I bought three books in Mauritius at Bookcourt, a store in the Caudan Waterfront mall. The other was a freebie I took from our hotel’s mini library.
The selection of books on all things Mauritius was impressive, yet I only saw one book on kreol morisien. It was a thick and heavy hardcover unilingual dictionary– entirely in kreol morisien, including the definitions. A very short Lexik Angle-Franse-Kreol Morisien was included at the end, but it wasn’t worth spending all that money for. I chose these three books:
Memories in Indian Ocean on the islands of Mauritius, Réunion, Seychelles, Chagos, and Madagascar by Georges Toussaint gave histories of all the islands in the title and the author’s family connection to them. He also wrote about visiting these islands with his niece.
Now here’s a curious little book for an island lover. While I was watching Mauritian TV in our hotel, I was naturally tuned to the weather reports as tropical cyclone Garance had shut the island down for two days while it was ravaging Réunion. In addition to providing forecasts for the entire island of Mauritius, the weather reports also included the inhabited outer islands of Rodrigues and one mysterious Mauritian dependency called Agaléga. I had to go on-line to find out where Agaléga was.
The archipelago of Agaléga consists of two islands located 1122 km north of Mauritius. Only 330 people live on its 24 km2. Had I not seen the weather report I would have glanced over and probably not even picked up Agaléga: Petite Ile by R. P. Roger Dussercle, who covered the islands’ history, flora, fauna, climate and settlement by slaves, Indians and missionaries.
Just as with Scotland, where every souvenir shop has fridge magnets and stuffed animals of the Loch Ness Monster, so in Mauritius you see dodo paraphernalia everywhere. It seems to be a symptom of humanity’s mass guilt; we extinguished the species but it lives on in tacky caricatures on dish towels. Although I can find dodo books anywhere, naturally I had to get myself a book about this extinct species while I was on Mauritius. Dodo: The Bird Behind the Legend by Alan Grihault talks about the explorers’ first encounters with the bird, its extinction, habitat, myths and mysteries as well as a final chapter on its iconography. I saw a dodo skeleton at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Saint-Denis:
The final book I acquired was a freebie from the hotel:
A little bit of history I didn’t know about. Redevenir l’isle de France? Un Récit Politique: La « folle aventure » de la rétrocession de l’ile Maurice à la France (1913-1921) by Lindsay Rivière dealt with the brief campaign by black and mixed-race Mauritians, as well as white French Mauritians, to secede from British rule and rejoin France.