There has been mobility in the world since time immemorial. We ourselves are living proof of this. People move to other countries to either find a better life or to make fortune; as a general rule, one does not happily move away from one?s motherland unless one is thoroughly unhappy with one?s living conditions. We should be well versed in this practice ? all over the world we find Mauritians who have emigrated in search of a better life ? and who have found it. Thanks in many ways to the hospitality of the host countries and of their people.

What we ask of others, we are however very reluctant to give. Most of the Chinese workers who have left their homes and families to come and toil on our ?hospitable? land have probably done so because they felt they didn?t have great many choices. They have showed a will to go out and make a life, for themselves. In exchange for a meager salary.

Those people whose will and perseverance we should admire but on whom we look down upon instead? Mauritians are complex people. Full of complexes as well, no pun intended. A nation of immigrants ourselves, we like to think in terms of inferior or superior people. To many Mauritians, the Chinese workers at best don?t exist and at worse are nuisances. Because they?re simply factory workers you see, and thus inferior.

The biblical warning of not forgetting to entertain strangers because, by so doing, some have entertained angels unawares, has been thrown out of the window. Instead we seem to be adopting another saying. That every guest hates the others and the host hates them all.

Chinese workers have probably decided to come to Mauritius because they had heard good things about it. Probably not that they would find gold under rocks but maybe that human rights were respected over here unlike homeland China. Little did they know.

We have always been dimly aware ? in our utter disinterest in other people?s sorry plight that the situation of the Chinese workers was not bright. They work hard in an ungrateful industry and they are treated like little more than talking machines. With the exception that they get paid for this.

Every time they have grievances, we tend to make light of them. Any wonder that they would get frustrated and that the situation would explode? When you are being ignored up to the point where you feel you may have become invisible, you get desperate to be heard and seen. Admittedly, Chinese workers are going the wrong way about it and were being irrational and unreasonable when they refused to give back the cadaver of their fellow worker Hu Xiao Bing. Admittedly force had to be used to recuperate the body. But maybe we should try and understand the reasons behind their anger and their irrational behaviours instead of accusing them of causing unrest in the country.

Instead what is likely to happen is that every time we will come across a Chinese worker, we?ll cross the road, saying to ourselves that these people are dangerous and that we should keep away from them. History repeating itself. The only thing that has changed is the colour of those modern day slaves. Shame, Mauritius, shame ! We never seem to learn, do we?