🇲🇺 When the going gets tough

Bonzur! Alex is getting a rainwater harvesting tank this week (after months of dithering), and it turns out that it’s pretty easy to install – and even quicker to buy: she learned that Quincaillerie A1 has an online shop (not an ad, we promise). We think that Mauritians, in the months to come, will similarly be transforming their homes with the means available to them in order to meet the compounded chaos of the energy crisis and climate change.

News digest

On the 10th April, the government published its highlights of the cabinet meeting held that day, which were, basically, an action plan concerning the Middle East crisis. There are now restrictions on electricity use; working remotely is now encouraged (a few Mauritian companies – Mauritius Telecom and IBL among them – have taken the lead on this); renewable energy projects have now been ‘unlocked’, and electricity tariffs have risen by 15% (thankfully though, Social Register beneficiaries, low-consumption households and SMEs are excluded from the increase). The price of petrol went up yesterday, too. The government is also clearly seeking to position the island as the next best place for investors exiting the Middle East, with the launch of a new ‘golden visa’ scheme that aims to attract investors and high-net-worth individuals.

Paul Berenger, Joanna Berenger and Chetan Baboolall left the MMM on the 13th April, and have taken their parliamentary seats in the opposition. Berenger Sr.’s departure has been hailed as a singularly radical move, given that he left the party he founded in 1969 – a party which had become almost inseparable from his name and face. A new party is in the making.

The National Research and Innovation Institute Bill was read for the first time in parliament on the 31st March, and it’s a newsworthy document. In essence, the government is planning to abolish the existing Mauritius Research and Innovation Council (MRIC) and replace it with a new, more ambitious body – the National Research and Innovation Institute – which would consolidate and centralise Mauritius's fragmented research ecosystem under one roof. Of particular interest to us is the Institute’s plan to create a ‘Brain Gain Initiative’ to attract diaspora expertise.

Last Thursday, the government launched its National AI Strategy and FAIR (Fairness, Accountability, Inclusiveness and Integrity, and Responsibility) Guidelines, which were elaborated with the help of the UNDP. During the launch, the Minister of Technology affirmed that artificial intelligence would be a key catalyst for the island’s economic growth, and announced the creation of a dedicated AI unit. We’re curious for updates on the government’s very ambitious tech plans (you can read all about them here), which include the creation of an open-architecture GovStack – a set of shared, interoperable digital building blocks that all government services would plug into.

The British government has been ‘forced’ to shelve its legislation to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after Trump refused to back the agreement. ‘Forced’ is The Guardian’s verb of choice here, which paints the current administration as essentially a good party of decolonial ambitions, pushed into a corner by an American tyrant. Virtuous diction aside, there's already some talk about how the lack of a deal would impact the national budget that's being prepared, with the Prime Minister stating in parliament that it would represent a loss of Rs 10 billion a year. We'd just like to point out, yet again, that the Mauritian diaspora contributed Rs 13.3 billion in personal remittances in 2024. There are other ways of building the economy without relying on neo-empires and their bloodshed.

Mauritius on the Move

Mauritius is making strides in spreading awareness about diabetes and in creating programmes that will, hopefully, reverse the epidemic. The 2025-26 national budget launched a 'Path to Remission Programme' targeting nearly 450,000 diabetic and pre-diabetic patients, with Rs 47 million allocated to the initiative. The name is significant: ‘remission’ rather than ‘management’ marks a shift in how the state frames Type 2 diabetes. ‘Remission’ is strong: it signals that, in principle, diabetes can be reversed through lifestyle change rather than simply medicated indefinitely.

One in five Mauritians is diabetic. We're ranked 12th in the world for diabetes prevalence — we hold the highest prevalence of any country in the International Diabetes Federation’s South-East Asia region, actually — and a 2023 study found that half of school-aged Mauritian children in the sample were pre-diabetic. Most diabetes in Mauritius is Type 2, which indicates that the epidemic is driven by lifestyle factors (diet and lack of physical exercise) rather than autoimmune predispositions.

Whether governmental measures and the media coverage will translate into meaningful change remains to be seen, but we’re hopeful. Historically, only around one in six diabetic patients in Mauritius has achieved good glycaemic control, despite free public health services. We recommend reading two excellent pieces by Rajiv Mohabir (Indo-Caribbean American poet and translator) and Nikhita Obeegadoo (Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Chicago). Mohabir's essay illuminates the colonial consequences of diet, land, and labour that underlies today's epidemic, and Obeegadoo's article questions structural access to quality food and physical activity, as well as the gendered dimensions of the disease.

With the number of Mauritian researchers doing incredible work, we have hope that we’ll be able to learn more about our bodies and their particular mechanisms soon.

