How Citizens Are Produced and Ethnicity Is Maintained in Post-colonial Mauritius, With Special Attention to the Creoles

This book examines how an education system can provide mechanisms for nation building. This work exposes how these mechanisms influence building and enacting nation in a country with no native population. It also examines how its colonially introduced ethnic groups proudly proclaim their differences in language and history. The analysis directs attention to how the education system maintains and reproduces differences. Though located in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius exists at the crossroads of multiple regions and cultures. While it is geographically part of Africa, Mauritius shares with the Caribbean a history of raw material production at the service of European capitalism, which has resulted in a Creole culture and language. Laborers from India, introduced as indentured servants, add to the picture as diasporic population that brings Mauritius closer to India, Europe and the Middle East than to its closest neighbors in Africa. Positioned as a node of historical flows of people, ideas, and commodities congealed in the making of the modern world, Mauritius is ideal for a multi-pronged study of nation building and the difficulties post-colonial populations face as they share citizenship in the contemporary globalized world.