Who is a Creole?

Let's get this clear. If you are a Mauritian, whether you are an Indo-Mauritian, a Sino-Mauritian, a Franco-Mauritian or an Afro-Mauritian, you are a Creole!

If you have gone about calling black-skined, slave descendents of your own nation "Creole" and yo hold a Mauritian Citizenship, hold back your tongue, because you are yourself a Creole!

The concept of cultural creolisation, introduced in anthropology by Ulf Hannerz (see Hannerz 1992), refers to the intermingling and mixing of two or several formerly discrete traditions or cultures. In an era of global mass communication and capitalism, creolisation can be identified nearly everywhere in the world, but there are important differences as to the degree of mixing. The concept has been criticized for essentialising cultures (as if the merging traditions were "pure" at the outset, cf. Friedman 1994).

Creolisation, as it is used by some anthropologists, is an analogy taken from linguistics. This discipline in turn took the term from a particular aspect of colonialism, namely the uprooting and displacement of large numbers of people in the plantation economies of certain colonies, such as Louisiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Réunion and Mauritius. Both in the Caribbean basin and in the Indian Ocean, certain (or all) groups who contributed to this economy during slavery were described as creoles.

Originally, a criollo meant a European (normally a Spaniard) born in the New World (as opposed to peninsulares); today, a similar usage is current in La Réunion, where everybody born in the island, regardless of skin colour, is seen as créole, as opposed to the zoreils who were born in metropolitan France. In Trinidad, the term creole is sometimes used to designate all Trinidadians except those of Asian origin. In Suriname, a creole is a person of African origin, while in neighbouring French Guyana a creole is a person who has adopted a European way of life. In spite of the differences, there are some important resemblances between the various conceptualisations of "the creole", which resonate with the theoretical concept of creolisation: Creoles are uprooted, they belong to the New World, are the products of some form of mixing, and are contrasted with that which is old, deep and rooted. This contribution sets out to discuss the concept of the creole -- related both to language and to people -- as it is used in Mauritius, and then relate the Mauritian situation to the general use of the concept of creolisation.

A question often posed by people unfamiliar with the varying uses of the term is: "What is really a creole?" They may have encountered the term in connection with food or architecture from Louisiana, languages in the Caribbean or people in the Indian Ocean.

In other words, it is worthwhile to take a close at Mauritian creoledom to see if it could shed light on the theory of cultural creolisation.

Analytically speaking, all the cultures of all the ethnic groups in Mauritius are creolised to a greater or lesser extent. For example, the Bhojpuri vernacular spoken by many of the Indo-Mauritians has been so strongly influenced by other languages that it is unintelligible to Bhojpuri-speakers in Bihar, and the Franco-Mauritians – like all other Mauritians – eat spicy curries and lots of rice. Nearly every Mauritian speaks a French-based creole language (Kreol) fluently, and it is the mother-tongue of a substantial majority. Regarding lifestyle, consumption and way of life in general, it is easy to demonstrate the effects of mutual influence between the ethnic groups that make up the Mauritian population, as well as cultural influence from the outside world – not merely from the West, incidentally, but also from India and East Asia.

Now, the anthropological use of the concept cultural creolization closely approximates Mauritian usage. Creolisation is seen as a process whereby new shared cultural forms, and new possibilities for communication, emerge due to contact. It highlights the open-ended, flexible and unbounded nature of cultural processes, as opposed to the notion of cultures as bounded, stable systems of communication.

Let us finally consider the term creolisation in linguistics. In this discipline, the term creole has a relatively fixed meaning. According to the recent Penguin Dictionary of Language, for example, a creole is "a pidgin language which has become the mother tongue of a speech community. The process of expanding the structural and stylistic range of the pidgin is called creolization" (boldface in the original). It is further remarked that decreolisation takes place when the standard language begins to influence the creole directly, and that the result is a "post-creole continuum"; which is a seamless system of lects which are removed from the standard language to varying degrees. The language situation in Trinidad is probably one of the most obvious examples of a post-creole continuum, where spoken language ranges from standard English via forms which are perfectly intelligible to English-speakers to lects that are clearly distinct from it.