When the American novelist Mark Twain visited Mauritius, 800km off the coast of Madagascar, in 1896, it struck him as a blueprint for paradise. ‘Heaven was copied after it,’ he wrote of this little Indian Ocean island, a quote much favoured by tour operators. Twain the traveller, however, was profligate with his praise: he paid the same compliment to Bermuda and, in any case was inclined to disparage heaven as a place with ‘no humor’, where ‘society consists mainly of undesirable persons’. When he came to describe a dodo-populated Garden of Eden in his diaries of Adam and Eve, however, it is clearly Mauritius he was thinking about. ‘She is colour mad: grey moss, green foliage, blue sky, the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountain, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star jewels glittering.’
It’s a description that holds true. If I have a single defining memory of Mauritius, it’s the abundance, the variety, the omnipresence of vibrant, vivid colour; not just the sea, which deepens from aquamarine in the shallows to indigo when it reaches the reef that encircles much of the island, nor the emerald cane fields of its lush interior, but the pink, violet and yellow of the bald volcanic dune-like ‘coloured earths’ near the Chamarel Falls, the technicolour sunsets and roseate dawns, and the brightly painted Hindu temples in almost every village.
Yet, for all this, many visitors never venture beyond their hotel beach, which is a shame because Mauritius is a pleasure to explore. It is small, about the same area as London, its total coastline less than the length of the M25. Its roads are well-maintained and its motorists (who drive on the left) mostly courteous. And crime levels are low. Its highly educated, multilingual, multiethnic population – Indo-Mauritian, Creole, Chinese and European – has given rise to a fusion of cultures, so you’ll see gaudily decorated Tamil temples, dour basalt churches and imposing mosques in every town. English may be the language of government and the law, but parliament business is debated in French, which remains unofficially the lingua franca. But such is the sense of fairness that when, in 2000, the general election resulted in a coalition, one leader, Anerood Jugnauth, served as prime minister for the first half of the five-year term before handing over to his coalition partner, Paul Bérenger, till the next election. Not for nothing, last September, did the Ibrahim Index of African Governance judge it the best governed of the 48 sub-Saharan African countries that it evaluates in terms of safety, economic development and human rights.
As one local put it to me: ‘We have many religions here – Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and we all live in harmony.’ The only conflict comes from football and ‘whether you support Manchester United or Liverpool’. (Though Arsenal and Chelsea are gaining ground.) For if there is a subject that unites – or, more pertinently, divides – the island’s male population, it’s UK football. Not just the Premiership: the main newspaper L’Express reports on the other leagues as well, in language that renders the usual footballing clichés almost poetic.
That football really does have the status of a faith here was reinforced as I walked around the magnificent Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanic Garden (named after the leader who secured independence from Britain in 1968 and whose son, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, is prime minister now) with a guide whose immense knowledge of dendrology and flora was rivalled only by his passion for Liverpool FC. Periodically, he would break off from explaining the differences between the 80-odd varieties of palm and showing me spice trees and lotus blossoms, to tell me, for instance, that questions had been asked in parliament when a Liverpool/Manchester United match was not televised live.
