{"id":28015,"date":"2023-04-04T08:58:02","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T08:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/the-true-nature-of-the-retrocession-movement-in-mauritius-prior-to-the-birth-of-the-mauritius-labour-party"},"modified":"2023-04-04T09:45:26","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T09:45:26","slug":"the-true-nature-of-the-retrocession-movement-in-mauritius-prior-to-the-birth-of-the-mauritius-labour-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/the-true-nature-of-the-retrocession-movement-in-mauritius-prior-to-the-birth-of-the-mauritius-labour-party","title":{"rendered":"The true nature of the retrocession movement in Mauritius \u2026prior to the birth of the Mauritius Labour Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Mauritius. <\/strong><\/span>This elite kept in power the conservatives from 1886 to 1948, when the Constitution changed and the conservatives, under a new enlarged suffrage, were swamped from power by the Labour Party led by Guy Rozemont, the successor of Dr.<\/p>\n

Maurice Cure\u0301, with the help of the Jan Andolan movement of the Bissoondoyal brothers \u2013 with Dr. Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, elected as an independent with Labour support, and who brought with him two other independents, Harilal R. Vaghjee and Aunauth Beejadhur, the latter ironically, or to say the least, defeating two official Labour candidates, Partab Algoo and Donald Francis!<\/p>\n

The future SSR finally joined Labour, took over the leadership with a team of his own after the successive deaths of Rozemont and Renganaden Seeneevassen, the next in the line of succession in the party, while the Bissoondoyal\u2019s broke away later on to form the IFB.<\/p>\n

For its part, the Retrocession Movement was born several years before 1948, on the back of the terribly desperate but educated and unemployed classes, including doctors, demoralized by the victory, at the 1911 general election, of the Oligarchy Party over the Parti Libe\u0301ral of Dr.<\/p>\n

Euge\u0300ne Laurent\u2019s and Manilal Doctor who had toured the island extensively rallying the support of the so-called \u2018indo-creole masses\u2019. It was not difficult to see, therefore, why Dr.<\/p>\n

Maurice Cure\u0301, a brilliant laureate and doctor who looked after wounded soldiers of the First World War, became a candidate with the Retrocessionist Movement.<\/p>\n

He was not at all a communalist, and went on, later, to enroll into the anti-oligarchy mass movement, the smaller agricultural entrepreneurs and workers of all communities, to create the Mauritius Labour Party, with the support of the Jan Andolan and his most trusted lieutenants like Pandit Sahadeo.<\/p>\n

It is important to revisit the Retrocessionist Movement as it was born and died between the defeat of the Laurent-Manilal Doctor tandem and the creation of the Labour Party by Cure\u0301-Sahadeo-Rozemont in 1936.<\/p>\n

In fact, there were a few \u2018Indo-Mauritians\u2019, a tiny minority, who supported the Retrocession while what remained of the Liberal Party of Laurent (by the way the author of brilliant medical articles in The Lancet and other medical publications) after both he and Manilall Doctor left Mauritius, fought against retrocession at the 1921 general elections.<\/p>\n

The British in London and Mauritius had been seriously worried by Action Libe\u0301rale\u2019s leaders Dr. Euge\u0300ne Laurent and Manilal Doctor. They thought, in their simplistic analysis based uniquely on ethnicity as the Colonial Office papers indicate, that the Creole leaders and other Creoles were going to be \u2018assimilated\u2019 by the Indians:<\/p>\n

\u201cLaurent, a Creole leader of Indian origins, was an example of that assimilation which alarmed the officials. But they soon found a new enemy. Creole leaders were not the only threat to Indian loyalty.<\/p>\n

There was Manilal Doctor, a lawyer from Gujarat who was favoured by Mahatma Gandhi and had helped Indian workers to complain against ill-treatment. The procureur-general thought he was trying to \u2018stir the Indian element\u2019.
\nThe movement for retrocession gathered momentum among the opponents to the Parti de l\u2019Ordre of the sugar barons, raising again British fears of a rebellion, but this time unlike the 1832 rebellion of the slave-owners and coming from the other side of the political divide.<\/p>\n

