The official ceremony for the Commemoration of the 188th Anniversary of the Arrival of Indentured Labourers would be held at the Trou Fanfaron Wharf next to the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site on 2nd November 2022. The official ceremony will be marked by a wreath laying by the Prime Minister, Pravind Jugnauth, the Leader of the Opposition, the Minister of Culture, and other members of the government. There is a cultural component by Mahatma Gandhi Institute. The 2nnd November is a public holiday commemorating the anniversary of that first arrival in 1834, this day celebrates the rich cultural heritage of the Indian population and their contribution to Mauritian society. Similar public holidays take place in Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago. In Grenada, a holiday is observed on May 1st, the same date as International Workers’ Day.
For this year the government has agreed to the organisation of a wreath-laying ceremony by the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage in collaboration with the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund at Antoinette Phooliyar, Barlow, on 01 November 2022 to commemorate the 188th Anniversary of the Arrival of Indentured Labourers in Mauritius. The ceremony at Antoinette Phooliyar would be in memory of the first indentured labourers who came to Mauritius in the 1830s and were employed by the Ex-Antoinette Sugar Estate.
The Arrival of Indentured Labourers
The use of slaves in Mauritius was widespread. It began when the French took control of the island and established sugar cane plantations, which needed a large workforce of slaves.
By the time the British took control of the island in 1810, slaves accounted for around 80% of the island’s population with most from Madagascar and East Africa.
In February 1835, slavery was abolished in Mauritius. This instantly created a demand for replacement labour on the plantations.
The solution was to use indentured workers. Effectively indentured workers would work as slaves, but only for the term of their contract, after which they would be freed. This process started in Mauritius and was expanded to other parts of the British Empire.
Between 1834 and 1920, half-a-million indentured immigrants (labourers and their families) arrived on Mauritius, with 97% of the immigrants coming from India. The first labourers, called coolies, arrived from Calcutta (Kolkata) on November 2nd 1834.
A commission to look at the practice of indenture first took place in 1872, though it was 1924 before the practice was abolished.
Apravasi Ghat
This year marks the 16th anniversary of the inscription of the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site, which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on 16th July 2006 in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the 30th general meeting of the World Heritage Committee. In 1849 an immigration depot was built at Trou Fanfaron, Port Louis, where the coolies lived for two days before heading out to the sugar estates. It was listed as a national monument and renamed to Apravasi Ghat in 1989.
In 2006, the depot, seen as a symbol of human endurance, was included in Unesco’s list of world heritage sites.
Located in Port-Louis, the Aapravasi Ghat is the remains of an immigration depot, the site from where modern indentured labour Diaspora emerged. The Depot was built in 1849 to receive indentured labourers from India, Eastern Africa, Madagascar, China, and Southeast Asia to work on the island’s sugar estates. The buildings of Aapravasi Ghat are among the earliest explicit manifestations of what would become a global economic system. The site stands as a major historic testimony of indenture in the 19th century and is the sole surviving example of this unique modern diaspora. It represents not only the development of the modern system of contractual labour, but also the memories, traditions, and values that these men, women and children carried with them when they left their countries of origin to work in foreign lands and subsequently bequeathed to their millions of descendants for whom the site holds great symbolic meaning.
