Limuria: The Lesser Dependencies of Mauritius by Robert Scott was cited in the bibliography for The Last Colony, and I acquired it as an interloan from the Vancouver Public Library. It was originally published in 1961 and I read a 1976 reprint. The title refers to a supposed lost continent that sank beneath the Indian Ocean, the remnants of which are the island archipelagos Chagos, the Seychelles, Maldives, and so on.
I found this book to be a sorrowfully slow read. Its 300 pages nevertheless took me eleven days to finish. My reading pace was not helped by the chunks of solid text, with rare paragraph breaks, printed in a tiny font. The first part of the book was devoted to the islands’ history, ranging from their discovery by Europeans, settlement, the role of slavery in the foundation of the economy, and politics and administration. The text flowed at a glacial pace, taking me over a week to get through the first 182 pages. I raced through the second part, however, which dealt with the major island groups and the people who lived there. Since this book was published in 1961 it documented the way of life of all the islanders before–unknown to all of them, including the author–they were forcibly evicted from the archipelago in 1973. I can’t expect anyone who read this book after 1973 wouldn’t feel sorrow in knowing that so many lives would be uprooted and entire island societies would be blown off the map.
For at times a dry academic read, Scott nonetheless couldn’t resist the inclusion of subjectivities which were tarnished by his own racism. From ranking the industriousness of each island settlement to pitting the islanders against the Seychellois, Scott, who was the colonial governor of Mauritius from 1954 to 1959 and should know better, came across as a twentieth-century plantation owner bemoaning the lack of efficiency of his workforce. He appeared to be quite surprised that the islanders could choose to live in clean houses where he couldn’t smell animal or human effluvia. It was as if he was expecting to tiptoe through excreta flowing through the village. Yes, those who live in the outer archipelagos, far from the Mauritian capital of Port Louis, can have a lifestyle as modern and sanitary as his own.
One passage of eye-rolling discriminatory subjectivity is below:
“Exceptionally, individuals from the main communities, usually crusty old bachelors who can no longer abide the chatter of women and crying of children, the need for observing regular hours or for wearing respectable clothes, will cut themselves off from society in one of the remoter islands.”
I found the next one to be quite funny, especially since I could still feel my own body rocking with the waves even after being one week on terra firma at Tristan da Cunha:
“From the manager’s house, the main ‘street’ runs towards the olive-green hedge round the cemetery at the northern end of Raphael. It has to weave its way among the casuarinas, whose ranks follow so wanton and undulant a pattern as to suggest that the original planter had not recovered from the pitch and roll of the schooner.”
Since we know the fate that befell the residents of the Chagos archipelago, it is hard to read the book’s final words below, where twelve years after publication no trace of their existence was “preserved”:
“A process which has its origins in the islanders’ own thinking cannot but be of eventual benefit to their societies. The danger is that the process might be unbalanced by untimely, if well intentioned, efforts to shape those communities to a pattern unnatural them; and so lead to their dissolution. This is far from being a plea to make the Lesser Dependencies a kind of nature reserve for the preservation of the anachronistic. It is, however, very definitely a plea for full understanding of the islanders’ unique condition, in order to ensure that all that is wholesome and expansive in the island societies is preserved.”