A New Comprehensive History of Mauritius Volume 1: From Prehistory to the Birth of Parliament in 1886, Paperback

A TRUE HISTORY OF MAURITIUS A revolutionary work that breaks free from the ethnocentric straightjacket that has too long characterized Mauritian historiography and which was condemned in 2011 by the Justice and Peace Commission. Several new findings, most of them surprising, are included in the book. Whites and non-Whites took part in the crimes of slavery and the indenture system and benefited from profits generated by the human trade involved under those systems of cheap labour. The common view of history is one that has been distorted over several decades and is responsible for the vicious modern games of ethnic politics that are counterproductive to the quest of national unity in the former colonies. Sydney Selvon, professional editor, researcher and former ambassador tells a history where people of all ethnic origins were on both sides of the class divide that has marked Mauritian history from 1638 to date. He teaches the people that their history and diverse cultures can unite them more as a nation than it divides them. His many new findings indicate that there was a free multiethnic population before French colonisation. A strikingly beautiful Malagasy Queen, a metis, abandoned her kingdom to live in Mauritius with her entire court and her slaves as a free and very rich woman... And many more

Sydney Selvon was the editor of the French newspaper Le Mauriticien and editor in the Rural Press Group, Australia, and of three other English language newspapers in the Bowes Publishers/Sun Media Corporation/Quebecor in Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada. He was the High Commissioner of Mauritius to Australia in 1995-96 and has served in government committees on history, one of which decided on the date for a public holiday commemorating the abolition of indentured labour. He presented his research on the genesis of the village system at the International Seminar on Slavery in the Southwest Indian Ocean in 1984, and was hailed in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the founding members of the so-called "New Historians group" comprising also Dr Satteeanun d Peerthum and Muslim Iumeer, who have initiated an entirely new reading and writing of Mauritian history, free from the traditionally ethnocentrist historiography that has plagued most history books until well after independence. Following that, a new generation of Mauritian historians comprising Jocelyn Chan Low, Vijaya Teelock and several others have emerged.