🇲🇺 Nou ress atan mem

Alex remembers how, when she was seven years old in 1999, she was washed with bottled water during the worst drought Mauritius had ever known. What she didn’t expect was that she’d be bathing her children in the same way in 2026.

The world she knew in 1999 is a spectre of the world we live in now. In those 27 years, we’ve developed technologies that extract potable water from thin air; we’ve harvested water from solar panels and hydropanels; we’ve invented desalination systems that are designed to be used on the sea floor, and other desalination systems that process hyper-saline wastewater and toxic desalination brine. Cities are – and have been – designed to capture rainwater and purify it as it percolates to underground aquifers. 

A climate resilient Mauritius is one that urgently needs to be built. And we’ll need all the help we can get to build it together.

News digest

If you’ve been reading the Bulletin over this month, you know that we’re suffering from a water crisis that shows no signs of abating. Mare aux Vacoas was at 33.9% this weekend, against 78.3% a year ago; the Meteorological Services expect about 80% of normal summer rainfall and temperatures of up to 37°C. 

Two young Mauritian men have been praised for their good hearts during the crisis: Zaheerkhan Loolmahamed, 17 years old, spent his pocket money on 45 gallons of water and gets up at 6am to share it on rue Émile Pitot in Curepipe. Adarsh Gunga, 30 years old, runs a family hardware shop in Plaine-des-Papayes, and has refused to raise the price of the water tanks sold in his shop. 

"Possession of firearm with intent to endanger life" was the original charge held against Sergeant Gautam Singh Taukoor, the policeman who shot Élodie Thomas in the neck. It has since been struck out and replaced by two provisional charges: ‘using a firearm to intimidate’ and ‘involuntary wounding’. He has been in custody since 10 October and the court will rule on his bail application on 6 November. Élodie's condition is described as stable. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is appealing for witnesses and any CCTV, dashcam or phone footage from Camp Levieux on the night of 9 October.

About 1.5 tonnes of Thai cannabis is believed to have been released near Île Ronde from a Thai-flagged yacht on 20 October, though the drugs haven’t been found yet. 18 people have been arrested, including nine Thai nationals; two Coast Guard officers are under investigation. The incident has revived questions about our maritime security. 

On an islet around Grand Port, scientists working for the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust found a spider that lives under the sea twice a day. The Mauritian tidal trapdoor spider, Idioctis marevallum – a relative of the tarantula – moves into ancient tubes in the coral bedrock and seals them with a trapdoor of silk, sand and algae that keeps the seawater out. 

A 38-year-old female Police Constable says a 62-year-old South African woman slapped her in the Charge Room at the Rivière Noire police station; in the constable’s account, the woman started filming inside the station, and when the constable tried to take the phone the woman dropped it and then hit her. South Africa’s High Commission issued a statement after nearly two weeks of press coverage and social media furore, asking South Africans living in Mauritius to show respect to everyone and not to promote divisions of race, class or ethnicity.

Kim Le Court-Pienaar is one of ten finalists for the women's Vélo d'Or, cycling's rider of the year, after her stage win at the Tour de France Femmes in August. The winner will be announced in Monaco on 28 November.

Mauritius on the Move

We’re getting a British medical school. In October 2026, the UK’s General Medical Council approved Swansea University to recruit the first students for its four-year Graduate Entry Medicine degree at Swansea University Medical School Indian Ocean, run with the Uniciti International Education Hub. The first cohort starts in September 2027. Applicants need an undergraduate degree, and fees for Mauritians are £20,000 a year. Uniciti’s Dhanjay Jhurry calls it “a historic milestone for Mauritius”, and hopes to draw students from across Africa, the Indian Ocean and the subcontinent.

This will be the sixth institution in Mauritius to offer a medical degree. We’re hoping there’ll be calls for diaspora Mauritians in the medical field to come and teach there.

Diaspora spotlight

“I remember my mum saying she would rather struggle by the sea than struggle in a little flat in England.”

Shalom Brune-Franklin is a British-Australian actress of rising fame, who grew up on a council estate in St Albans, London. Her mother is Mauritian: a nail technician who braided hair and who sounds pretty fierce:  “I like to say my mum was a hustler,” Shalom has said. Her father, Thai-born and English, was “always super creative and artistic”. “It definitely wasn’t a lavish upbringing,” she told the Sunday Independent, “but there was a lot of love.”

When she was a teenager, the family moved to Perth. Her father became a chef, and her mother took up bodybuilding and found work with the government. Shalom meant to study journalism but ended up at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts instead, which she called “a savage, fun, crazy, three years”. She won the Academy’s prestigious Chris Edmund Performing Arts Scholarship (created by the Academy’s very famous alumni, Hugh Jackman, who was there in person to hand the scholarship to her). Since then she has played a soldier in the BBC’s Our Girl, DC Chloë Bishop in Line of Duty, Morgan le Fay in Cursed, Estella in Great Expectations, and Mikaela in HBO’s Dune: Prophecy.  She’ll soon join Oscar Isaac in Netflix’s The Roman, a Las Vegas casino drama series, executive-produced by Martin Scorsese.

She has spoken about what it meant to represent actors of African background on Australian television: “If you don’t see people who look like you doing something, you won’t think there’s a space for you.”

Culture corner

The Caudan Waterfront turns 30 this November. Before it opened in 1996, there wasn’t much when it came to afternoon entertainment around the Port Louis docks. Maurice Giraud (alias Mico) changed all of that. One of the island’s foremost architects, he envisioned a place that would keep Mauritius’ heritage alive, but would also enable Mauritians to come together for leisure. Several of the historic dock buildings were kept, the Ruisseau du Pouce was rehabilitated, and the area is still one of the best examples you can find here of a lifestyle destination where people can relax without necessarily buying anything. 

Giraud was born in 1939. He studied architecture in Cape Town and urban planning in London, and worked in London and Durban before coming home in 1973, five years after independence, just as the government was betting on tourism. Over some 45 years he designed a large share of the island’s tourism infrastructure – around twenty resort hotels, from the Royal Palm to the  Dina Robin, the Touessrok to what became SALT of Palmar. His buildings have a recognisable vocabulary: thick basalt walls, limewashed or left bare; thatched and shingle roofs on exposed hardwood; curved walls that let space flow through; verandas and courtyards opening onto tropical gardens, and an exceptional eye for detail that is largely lost now in modern construction projects. 

When he died in February 2018, aged 79, Le Mauricien counted him among “les plus grands architectes de l’île Maurice indépendante”.

Sirandann

'Mo mezir enn latwal, zame mo trouv so lafin?' or, I measure a piece of cloth, but I can't see its end? The answer’s not that obvious: it’s ‘gran sime’, or main road.

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