Biography:
As a documentary photographer for over 25 years, my point of view has been to work slowly when it is possible. The domestic landscape of America has been my interest for the past two decades. Today I continue to work within the social documentary...
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Black volcanic rubble, a reminder of eruptions that created the island nearly ten million years ago, was heaped into piles to make a room for sugarcane, the top export crop. Where the sweet stalks now sprout, the flightless dodo bird roamed until hunted to extinction within 50 years after the Dutch settled the uninhabited island in 1638. Later arrivals from Europe, Africa, India and China have learned to live in amity for common goals.
Procession of pain: Moving slowly so hooks and needles dig no deeper, pious Muslims parade through the capital city of Port Louis to mark the anniversary of a battle that claimed the life of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn in A.D. 680. Typical of the Mauritian spirit of religious tolerance, Hindus, Christians, and Buddhist line the streets to watch the yearly spectacle, end of the ten-day Yamse festival.
An overview of the island of Mauritius"A perfume country caressed by the sun,†wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire of this crowded nations ringed with coral lagoons and crowned with volcanic peaks. But problems lurk in surrounding waters, where waste was dumped during a furious buildup of tourism and manufacturing in the 1980’s. A Ministry of the Environment was created in 1890 after the World Bank slammed the island’s lax pollution control.
A Family luncheon at the Bel Air Sugar Estate. Although only 2 percent of the population, Mauritians of European descent control the sugar trade, and the wealthy among them look to Europe for culture and furnishings.
Harvest over, a cane worker burns straw to make way for the next planting. Before the Dutch introduced sugar 350 years ago, rich ebony forests blanketed Mauritius. Today’s growers, nervous about world sugar prices, plant new export crops, such as tea, tobacco, onions, and cut flowers. Large estates account for about half the nations farmland; the rest is owned by small planters, most of them Indians working plots of less than five acres.
Harvest over, a cane worker burns straw to make way for the next planting. Before the Dutch introduced sugar 350 years ago, rich ebony forests blanketed Mauritius. Today’s growers, nervous about world sugar prices, plant new export crops, such as tea, tobacco, onions, and cut flowers. Large estates account for about half the nations farmland; the rest is owned by small planters, most of them Indians working plots of less than five acres.
Port Louis was landfall for Asian workers and merchants as well as African and Asians imported as slaves. Today most of the two dozen vessels that pass through each week carry farm products or manufactured goods.
Day care Mauritius-style, finds a child close to her mother at a textile mill. The worker can earn a government-mandated monthly bonus for perfect attendance. Unemployment has virtually disappeared, thanks primarily to textile plants owned by local and Hong Kong investors. Tropical Mauritius is now one of the world’s largest producers of wool sweaters.
Resplendent in a scarlet garara and with henna-stained hands, Aktar Bibi Hamod welcomes well-wishers to the traditional Muslim mendhi celebration the night before her wedding. Families of the betrothed exchange gifts and hurl playful insults at each other, feast on the rice dish biryani, and sing late into the night. The merriment increases the next day, as nearly a thousand guests jam into two separate halls for the reception.
A variety of creeds and calendars means the New Year is feted several times. An Indian father hoists his daughter at February’s Chinese parade; seven months later.
Seven months after the Chinese New Year a Muslim holy man marks the end of Muharram by running a sword across his lips. Islanders use Creole for daily communication across ethnic lines and French and English in formal Conversation.
Hanging out in the Black River district, young Creoles—whose forebears were imported as sugar-plantation slaves—face life at the bottom of the country’s socioeconomic pyramid. Other Mauritians are more likely to profit from the country’s next economic wave, which may crest with opportunities in offshore banking—a chance for the island to solidify its place among Africa’s most prosperous nations.