History shows that immediately after the retrocession movement died out, London was expressing fear that the Indo-Mauritians were being influenced by \u2018terrorists\u2019 who got their inspiration from the pro-independence movement in India.<\/p>\n

In both cases, those fears were imaginary as the retrocessionists submitted themselves to the electoral process, while the Indian nationalists had been seeking financial help, as some researchers have established, from Indo-Mauritians who could afford to support them.<\/p>\n

This was only partly true, in fact, as in the 1940s Labour leader Emmanuel Anquetil appointed his close friend Basdeo Bissoondoyal as the political representative of the party with the independentist Indian Congress Party.<\/p>\n

The retrocessionist initiative was in truth another way to challenge the colonial authorities and the sugar barons. Many believed that integrating the French fold would bring them a better social status and jobs and the ensuing well-being that they were being deprived of.<\/p>\n

What can be established already is the constant influence of ideas of freedom from overseas, especially Europe and India, has always played a role in the island\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

One cannot dissociate the events in Europe where socialism was on the rise, especially in France with such great leaders as Jean Jaure\u0300s, assassinated in 1914, and who had probably influenced Dr. Maurice Cure\u0301, who had studied in Britain, then had participated in the Balkan War as a doctor, and other intellectuals of his days.<\/p>\n

The same can be said of influences brought to Mauritian shores by Mohandas Gandhi and Manilal Doctor and of the considerable influence of Indian nationalism on great Mauritian leaders like Cashinath Kistoe, then later Cure\u0301 and Anquetil, and Basdeo and Sookdeo Bissoondoyal, the latter even being appointed representative of Labour with the Indian Congress Party.<\/p>\n

The Franco-Mauritian sugar barons opposed retrocession to France and so did the richest leaders of Indo-Mauritian businesses. Those ultra-conservatives monopolised the right to vote except in Port-Louis where there was a large number of self-employed people and middle- and low-ranking government employees who could satisfy the very restricted property franchise.<\/p>\n

At the Colonial Office, there was a lot of head-scratching, observes researcher Ballhatchet on the basis of an examination of the frantic correspondence between the governor in Mauritius and the officials in London in those days on the topic of retrocession and then on imaginary Indian \u2018terrorists\u2019.<\/p>\n

It is extremely unfortunate that such people were defining the destinies of the colonies. For those officials, the partisans of retrocession were being disloyal.<\/p>\n

They had the same reaction when Manilal Doctor, Gandhi\u2019s envoy, mobilised the Indian small planters and labourers and disturbances broke out before and after the 1911 general elections and the influence of India started to be felt in the island.<\/p>\n

In 1922, following the demise of the retrocession movement, the Colonial Office was considering action against the Indo-Mauritians inspired by Indian nationalism and C. O. (Colonial Office) files contain references to those persons as \u2018sedition-mongers. \u2019<\/p>\n

Cashinath Kistoe had organised strikes in the south of the island and had been sentenced to prison and then upon liberation went to India from whence he came back a priest and an even more resolute militant and founded the militant Hindi language newspaper Arya Vir.<\/p>\n

More serious disturbances would come in the 1930s and 1940s from the masses of Indo-Creoles militating under the banner of Cure\u0301\u2019s Labour Party and the Jan Andolan, and one of the names that come up in the Colonial Office papers was going to be that of the young Pandit Sahadeo:<\/p>\n

\u201cThen Bede Clifford, the governor, told the secretary of state that Pandit Sahadeo, Cure\u2019s \u2018principal assistant\u2019, was in India \u2018going through a course of instruction with Nehru and the terrorists\u2019.<\/p>\n

Bede Clifford thought he was \u2018a rank seditionist\u2019 who wanted \u2018to induce Mauritius Indians to follow the anti-British policy prevalent in India\u2019. He was \u2018cunning\u2019, whereas Cure\u0301 was \u2018mentally unbalanced\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201d It must be also admitted that there has been in the course of some political movements, excessive language used on various sides.<\/p>\n

