‘If they fall, we all fall’: The ecocide that sparked a revolution in Mauritius

Mahebourg is a picturesque village on the southeast coast of Mauritius. Its shores are usually buzzing with fishers in the morning, chatting while disembarking their catch from pirogues, or peppered with families or friends sat together playing cards and dominoes. But then tragedy struck, devastating this community of 15,000 people.

In late July, MV Wakashio, a 300-metre long bulk carrier carrying 4,000 tons of oil, crashed into fragile coral reefs a few kilometres from Mahebourg. Just under two weeks later, oil started spilling into the turquoise lagoons, turning the sea and the shores black.

“The local economy depends on fishers,” says Brummell Laurent, owner of a local shop that sells fishing gears. “It’s the fishers who buy from the local shops. Everyone here is linked to them. If they fall, the whole community falls – it breaks the entire link.”

Shortly after the spill, the link was broken as the government banned fishing in the region. Tests showed that even fish that looked normal to the naked eye had arsenic levels 500 per cent higher than normal, making them unsafe for consumption. Just like that fishers were out of work. During the hour and a half I spoke to Laurent in his shop, no one came in to buy any fishing gear.

The oil that spilled into the lagoon may have poisoned not just fish but whole ecosystems. The lagoon is home to the Blue Bay Marine Park, with its 38 species of corals; rare wetlands populated by mangrove forests; the nature reserve of Île aux Aigrettes, a coral islet which houses some of the world’s rarest plants, reptiles and birds, including the critically endangered olive white-eye, endemic to Mauritius.

Such devastation to nature and its people can only be classified as an ecocide. But when this tightly-knitted community of Mahebourg faces adversity and when it sees the sea that it cherishes undergo such damage, it does not surrender. Instead it mobilises. This mobilisation would prove to be the beginning of a popular movement that would regroup Mauritians all over the island, transcending age, class and ethnicity, who would demand not just a change of prime minister, but a change of the country’s entire political establishment.

Within hours of the oil starting to spill, the people of Mahebourg had come together at the waterfront. That first night, they and some volunteers started building sorbent booms to act as floating barriers to slow the spread of the oil. They built the booms by compacting dried sugarcane leaves into stretch nets. Getting those stretch nets in the middle of the night had been tricky. Volunteers had to go around Mahebourg knocking on doors on the off chance that someone had stretch nets lying around somewhere. They eventually met a resident who, as it so happened, stocked some stretch nets in his hardware store. He gave them away.

Over the following few days and nights, more than 5,000 volunteers built booms in Mahebourg and in malls and public areas all over the country, they became the largest assembly of volunteers Mauritius had ever seen.

“It was a people’s factory,” says Natasha Magraji, member of Mahebourg Otantik, a collective that works to preserve the authenticity of the village, its history and culture. “We were one family, one people.”

In the face of ecocide, the whole country had come together to protect nature and to show solidarity to the people of Mahebourg. And it also reminded Mauritians of what they could achieve when they united. That coming together was the beginning of a popular movement.

Mauritius has a proud history of popular movements. In the early 1900s, when the country was under British rule, workers came together and demanded colonists granted them basic rights and freedoms as well as higher wages and paid leave. The labour movement was born and it would eventually become the Mauritius Labour Party. Labour would form the first government after Mauritius won independence in 1968. A few years later, students, trade unions and the Mauritian Militant Movement (MMM), then a radical left-wing movement, united to stand for universalism, equality and direct democracy. The MMM would become the single largest party in parliament within a decade. The Militant Socialist Movement (MSM), the largest party in government today, formed following a split in the MMM a few years later. But the political landscape then ossified.

The parties formed coalitions with one another before most elections to guarantee they entered parliament. Gradually, they abandoned grassroots politics in favour of exploiting the state in the interest of big capital. This alienated people whose political activism subsequently decreased, and it led to growing distrust and anger towards not just one party but the entire political establishment.

This distrust and anger has only grown over the decades as scandals of alleged corruption and nepotism became a mainstay of the establishment. Just this year, the deputy prime minister was dismissed shortly after the African Development Bank released a report documenting an alleged corruption scandal centred around a major upgrade of a diesel power station.

It’s not surprising then that a large number of Mauritians do not feel represented by those in parliament, let alone by those in government. (Three in four people eligible to vote, did not vote for the MSM, the party now in government, in the last election.) And they have been crying out for change. But a cry for change without action brings only frustration, not change. Because of the decrease in political activism over the past decades, people could no longer channel their anger into action. They found they could no longer create popular movements.

