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Paper short abstract:

The paper compares genealogical writings and commemorations by Mauritians of European, Indian and African descent as statements contributing to a longstanding and ongoing dispute about the meaning of African Indian Ocean belonging

Paper long abstract:

Mauritius provides a privileged field for studying claims to belonging as Indian Ocean African. Geographically, the island is part of Africa, but it had no human inhabitants before settlers and slaves arrived in the 17th century, and the self-understanding of its population has been the object of continuous dispute between groups identifying their descent as respectively European, Indian or African. This is reflected in the independence constitution of Mauritius from 1968, which recognized multicultural alongside individual citizenship rights. While there is little disagreement that Mauritius is actively situated in an Indian Ocean world, it is matter of contestation, whether its national identity within this setting has been formed primarily by European - especially French - colonization, as a ‘little India’ by indentured labourers, whose descendants today make up the majority of the population, or as an integral part of a diverse Africa by the multitudes of slaves brought to the island from Madagascar and Mozambique from the earliest times of human settlement. The paper discusses how such debates over African Indian Ocean identity and the prioritization of different claims of belonging are given expression in a rich literature of genealogical writing and in initiatives to investigate, highlight and commemorate the descent of European, Indian and African Mauritians.