Since the death of George Floyd on the 25th May 2020 (see article on Wikipedia), there has been ongoing protest not only in the US but all over the world, where people are expressing their concerns about systemic racism and unfair injustices on Black people. Growing up in Mauritius, which is a pluri-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-ethinic society, I have a deep feeling and connection with this issue and hopefully, through this post, I will put forward some of my views on this.

It goes without saying that our past will define our future, and indeed, in the Mauritian context, despite the fact that our ancestors had been subject to slavery (History of Mauritius), today, we are enjoying the full freedom of religion, press, speech and many more. This makes us one of the highly ranked countries where these are generously acceptable. That said, I am not at all claiming that my island is a paradise, which is often the outlook at the international level. We still have much work to do, in order to combat, for example, poverty, crime, corruption and many more. I am almost certain that these form part of every countries' issues that need to be addressed.

My next journey was in Cape Town where I spent two years for my MSc. As we all know, South Africa went through the Apartheid and I could still feel the tension among the people. Sadly, when I was there, students from the University of Cape Town were protesting for the Rhodes memorial to be removed (Rhodes Must Fall). On Facebook, Black people were constantly being referred to as 'Black Monkeys' and this had an impact on me. Are we living in a society where people are pretending everything is okay? On the other hand, I remember a friend telling me, 'you don't know what those people did to our parents and grand-parents'. Another friend told me that his grand-dad had to live with a bullet in his face because the doctor said that if it were to be removed, he would have passed away.

I am surprised that we often respond according to the 'action-reaction' principle (Newton's first law: for every action there will be an equal and opposite reaction). If we did not have the protests related to the killing of Black people, then maybe there would have been no (re)action. My question is, why do we even have to call people Black, White or Coloured? Why do we need to associate a colour based on our skin colour? Since I come from Mauritius, I do not even know what my ethnic background is and this often gets asked when filling in forms. On the flip side, I am glad that various actions have been adopted since the protests and two which I am aware of are:

  1. The Presidential Scholarship for Black Students ()
  2. Google commitments to racial equity ()

I personally think that we can do more to alleviate this issue of (systemic) racism in our society. I am certain that many people from Africa do not know how to leverage these opportunities. They need to be sensitised about the process and make them feel they have a place of belonging. I am grateful to all my colleagues that we now have sessions dedicated to BAME (Black Asian Minority Ethnic). I strongly believe that education is the main pillar towards building a fair and equal society. If a department (let us consider, for simplicity, just 100 universities from Europe and US) takes the initiative to fund at least 1 student from Africa every year for a time lapse of 10 years, then at the end of the process, we will have at least 1000 students who have had access to world-class education. I remember a saying from my parents, which essentially says, 'be a light that can never be extinguished' and I strongly opine that it's only education which enables one to be someone in life.