Mauritian Entity

From Our Archives – A Glimpse into 1961

By L. Seetanah

I was invited the other day to take part in a debate on L’Entité Mauricienne at the Youth House and was asked to write on the subject in the interest of youth clubs which are at present taken up with the idea. This urge on the part of the youth of this country is, in itself, a healthy sign that Unity is the much-sought-after solution to most, if not all, of our problems. It is a sure sign that communalism is now universally believed to be an impediment to this country’s progress, socially and economically, not to mention all the unhealthy emotional feelings which cause us to be at variance with one another, and which stand in the way of good relationships and harmony. It is a sign that we are not, after all, utterly devoid of patriotic sentiments which alone can transcend and rise above our parochial and petty differences.

The questions that ought to crop up in our minds to be answered now should be: What makes us keep apart? Why is it that a rapprochement seems so impossible? To answer these, we must go to the roots of our differences; we must empty our minds of all the prejudices that have gathered there from our infancy; we must examine and understand the psychological facts about our likes and dislikes which are the direct outcome of the influences on our minds brought about by the way we have been brought up and by the environments in which we have lived in the past.

There must have been many occasions in our childhood when what was taught to us by our parents and what our parents did were incompatible, but we were not perhaps particular about questioning anything they did or said because we accepted them as our guides and protectors, and the love we naturally have for them besides prevented us from caring overmuch about what seemed to us to be improper. What we are, therefore, is the result of what we then thought and believed. What we did not question then, we accepted as thoroughly true, and no great wonder, therefore, that we cannot now explain why we cannot see things in a different light.

From this argument we can satisfactorily come to the conclusion that our beliefs are not all of them right, or rather that there is a possibility they can be wrong. If we can reason with ourselves in this way, then there is no doubt that we can bring ourselves to understand our friends who have been brought up differently from ourselves.

I admit that this standard of reasoning cannot be easily reached by everybody, but for our intelligentsia, among whom we include our students, it should not be all that difficult. Since we are out in search of the truth about our Unity, we must now answer this question: How are we to strive undividedly — without jeopardising the very unity we are striving for — to reach it? The answer to this will be better understood — since I have already explained what procedure in our reasoning we should follow — if I quote myself, though very copiously, from a letter which I addressed to a Franco-Mauritian friend of mine in London, when we were considering the possibility of creating the Mauritius League there:

“The barriers of religion, race, creed, class, colour, etc., are just imperfect creations of our imperfect minds. Human beings remain as they are in spite of such puny creations in their minds. The world is a unity, and however much we would try to divide it, the unity will remain, and so, therefore, why not contribute towards this unity instead of going against the natural current? I am confident that we can work together although we disagree on points of principle.

“So, let us view the problems of Mauritius, you and I, as just two young human beings, two detached observers, unbiased and disinterested. What do we see? We see an old generation moving towards its end, leaving behind its class, race, creed, and political hatreds, and the young stepping gradually into its place and reviving and perpetuating the old hatreds, having unquestioningly and sheepishly accepted as gospel truth everything indiscriminately that the old generation is leaving behind.

“We see children being born, pure in heart and mind, and then suddenly absorbing the pride, prejudice, hatred, jealousy, fear, etc., of their parents. They grow up to worsen things instead of to improve and remedy them. What should you do? Do we stand there and do nothing, or do we make it our bounden duty to remedy the evils before we are driven and drowned by the current?

“ We, the Mauritian youth of today, must learn to understand, tolerate and live side by side with one another, whether we are Franco-Mauritians, Indo-Mauritians or Sino-Mauritians; whether Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Mohammedans or pagans; whether we are clerks or labourers, so that posterity might say that we knew how to live in our day. Civilisation and education must be judged by the extent to which people can and will understand and tolerate others and live in harmony together. At this stage of Mauritian history, we need people, like yourself, of goodwill and understanding to come fearlessly forward and help create a harmonious future for the good and welfare of all of us.”

If we can struggle first with ourselves to eradicate all our prejudices which have, through no fault of ours, found their way into the pure mind and heart with which we were born, we shall, without the shadow of a doubt, succeed in bringing about Unity into our society. The move on the part of our youth now was bound to come. Order and harmony are inherent in the nature of this God-created world, and all interferences by puny mortals who are, after all, its offspring, inevitably must, at some stage or other, give in to the Absolute Power which is Truth itself.

What is taking place in the minds of our youth today in the form of this move towards Unity is simply the effect of this Absolute Power which seeks to restore order in a deeply divided society through its younger creatures here. Also, the existence of this country has been unjustly ignored by the outside world, which has always sought its own interest through cheap labour at our expense. This will slowly be remedied when the youth of this country will together put up a timely struggle and win respect and recognition for their country from the outside world. This recognition, however, must be earned and demands their sustained efforts; it demands their pledge and dedication to a just cause.

Our youth will be gratified to know how just a cause theirs is in their struggle to restore order, peace and harmony in this country. For them, we quote these well-known verses from Lord Tennyson, so that they may realise how great their task is:

“The old order changeth,
yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

8th Year – No 343
Friday 31st March, 1961

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 21 August 2026