felt that my visit had helped to dispel that feeling of isolation which affects all family planning workers in remote parts of the world.”

There has, of course, been a recent furore in the UK about family planning. The British Medical Association found itself the centre of a storm of controversy when it rejected a Family Planning Association advertisement. This the FPA wanted to insert in the BMA’s annual Getting Married; before deciding whether or not to accept the advertisement for the monthly Family Doctor, the BMA has asked for the comments of its Roman Catholic members. It was widely said that the BMA had rejected the FPA advertisement at the instigation of Catholic members; commenting on this, The Times quite properly said that if this was indeed so, then the BMA was allowing a tiny minority to prevent the free flow of information. The majority of people in the country were in favour of family planning; yet the views of a tiny minority were to be allowed to prevail.

Letters to the editor of The Times revealed the fact that the Family Planning Association lets the Catholic Truth Society advertise its anti-birth control pamphlets in the quarterly Family Planning; but the Catholic Truth Society will not accept the FPA’s advertisements in its quarterly Catholic Truth. Can this be because the FPA’s case for family planning is better than the CTS’s case against it?

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Educating Young Nations

The name of Mr W.E.F. Ward is not unfamiliar to the older generation of teachers. He left Mauritius to become an educational adviser at the Colonial Office; later still he became editor of Overseas Education. He has just had published, by Allen and Unwin at 15 shillings, a new book on education in the colonies. Its title is that which I have given to this paragraph: Educating Young Nations. In just under 200 pages, Mr Ward deals with the problems which crop up when an education system originally devised on western lines for a western country is set to work in a country where the traditional culture is not western. The problems are both professional and human, and Mr Ward tackles both. Naturally, since his active teaching career was in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) followed by four and a half years as Director in Mauritius, he draws plentifully upon his experience in both countries. The index gives some idea of the frequency with which he refers to Mauritius:

“Mauritius 16, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, 41, 44, 74, 75, 97, 141-3, 159, 160, 192.”

The big gap between pages 97 and 141 is because in the intervening pages Mr Ward is dealing with technical and informal education, in both of which Mauritius is at present lacking — though it will not be lacking if the plans which Mr Beejadhur has in mind come to fruit.

One of the special problems with which Mr Ward deals is the problem of secondary school selection; he takes the reader back to 1941 when he changed the basis and organisation of the Standard Six examinations. He refers to work which has recently been done in Nigeria and Northern Rhodesia in evaluating the results of selection examinations especially in the light of the need to remedy the gross inequalities of opportunity which arise from social differences and differences in environment. “One child comes from an efficient school in a town; his parents… have had some education: he drinks clean water from the tap, and eats food which has been bought in a properly supervised market; he may go barefoot but it is on relatively clean pavements: his house had electric light and newspapers, perhaps a radio, perhaps even books. Another child comes from a poor school in a remote village, with illiterate parents; he is infested with internal parasites from his food, his drinking water, and the mud he walks in; and he may have no opportunity… of seeing a newspaper.”

The existence of these two contrasting environments is one of the problems confronting the colonial administrator or the newly-fledged Ministers of a colony which has achieved constitutional emancipation. This social problem must be solved, just as must the educational problems. Mauritius has both types of problem to solve. The Government has to help to improve the lot of the unfortunate majority of the citizens; it has to provide opportunity for work, it is called upon to do this, that and the other to make life better for everyone. But it cannot do everything at once; and in any case, as we have more than once pointed out in these columns, the way to a better Mauritius will not be quick, will not be easy, will not be smooth. All the Government can offer for the immediate future is toil and sweat; but toil and sweat now will avoid the blood and tears in the future.

Those jeremiads who cannot understand what the government is doing, what it is getting at in its plans and preparations for the next 10 years, should read Mr Ward’s book. They will learn that in the field of education, as in all other fields of constructive governmental activity, one cannot get quick returns which are lasting returns. No Government can succeed if it acts according to the philosophy of “Eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow we die”, or “Come day, go day, and the devil take the hind-most.” On the contrary, the Government, like all prudent citizens, takes thought for tomorrow, and plans for the future. It often may look as though the Government is sitting back comfortably on its collective derrière and doing nothing, but this isn’t ever the case. No matter what the Government’s Destructive traducers may say, it isn’t lazing about and doing nothing. On the contrary, it is in many instances doing for people what these people might reasonably be expected to do for themselves.

6th Year – No 283 – Friday 22nd January, 1960

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 27 September 2024