And so a country whose history is one of popular movements found itself unable to form popular movements. Until, that is, ecocide threatened something that is precious to every Mauritian: the sea.

The cultural identity of Mauritians is strongly tied to the sea. We are taught early in school that Mauritius is born of the sea – a powerful volcano erupted millions of years ago creating a small island in a vast expanse of blue. We are taught that Mauritians too are born of the sea. Our ancestors came from all over the world across the seas either by force to serve white people and work the fields or in the hope of creating better lives.

Mauritians believe we exist because of the sea. It is the commonality that cuts across age, class and ethnicity. So when Mauritians see the damage an oil spill does to the sea, we share the same hurt. And thousands of us mobilise to protect it.

While Mauritian citizens mobilised and built booms to protect the sea, the establishment, for its part, failed to help. In fact, its inaction was startling. And it started before the oil spill. When the Wakashio entered Mauritian waters on 23 July, on a clear trajectory towards Mauritius, authorities did not dispatch any coastguard vessel to intervene. When the ship eventually ran aground, authorities did not begin pumping the oil until after the spill started, 13 days after the grounding.

Why the inaction? Why the delay? Pravind Jugnauth, the prime minister of Mauritius, said that bad weather made it impossible to pump out the oil earlier. This is refuted by local fishers who say that bad weather was not persistent. Jugnauth also said that Mauritius lacked the expertise to deal with an oil spill. However, Christian Bueger, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, has pointed out that the Mauritian government was “well aware of the risk” of an oil spill and that it had received substantial assistance and financial support to prevent one since the 1990s. Mauritian officials themselves gave an update about the country’s preparedness to set up an oil contingency plan at an international workshop in March 2020.

Seeing the sea being damaged was hurtful, but seeing the establishment flatly failing to protect it was seen by Mauritian citizens as betrayal. The anger it provoked is what broke the camel’s back and reignited a desire for action, not seen for a generation.

People started demanding the prime minister step down. But soon enough, people were also demanding a change in the entire political establishment, as decades’ worth of anger and frustration that had had no outlet for so long came pouring out. It is that desire for systemic change that kept people mobilised even after the oil spill. That and the persistence of one man whom practically no one had heard of prior to the ecocide.

Bruneau Laurette is a 46-year-old social activist and a maritime security expert. In the weeks following the grounding of the Wakashio, Laurette used his Facebook page to chastise the government for its inaction, backing his criticisms with his own research and expert knowledge. His posts quickly gained traction and his following swelled. Within weeks he was on radio stations asking some of the same questions that so many Mauritians were asking of the government: “Why the inaction? What are you hiding?” Laurette was giving people a voice and they rallied around him.

So when he called for people to take to the streets of the capital Port Louis, 100,000 of them answered. It was a historic march, the largest public demonstration Mauritius had seen in decades. Marchers wore black and waved Mauritian flags. They sang songs by Bob Marley and by the late Kaya, a popular local musician. And they demanded change. “Bour li dehor” (“Get him out!”) they chanted. It was aimed at Jugnauth but the sentiment applied to the whole political establishment. “They are all the same! They all need to ‘lev pake ale’ [‘get the f— out’]! We need new people, new ideas, new blood,” one of the marchers, who refused to give her name, said.

Will this change happen? Perhaps Mahebourg, where it all started, can offer a hint. Since the first mobilisation on the night of the oil spill, Mahebourg’s waterfront has become a site of rich intellectual and cultural exchanges. There are open assemblies where local inhabitants and collectives share thoughts and opinions or debate political ideas. Sometimes they play the ravanne, a national percussion instrument, while others sing in communion.

Behind this is a small left-wing party called Rezistans ek Alternativ, meaning Resistance and Alternative (REA). Many of the first volunteers who rushed to Mahebourg to build booms on the first night of the oil spill were members of REA. The party has since erected a large tent on the waterfront to promote and encourage this collectivism and togetherness and to help the local community.

It also organised a public demonstration in Mahébourg two weeks after the one in Port Louis. It became the largest demonstration the region has ever seen. And it also positioned REA as the political party that represents this movement.

“Rezistans is doing extraordinary work,” says Magraji. “They work with us and we decide on things together for Mahebourg. They give us the support to bring people together and to get the work done. I see a new Mauritius.”

Grassroots politics has reappeared and it involves citizens and a new party with new people, new ideas and new blood. It seems then, that the change that so many Mauritians are crying out for, is already underway. Here in Mahébourg where, less than two months ago, an ecocide started a popular movement.