Paradise defined
Auberon Waugh
Port Louis, Mauritius The wage of a sugar-cane cutter in Mauritius is 25 rupees — slightly under £2 — a day. It is an exhausting and rather painful operation, as chips from the bamboo-like canes I'ly in every direction: Sugar — with its by-products of molasses and rum — remains overwhelmingly the main industry of Mauritius, with tourism trailing behind by virtue of the island's distance from anywhere else. But the Frenoh come here in large numbers, responding to some deep migratory instinct which draws them from the beaches of the COte d'Azur to this obscure point over a thousand miles south of the Equator where they lie all day like seals on the beach. Since the collapse and agony of Mozambique, South Africans come here, too, grunting and running round each other like wild pigs. The result is a chain of excellently appointed luxury hotels, insulated from the rest of the population—in some cases literally so, being built on small islands around the coast — where the local dance, the sega, is performed by the lithe young women who lift their cotton skirts with tantalising effect, a far cry from the shuffling, wobbly Creole mammies who invented the dance as a substitute for the television and bingo of better favoured nations. On my first day at La Pirogue, a new luxury hotel with the enterprising idea of having its bedrooms in air-conditioned, chaumiclre-style individual chalets all within a hundred irrigated grassy yards of the beach, I was happy to buy a mildly ridiculous sun hat — a sort of canvas contraption such as might have been worn by Boer farmers on the Great Trek — for 50 rupees: do not mention this price to complain about it. The place, needless to say, is an earthly paradise, or as close to an earthly paradise as modern ideas of luxury can contrive. A price of slightly under £4 would be perfectly reasonable for a canvas sun hat anywhere in the world, even in Blackpool where the food is revolting, the natives arc hideous, overpaid and largely incomprehensible in their own language, without being fluent in two others. Nor is it my intent ion to make some Sunday Times-style radical-cheap point about the scandalous disparity between two days of hard labour in the boiling sun and a tourist's gewgaw as I wolf my way through the exquisite Creole food and free drinks supplied to my party bf English journalists on a binge. Our party comprises the representative of a teenage magazine, another from a Scottish sporting publication, a rather austere young ornithologist from Country Life who Ltimounced on the first day that his favourite drink was water, a lady from Diner's Club, Mrs Claudie Worst home and myself. Occa sionally we ask ourselves what, exactly, we are doing here. Few Spectator readers, I
fear, will be able to follow me. The cost of the trip, if I had been paying it, may only be a third of the cost of a British Leyland Mini, but then the price of a new Mini is one of the great jokes of our time and it seems rather a lot to pay simply for being 6,500 miles away from Blackpool.
.The sun is hotter, of course, the food better, the scenery different, the service more willing, the races more mixed even than they are in England, but British Airways jumbo jets, while comfortable enough, have removed the elements of hardship, daring and discovery from travel and the greatest contrast between Britain and this earthly paradise. it seems to me, is in the wages paid to workers.
My purpose in harping on this point is not, as 1 say, to complain that sugar-cutters are paid less than £2 a day. It seems none of my business. No doubt they would prefer to be paid more, and I cannot subscribe to the South Sea Islands myth that they are noticeably happier for having little or no money. When not serving drinks or dancing the sega, they seem rather morose. but that is their affair. I am here as a tourist. My purpose in harping — some would say gloating— over these extraordinarily low wages is to inquire whether, if we are honest, it may not be an essential part of any idea of an earthly paradise that there should be a race of Men Friday or Calibans to cut the sugar canes and prepare the rum punch.
Again, it may seem rather offensive to refer to the Creoles as a race of Calibans. Some of the women, it is true, resemble a cross between Lord Gowrie, the immensely distinguished Conservative statesman, and Mr Anthony Blond, the publisher. But they also include some women of the most extraordinary beauty, most notably our 22year-old guide called Pirette, supplied by the islands' Concorde tourist service She says she is probably of mixed Indian, Chinese and French descent, but sadly is not certain. Any film producer or photographic model agency seeking perfection in the female face and form should apply to the Entertainments Manager of La Pirogue Hotel, Flic-en-Flac, Mauritius, whose wife she unfortunately is.
But Pirette belongs to a different aspect of the paradise-fantasy, and not one which need concern us here. A fantasy is what Mauritius will remain for nearly all Englishmen, of course, unless they can persuade the British worker to work a little harder or more efficiently, or the British government to be a teeny-weeny bit more daring in its approach to the unions. But there was a time when people said their technology would in due course do away with the need for Calibans: sugar would yield to the combine harvester, rum punches would be mixed by ingenious slot machines and served at the press of a button. Instead of the elderly, topless wife of a French professor I would have the delightful company of British steelworkers on the coral-strewn beaches of the Indian Ocean, and the Creoles would come to Blackpool to test their magnificent teeth on peppermint-and-vanilla-flavoured Blackpool rock.
The bitter truth of this technologyfantasy, which once inspired such powerful imaginations as those of Harold Wilson and Tony Berm. is that the closer one gets to it the further it seems removed from anything approaching an earthly paradise. Quite apart from my familiar complaint that a prosperous working class creates horror and devastation, abominable sights, noises and smells all around it, the sad fact remains that automated luxury is seldom remotely enjoyable once the novelty of pressing buttons has worn off. It is lonely and dull. The real pleasure in life is having other people do everything for you and encouraging them to smile as they do it. Last year I had occasion to stay a night at the Heathrow Hotel at London Airport. The cost was exorbitant — over £32 for a single bed — but my bedroom was equipped ped with a do-it-yourself tea-maker, infra-red griller and bar. No porters carried suitcases, and if you ordered a meal in the grill you did it by numbers to a surly black woman who threw the revolting food at you with a scowl. It was a vision of the future and it stank. At La Pirogue Hotel, or its sister in the north of the island called Touessrok where we repaired after a few days, servants outnumbered guests and the giggling black ladies who came to turn down my bed left a boiled sweet on the pillow every night — a gesture whose significance I never quite worked out. it is a vision of the past and it works.
So I do not pro pose to be indignant about the low wages in Mauritius. There is so much else to be indignant about for those who enjoy such emotions. Mauritius offers the spectre of the slaughtered Dodo. This amiable, waddling creature eXistecl nowhere else, and was practically the only inhabitant of the island when Portuguese mariners landed here at the beginning of the
16th century. Having no water-drinking ornithologist among their number, they mistook it for a swan and started eating it ieaidees greedily. The Dodo had no natural enemies and laid its eggs anywhere, which ch n them very vulnerable to rats, brought by the Portuguese, and pigs, brought by the Dutc half a century later. The last Dodo wash well hope hsheotsabiydao s
Dutchman in 1693. I jolly
Previous page
