Mauritius
Capital: Port Louis · East Africa & Horn
Indian Ocean crossroads whose Creole, Indian, African, Chinese and European heritages fused into sega music and a plural island culture.
Ethnic communities
- Mauritian CreolesAfro-Malagasy descendants; keepers of sega tipik
- Indo-MauritiansDescendants of indentured laborers via Aapravasi Ghat
More communities of Mauritius
- Hindu communities · Bhojpuri-rooted majority of temple festivals
- Muslim communities · Trading families of the port and plains
- Tamil communities · Cavadee fire-walking devotional culture
- Telugu & Marathi folk · Distinct South Asian heritage streams
- Sino-Mauritians · Hakka shopkeeper families of every town
- Franco-Mauritians · Plantation-descended estate families
- Rodriguan Creoles · Autonomous island's fisher-farmers
- Chagossians · Displaced archipelago community seeking return
- Agalega islanders · Coconut-isle outpost communities
- Sega artist lineages · Ravanne drum families of the UNESCO art
- Port Louis dockland folk · The harbor's mixed working heritage
Languages
Major languages: Mauritian Creole, French, English, Bhojpuri
Language families: French-based Creole; Indo-Aryan
Historical kingdoms & states
- • (No precolonial kingdoms — island settled in colonial era)
Heritage sites
- • Aapravasi Ghat
- • Le Morne Cultural Landscape (maroon refuge)
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Mauritius
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activismb. 1959
Ameenah Gurib-Fakim
Biodiversity science
Biochemist who catalogued the medicinal plants of the Indian Ocean islands and served as Mauritius's first woman president.
- Music & the artsb. 1957
Ananda Devi
Literature
Anthropologist and novelist of Eve Out of Her Ruins, among the most acclaimed writers of the Indian Ocean.
- Sportb. 1979
Bruno Julie
Boxing
Won Mauritius's first and so far only Olympic medal, bantamweight bronze in Beijing in 2008.
- Politics & liberation1900–1985
Seewoosagur Ramgoolam
Independence
Doctor who led Mauritius to independence in 1968 and built the free education and health systems that underpin the island's later prosperity.
Deep-dive community profiles
Agaléens
The people of two coconut islands a thousand kilometres north of Mauritius — a few hundred islanders whose community was built on copra, who have no airport of their own until recently and no say in the runway now being built on their land.
Open deep profile →Chagossians
The people removed from their islands — Ilois families deported from the Chagos Archipelago between 1968 and 1973 to make room for a military base, who have spent half a century in Mauritius and Britain litigating for the right to go home.
Open deep profile →Franco-Mauritians
The descendants of the island's French planters — a very small minority who kept their language, their estates and a disproportionate share of the sugar and tourism economy through British rule, independence and beyond.
Open deep profile →Indo-Mauritians
The majority of the island — descendants of nearly half a million indentured workers who landed at the Aapravasi Ghat after 1834, kept Bhojpuri alive in the cane belt, built the temples of Grand Bassin, and turned a labour system into political and economic power.
Open deep profile →Mauritian Creoles
The descendants of the enslaved — the people whose ancestors were brought from Madagascar, Mozambique and West Africa, who made sega on the beach at night, who climbed Le Morne rather than be recaptured, and who remain the group least served by the island's prosperity.
Open deep profile →Muslim Mauritians
Around a sixth of the island, descended from indentured labourers of the Ganges plain and from Gujarati merchants who arrived free, holding a constitutionally recognised place in parliament and a distinct institutional world within an Indo-Mauritian majority they are not part of.
Open deep profile →Rodriguans
The people of the far island — forty thousand Creole-speaking fishers and farmers 560 kilometres east of Mauritius, with their own accordion-driven sega tambour, their own autonomy since 2002, and an octopus fishery they close by agreement each year to let it recover.
Open deep profile →Sino-Mauritians
The island's Chinese community — largely Hakka families who arrived as traders and indentured workers from the 1780s, built the shop network of every village, gave Mauritius its Chinatown and its spring festival, and produce a share of its writers and business families out of all proportion to their numbers.
Open deep profile →Tamil Mauritians
The oldest Indian community on the island, brought as artisans and masons before indentured labour began, who built much of colonial Port Louis, kept their temples and fire-walking, and are counted separately from the Hindu majority they are usually confused with.
Open deep profile →