Such excesses were literally made available to the communalist strategists like when a supporter of retrocession argued that in Re\u0301union Island the Indians had been assimilated and that it should be the same in Mauritius to avoid an Indo-Mauritian majority that would rule the country.<\/p>\n

This came from a district cashier, one Abel Loumeau in his \u2018La re\u0301trocession et les aliens,\u2019 a publication smacking of anti-Indian racism, published in 1919 in Port-Louis under the pseudonym of Elba L. He was justly sacked by the British administration.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the policies \u2018keep-them-apart\u2019 of the ultra-conservatives to divide the work force, and, its equivalent, the \u2018divide-and-rule\u2019 of the British colonial administration were being tested and put into practice, and the ultimate result is today\u2019s ethnic politics, pushed to the extreme, unashamedly, by the Mauritian political establishment to this date, in independent Mauritius.<\/p>\n

And yet, scholarly studies have established that Mauritius has remained an \u2018integrated\u2019 society to such an extent that the greatest geniuses in the science of statistics have never been able to solve the problem of ethnic classification and demographics with so many intercultural and interethnic marriages, the blurring of the divide between the Indian castes following immigration to Mauritius, etc.<\/p>\n

This has led to such conclusions as this one: \u201cThe very problems of the census commissioners derived from the fact that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the variously defined communities lived as an integrated society, notably in Port Louis, the capital, making segregation and separation impossible.
\nRetrocession to France, it must be said, was also, despite the underlying class-based antagonism between the rich and the poorer sections of Coloured and Creoles, motivated by a mixture of nostalgic ideas about French colonisation that had left in the island a major cultural heritage.<\/p>\n

Anand Mulloo writes, \u201cWith the long World War I over, the bottled up feelings of sympathy for France \u2013 La douce France (sweet France) \u2013 exploded. \u201d U. Bissoondoyal sees the more political aspect of the movement: \u201cDuring the 1921 elections, the main issue was the retrocession of Mauritius to France.<\/p>\n

Some liberal politicians of Mauritius campaigned in favour of the annexation of Mauritius to France in the hope that this would give Mauritius a larger measure of autonomy in internal affairs.
\nIn Madden and Darwin\u2019s \u2018The Dependent Empire\u2019, it is observed that Colonial Office documents mentions the case of an Indian who was a retrocessionist: \u201cThe son of the deputy mayor of St.<\/p>\n

Louis (Port-Louis), a wealthy Indo-Mauritian, had been treated in an offensive way in Cape Town: his father had become an enthusiastic \u2018retrocessionist\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201d The defeat of the retrocession movement was not the work of the Indo-Mauritian electorate which was only composed of a very tiny number of voters that were rich enough to qualify as electors and most of them sided with the conservatives.<\/p>\n

The defeat was the doing of two major political forces, both the oligarchs and the liberals of the former Liberal Party of Euge\u0300ne Laurent and Manilall Doctor.<\/p>\n

In fact, in Port-Louis, the anti-retrocessionists Edouard Nairac and Je\u0301ro\u0302me Tranquille defeated not just the two retrocessionist candidates, but also those of the oligarchy.<\/p>\n

In the rural areas, the conservatives were instrumental in the defeat of the Retrocessionists. Indian voters represented only a tiny fraction of voters nationally, the very rich among them voting with the conservatives.<\/p>\n

Class politics prevailed over other considerations. \u2018The Dependent Empire\u2019 reveals the Franco-Mauritian Oligarchs\u2019 hostility to retrocession. In addition, Sir Henri Lecle\u0301zio, knighted by the Queen is quoted in the book as stating:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were some 5,000 \u2018gentry of colour\u2019, attached to England and opposed to retrocession \u2013 equal in intellect with the whites.<\/p>\n

There are some 15,000 coloureds of middle class and \u2018pretty well educated\u2019 with some French blood: clerks, professors, traders, doctors, attorneys &c.<\/p>\n

