From East Africa to the Mascarenes

Between 1810 and the 1840s, tens of thousands of East Africans were transported illegally from Mozambique and the Swahili Coast to Mauritius and Réunion. Referred to as “Mozambiques,” these East African captives were generally men and boys sent to the Mascarenes to work on sugar plantations. While this commerce in chattel labor has been a subject of scholarly attention, we know comparatively little about these individuals’ life histories. Between 1845 and 1847, Eugène Huet de Froberville, a member of the Franco-Mauritian elite, conducted an ethnological study which included interviewing about 300–350 “Mozambiques” in the Mascarenes. Preserved in the Huet de Froberville family’s private archives, long inaccessible to researchers, Froberville’s papers provide valuable information about these individuals’ names, origins, languages, life experiences in East Africa and the Mascarenes, and the ways in which they resisted the system which sought to deny their humanity