The history of Mauritius, an island with no indigenous populations, is the history of sequential colonialisms and successive immigrations. The Portuguese are credited with the discovery of Mauritius in the early sixteenth century, but they showed little interest in colonizing the island. The Dutch came later, but were unsuccessful in their efforts to found a colony. After their withdrawal in 1710, French colonists, adventurers and merchants transformed the island into a prosperous and flourishing sugarcane-producing colony with the help of slaves who came mainly from Madagascar and East Africa (Addison and Hazareesingh, 1999: 25). General Decaen's capitulation in 1810 transformed the island into a British-administered colony where the French, as plantation owners, maintained their economic status and cultural presence by continuing linguistic and religious practices. When slavery was abolished in 1835, slaves constituted over two-thirds of the entire population of Mauritius. After abolition, the British brought in indentured immigrants from India to work on the plantations. The Franco-Mauritian plantocracy's demand for labour was so important that by 1911 the island's demography had completely changed – from a Creole island it was transformed into a Hindu-dominated plantation society (Addison and Hazareesingh, 1999; Miles, 1999; Vaughan, 2005). Political independence in 1968 established the Hindu-Mauritian majority (almost 52% of the total island population) as the ruling elite, effectively marginalizing mixed-race Creoles and descendants of African slaves.

Even if the island has no ‘natural’ founding memory by way of indigenous populations, a double colonial heritage and successive free and forced migrations from Africa and Asia have generated complex memorial registers that shape Mauritian identities in the present. According to the Mauritian Constitution (1968), the population of Mauritius includes a Hindu community, a Muslim community and a Sino-Mauritian community. Anyone who does not appear to belong to one of these communities is regarded as belonging to what the Constitution terms the ‘General Population’, which effectively includes Europeans and mixed-race and African Creoles, who are for the most part Catholics (Miles, 1999).

As reference to a shared past, memory reassures the members of a society of their collective identity and supplies them with an historical consciousness. In Mauritius, the notion of a shared past is difficult to forge.