\u2013 where in particular retrocessionists could be found, but not many. The promoters had indeed neither influence nor prestige to lead this section. [Lecle\u0301zio and elected members of the Council of Government asked for the advocacy of retrocession to be treated as disloyalty, believing that the leaders knew it was a \u2018chimera\u2019.
\nThe Oligarchy controlled a majority of the electoral votes and the majority in the Legislative Council from 1886 to 1948 and so, thanks to Lecle\u0301zio, the leader of the multiethnic conservative electorate, descending from an old French family, a leading figure of the battle against the retrocessionists, and to the liberals, retrocession disappeared in national politics – and that\u2019s the plain historical truth.<\/p>\n

It was class-based politics, or politics, simply put, based on class interests. [1] Sahadeo was still struggling against political repression and went on a hunger strike in the 1970s, as one of the historical leaders of the Labour Party.<\/p>\n

This hunger strike was recalled in L\u2019Express of 21 October 2003: \u201cIn June 1972, while Paul Be\u0301renger, the other leaders of the Mouvement militant mauricien (MMM) and of the General Workers Federation were imprisoned by the Ramgoolam re\u0301gime, it was Pandit Sahadeo who undertook a seven-day hunger strike, despite his poor health condition.<\/p>\n

\u201d Peerthum, Satyendra, in L\u2019Express, The Struggle of Pandit Sahadeo, 21 October, 2003.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, I was able to convince Pandit Sahadeo, during a visit at the Vacoas asram, to stop his hunger strike and this made the front page of Le Mauricien where I explained that I intervened on humanitarian grounds because he had become extremely weak due to his old age.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2] Ballhatchet, Kenneth, The Structure of British Official Attitudes: Colonial Mauritius, 1883-1968, The Historical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec.<\/p>\n

, 1995).<\/p>\n

[3] Ibid.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

\u201cOfficial attitudes were losing touch with reality. What the Congress party wanted from Indians in Mauritius was financial help for its campaigns in India. \u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>[4] Quoted in Ballahatchet, op cit.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[5] Ballhatchet, op cit.<\/p>\n

[6] Ibid.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[7] The maxims divide et impera and divide ut regnes were utilised by Caesar and Napoleon and meant divide and rule or divide and conquer.<\/p>\n

The British applied them in their colonies, mainly India. There are theories that say either they created the principle or that it existed already and they used what they saw.<\/p>\n

[8] Christopher, J. A.<\/p>\n

, Ethnicity, community and the census in Mauritius, 1830-1990. In: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 158, No. 1 (Mar. , 1992), pp. 57-64.<\/p>\n

Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) [9] Mulloo, Anand, Our Struggle, 20th Century Mauritius, Vision Books 1982.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[10] Bissoondoyal, U. Indians Overseas: The Mauritian Experience, Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1984 – 438 pages [11] Madden, A.<\/p>\n

Frederick & Darwin, John, The Dependent Empire, 1900-1948, Colonies, Protectorates, and Mandates Select Documents on the Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, page 324 – December 1994.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[12] \u201cSIR HENRI LECLE\u0301ZIO TO ACTING-GOVERNOR JOHN MIDDLETON, 21 April 1919 [Apart from a very few, the white population descending from the old French families was opposed to a return to France.] They have personal feelings of strong affection and admiration for the country of their origin, but they are loyally attached to England by bonds of gratitude for the blessings which they enjoy under the British rute: liberty of conac1ence 1 freedom of speech, social peace.<\/p>\n

For More News And Analysis About Mauritius<\/a> Follow Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Mauritius. This elite kept in power the conservatives from 1886 to 1948, when the Constitution changed and the conservatives, under a new enlarged suffrage, were swamped from power by the Labour Party led by Guy Rozemont, the successor of Dr. Maurice Cure\u0301, with the help of the Jan Andolan movement of the Bissoondoyal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":28014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[233,245,241,257],"class_list":["post-28015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-policy","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-mauritius","tag-mauritius","tag-port-louis"],"yoast_head":"\nThe true nature of the retrocession movement in Mauritius \u2026prior to the birth of the Mauritius Labour Party - Mauritius<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This elite kept in power the 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