MUSEE INTERCONTINENTAL DE L'ESCLAVAGE

This new museum occupies the island's oldest public building, and one of the first very large buildings erected under Mahé de La Bourdonnais during the French colonial era: the former military hospital of Port Louis, built in 1740 by slaves... quite a symbol. Comprising 4 buildings, it was strategically located near the port so that wounded soldiers could be transported quickly. European soldiers were cared for upstairs, while slaves were treated on the first floor, in conditions that rapidly deteriorated for the latter, until a surgeon of the time sounded the alarm. In 1782, following a smallpox epidemic and the overcrowding of the hospital, it was decided that another hospital would be built for the slaves, to separate them from the soldiers. Later, under British occupation, the hospital became a penal colony for slaves who had tried to escape. It only regained its status as a hospital after the abolition of slavery, until it was replaced by more modern units.

The multi-sensory scenography, which encourages immersion in different environments, arouses emotion and therefore reflection. One room presents little-known aspects of slave life. Another displays objects that belonged to slaves and were discovered during archaeological digs in an Albion cemetery. Yet another features a documentary on the genesis of the museum project. Numerous educational panels punctuate the tour, providing interesting explanations of rituals, traditional healing practices, the origins of sega, different forms of resistance (including women's strategies)... Particularly chilling are the articles taken from the Code Noir, the document drawn up under Louis XIV to legislate the condition of slaves, an original copy of which from the Carnégie library in Curepipe is on display at the museum.

The most disturbing and astonishing room is the one presenting life-size digital images of the faces of 63 slaves from various African countries (Mozambique, Tanzania...). They come from 63 ethnographic busts made in 1846 on a Mauritian plantation by French aristocrat, aesthete and ethnographer Eugène Huet de Froberville. In the mid-1940s, he conducted a vast study on "the races and languages of East Africa south of the equator", which led him to interview numerous former captives. Among the materials collected were these 63 plaster heads (only 49 originals survive today), 58 of which were molded from life - a sometimes long and uncomfortable operation, but essential to the work of remembrance. A number of copies have been made and stand as unique testimonies to a part of history whose iconography remains underdeveloped.

By conveying these names and faces, the museum, over and above its duty to pass on knowledge, has the great ambition of reconciling part of the Mauritian population with its tragic past by humanizing slavery and honouring "the economic and social contribution of enslaved people and their descendants". Its vocation is to go beyond the Mauritian territory and to have "an influence on the continents from which the various peoples of the island originate".