Recognition and Redress in the Indian Ocean: Public Memory, Slavery, and the Catholic Church in Mauritius

For a small island nation of 1.3 million people, Mauritius has an unusually dense public-history landscape. Since 2006, it has seen the establishment of two UNESCO World Heritage sites and a government-appointed Truth and Justice Commission to examine the impacts of colonial institutions. Yet, as scholars of history and memory have observed, these efforts have been shaped by tensions over whose pasts should be emphasized, producing a segregation of memory rooted in Mauritius’s history as an Indian Ocean plantation colony. Within this landscape, the history of indenture is often coded as more meaningful to the island’s large South Asian population, while slavery is dismissed as relevant only to the Creole (African- and Malagasy-descended) minority and remains underemphasized. Recent state efforts to address this imbalance, while largely sanitized and tourism-oriented, have culminated in the Intercontinental Slavery Museum. This paper examines why one major aspect of that history, the direct participation of the Catholic Church in the enslavement of both Africans and Asians under French- and British-colonial rule, remains largely absent from these latest initiatives. Despite the Truth and Justice Commission’s recommendations that the Church issue a formal apology for its involvement in slavery, open its archives, and participate in restorative justice initiatives, the Mauritian Church has largely avoided public reckoning with its past, even as dioceses in Europe and the Americas have begun to do so. Drawing on newspapers and interviews with Mauritian activists and artists, this paper examines efforts outside the Church to confront that silence and situates them alongside movements for recognition and redress in the Americas. It finds that these dynamics reflect broader tensions in Mauritian memory politics rooted in Indian Ocean experiences that, as Isabel Hofmeyr reminds us, involve “cross-cutting” diasporas and categories that resist the Atlantic-centered frameworks that structure public histories of slavery elsewhere.