Diaspora spotlight

Over the past few months, we’ve heard some of you say that you’d like to hear more about the careers and lives of diaspora members who returned to Mauritius. We thought we’d start by highlighting the career of Priscilla Muthoora Thakoor. Thakoor is, discreetly, one of the most consequential Mauritians of her generation. In September 2025, she was appointed Governor of the Bank of Mauritius — the first woman in the institution's history to hold the position. She inherited a bank battered by internal conflict and swiftly got to work restoring its reputation.

Thakoor was shaped by some of the world's most demanding institutions. A laureate in Economics, she studied at Monash before completing a Master's and DPhil at Oxford. In 2009, she became the first Mauritian ever accepted into the IMF's Economist Program — one of the most competitive entry points in global economics — and spent the next sixteen years building a portfolio that ranged from fiscal affairs to the Western Hemisphere to the Middle East and Central Asia. Beyond research, she advised policymakers, led technical assistance missions, and served as Resident Advisor on Macroeconomic and Financial Policies at the IMF's Africa Training Institute based in Mauritius.

Culture corner

In this edition we want to showcase this brilliant piece by Dr. Vedita Cowaloosur, a Mauritian academic, teacher, writer and translator based in San Francisco. Dambore Dambore: Bidding Goodbye to Mauritian Bhojpuri is an essay on the complexities of her relationship with Mauritian Bhojpuri. Cowaloosur traces the language’s fascinating history, the intricacies of its use within her own family, and how the once syncretic and secular language has now been co-opted by Hindutva. She describes how the very name of Mauritian Bhojpuri, kalkatiya boli, ‘kalkatiya’, is a reference to the Indian migrants who boarded ships to Mauritius from Kolkata between the early 19th and early 20th centuries; though Mauritian Bhojpuri retains much of its grammar and vocabulary from its Indian ancestors, the language is different from its Indian varieties and from the Bhojpuri spoken in former European colonies populated by Indian indentured labourers from Northern India. 

The language is rooted in agricultural and rural settings: its expressions ‘are redolent with images of sheer physical work, fields, and grittiness’, writes Cowaloosur. But it’s also a language of inheritance beyond class. She writes how she and her sister ‘grew up with the tacit understanding that Bhojpuri could be both […] a language to make ourselves understood to those who did not speak our educated ‘Anglais–Français’ (these two colonial languages have always been bunched together as the languages of education), but also a language to make ourselves worthy of our cultural background, that made us sound erudite, and connected us to our roots’.

Mauritian Bhojpuri used to be – perhaps still is, though at a reduced scale – a language spoken by many social, ethnic, and religious groups. Cowaloosur states that ‘the symbolic texture of the language reflected the social groups that formed it— hence the abundance of words in Urdu, Tamil, Marathi, and Telugu, but also French, English, Mandarin, and other languages.’

We’ll leave you with this compelling quote from the paper, where Cowaloosur analyses the Bhojpuri sentence ‘montagne ke dambore-dambore, pisstass plantal ba’, which translated means ‘along the edge of the mountain, peanut plants have been sown.’ She writes that ‘none of the individual words have any resemblance whatsoever to any variety of Bhojpuri spoken anywhere else in the world. The words in the above sentence are mostly sourced from French: montagne (mountain); dambore ([au rebord] along the edge/on the side); pistache (peanuts); planter (to sow). Dambore, in particular, is a term that has fascinated me over the years. It was probably borrowed not directly from French, but from Kreol, which had already creolised au rebord as dan bor. Mauritian Bhojpuri adopted dan bor which, with a different pronunciation, becomes dambore. This single word was not transformed once but multiple times, and through contacts with different languages, communities, accents…’

We are delighted to announce that we’re launching Koze, an intimate conversation series that will gather eight people around a single question connected to the diaspora experience. 

There are no presentations, no panels, and no agendas beyond the conversation itself. The richness comes from the room.

For our inaugural edition, we’ll be exploring the question of home: what does home mean when you have more than one? 

As part of the Mauritian diaspora, many of us hold Mauritius as home while also having built homes elsewhere. This Koze is an invitation to explore how we navigate that multiplicity, the challenges it creates, and the beauty of belonging to more than one place.

Sign up here for our very first session on Thursday 30 April 2026 at 8pm CEST. Nu zwenn byinto. 🇲🇺

Sirandann

Here’s another riddle from Arnaud Carpooran’s Proverb ek Sirandann Repiblik Moris, and it’s just two words:

Bred galoupe? Or, leafy greens on the run?

Answer in the next bulletin!

The Bridge playlist

Kreol crossword puzzle

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