The Chinese who helped make tiny Mauritius an African success story

As Mauritius speeds towards becoming the first high-income nation in Africa, its small but influential Chinese community can give itself a pat on the back for making the island what it is today.

“We Sino-Mauritians make up around 2-3 per cent of the population, but our influence is probably around 30 per cent as we punch well above our weight,” said Antoine Kon-Kam King, Vice-President of Mauritius’ Chinese Business Chamber and a former UN diplomat.

Not far from the main bus station, the capital Port Louis’ Chinatown is a brightly coloured and bustling place.

It has two paifangs (archways) and walls painted with murals featuring Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and Chairman Mao Zedong.

Flags flap in the air welcoming visitors. Pinned to the wire fence of a car park is a photo of a beaming Miss Mauritius standing next to a drawing of Confucius.

There is a Buddhist temple, barbers and well-stocked food shops, as well as other businesses and stores serving not only the Chinese, but also Hindu, Afro-Creole and French locals.

Ranked by the World Bank as the best place to do business in Africa in 2018, Mauritius’ economy is expected to reach developed country status by the early 2020s.

Since independence in 1968, the multicultural former British colony has morphed from a sugar plantation economy, through tourism and textiles to an emerging service economy specialising in finance.

Around 10 per cent of the population live under the poverty line and corruption still exists, but compared with other African countries, it is a model of good governance.

Despite dwindling numbers and only one cabinet member in a government dominated by people of Indian heritage, the local Chinese community still contributes greatly to the island’s economic development.

There has been a Chinese presence in Mauritius since the late 1600s, starting with convicts brought by the Dutch who controlled the island at the time, followed by artisans and traders captured by French pirates.

But it was only after 1810 when the British took over that their numbers increased and the community settled, establishing Chinatown in Port Louis as a centre for commerce, culture and gossip.

The abolition of slavery saw thousands of labourers recruited, mainly from India but also from China.

“They weren’t docile like the Indian coolies, they already suffered British exploitation in Southeast Asia and didn’t want to be whipped again by the French,” said Kee Chong Li Kwong Wing, a former member of the Mauritius parliament, now chairman of the country’s second largest bank, SBM.

The current community of mainly Hakka-speaking Chinese arrived from Meixian in Guangdong Province in the 1840s, many planning to join the gold rush in South Africa, but stayed in Mauritius.

From the top floor of his bank in Port Louis’ financial district, Li tells the tale of how Chinese dug under the MCB, a bank founded by French slave-owners, and emptied its vault to pay for a ship back home.

True or not, what is fact is that the Chinese, rather than labour in sugar cane fields, opened shops in the Mauritian countryside to supply food to the Indian labourers, whose ancestors form most of the population.

The Chinese influence on the local cuisine is unquestionable with dishes like dumplings, fried rice and “Poulet Mee Foon” – chicken soup with rice vermicelli noodles that is eaten by nearly everyone.

Chinese continued to arrive in significant numbers well into the 20th century, so most have roots on the island going back three or four generations.

“If we had stayed in China we would have been planting rice,” King said. “I went back to my ancestral village and I looked around and thought … I’m glad my father left. And we admire how they left because they were very poor and there were no cars. They walked and sailed on a junk.”

But just as his ancestors had fled poverty, survived and thrived, today many of the young Chinese are leaving for better career prospects abroad, especially to Australia and Canada.

Posted by Minority Voice on Nov 24 2018. Filed under Featured, Société. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry