When the Governor of Mauritius, Sir Henry Barkly, introduced a labour law in 1867, the agricultural labourers must have heaved a sigh of relief for the amount of protection it was going to afford to them. More so, since the Governor stated in the Council that the labour law ?would be universally looked upon as the commencement of a new era of social improvement?.

The reality was different. The Labour law of 1867 was intended to be clamped down on the Indian labourers described by Sir Virgile Naz as those ?almost naked and often starving semi-savages from India?. When it came into effect, every Indian labourer was required to carry with him whenever he left his house a work permit with his photograph on it, a police pass and the area within which he was authorized to move. If the labourer was stopped on the road by a policeman and could not produce his pass or had moved to an unauthorized place, he was taken to the police station and locked up until he was brought before a Magistrate. The prescribed punishment was imprisonment with hard labour. If the pass was lost, he had to make the journey to Port Louis several times, covering a distance of between 100 and 150 miles, to try to obtain one at the Immigration office after having paid the equivalent of two months wages. Between 1867 and 1870, it was believed that not less than 63 000 labourers were arrested by the police in connection with lost passes.

It was the inhumane application of the repressive Labour law that aroused an estate owner like Adophe de Plévitz (who married a daughter of the Rivet family) to alert the Colonial office. De Plevitz collected 9401 signatures on a petition in 1871 and sent it to the Governor, Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon protesting against the miseries the labourers were made to endure and demanding the scapping of the 1867 Labour law. Gordon supported the appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into the treatment of immigrants in Mauritius. On the recommendation of the Royal Commisioners, the 1867 Labour law was repealed and replaced by a more flexible one.

Although a new labour law came into effect in 1878, the working conditions of the labourers were not regulated. Estate owners hired and fired workers according to their whims and fancies. Wages were kept low with daily rates ranging from 50 cents to 75 cents while prices of commodities kept rising.Workers were thus helpless and left to their own fate.

In 1921, a glimmer of hope showed itself when Willy Moutou tries to launch with the help of Dr Edgar Laurent a Trade union, ?un movement formidable? in order to better the lot of workers. He held several public meetings so that resolutions could be voted and sent to the authorities. He met Governor Herbert Read who told him he could introduce legislation for the setting up of trade unions provided an elected member in the Council of government piloted the bill. In fact, Governor Read showed his good intentions when in his opening speech in the Council of government on 26 May 1926, he announed that the Trade Union and Workmen?s Compensation bills would be in due course brought before the Council. But the members of the Council all being rich owners of business houses and estates, the plan was nipped in the bud. Moutou, believing in his cause, persisted and met the successor of Read, Sir Wilfrid Jackson. Sir Wilfrid told him to put his demands in writing. Trade unionism again failed to see the light of the day.

After Adolphe de Plévitz

It was impossible to bring changes in the interest of the population unless the oligarchical power was torn to shreds. One man mustered enough courage to defy this rock-like power. He was Dr Maurice Curé, one of the promoters of the retrocessionist movement. One day, in the 1930s, he was driving home together with Dr Edgard Laurent after having visited a patient at the Civil Hospital when they were stopped by a policeman on a street beat. The policeman enquired why they had no light on the coach. They tried to explain that they had been taken up with a patient on his deathbed for more time than expected when the policeman grabbed Dr Laurent by the collar yelling out ?You damned nigger?? That racist expression remained etched as an indelible mark in the minds of Laurent and Curé. It was similar to the memorable incident Gandhi as young lawyer experienced when he was forced out of his first class train compartment one cold night at a lonely railway station in South Africa. If Gandhi gave India its independence, Maurice Curé founded the Labour party which was to spearhead the decolonization process leading to the independence of Mauritius.

Indeed, the idea of fighting against all odds through the medium of a political party in 1936 was conceived in the mind of Curé after his electoral defeat. There was nobody to speak on behalf of workers in the Council, he said. Curé stated many years later in 1963 at a gathering of the Plantation Workers Union that the struggle he started in 1936 was not against the capitalist class which had of course to protect its interests but against what he described as the ?ultra reactionaries? who were obsessively clinging to the old order like limpets. He went to every corner of the island with a band of loyal supporters demanding better working conditions, the establishment of Trade Unions and increases in wages which had remained low for several years. Though the Minimum Wages ordinance was poassed in 1934, it was not actually implemented. With Cure?s strident call, the workers were all of a sudden jolted into concerted action. In Maurice Curé, they found some one who was championing their cause many years after de Plévitz. The simmering discontents erupted unexpectedly like a valcano with wild cat strikes on sugar estates and ended up tragically with the loss of human lives at Flacq. The island was drenched in a revolutionary fervour and the labourers were as if baying for the blood of the estate owners. What else could the government do to prevent disturbances from spreading but place Curé and senior members of the Labour party under house arrest?

That was the outcome of persistently ignoring the writing on the wall and of taking the people for a ride. In France, for example, the people?s response was horrible. The French revolution came because the people had been asking for ?bread, bread and bread? and the king Louis XVI kept turning a deaf ear.

Rather than attending to the needs of the people, Louis was more focused on trying to save his marriage that was not consummated for seven years. Besides, he had to cope with a nagging mother-in-law who wanted to cement as quickly as possible the alliance between the Bourbons and Hapsburgs with a heir born to the royal couple. The king so became the subject of public ridicule. ?This is a great revolt? said Louis when he heard the news of the uprising. ?No Sir?, replied the Duc de Liancourt. ?It is a great revolution !? The king and his wife Marie Antoinette were beheaded at the instigation of the inflamed mob. That was the end of the monarchy in France. The common people took control of the country.

In England, the peasants? revolt broke out in 1381 because social reforms long overdue failed to take concrete shape. This was exacerbated by the decision of the government to impose a poll tax on each and every Briton, including the poor, to finance the military expedition to France which the people were in no mood to support. King Richard II fled to seek sanctuary in the Tower of London. In the course of negotiations on doing away with the system of villeinage at Mile End, one of the rebels? leaders, Wat Tyler, was slain by the Mayor of London. Not so lucky as the king was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Though a man of God, yet very rich, he fell into the hands of the rebels who could not do otherwise than to execute him. The revolt brought on its heels labour reforms that went about alleviating the hardships of the peasantry.

In Mauritius also, a new era dawned after labourers were shot in 1937. It was only then .