ABSTRACT
Walk into any supermarket in Mauritius, one of the Indian Ocean Rim countries known among economists as an “African tiger cub,” and you get a picture of abundance: neat rows of packaged foods, aisles crowded with customers, entire families shopping for bargains (The Economist, February 28, 1988, 51). The lines at the cash registers are long, even at the Frenchowned mega-stores Continent and Prisunic, which charge infl ated prices, or at the South African-owned Winners and Spar, which import merchandise from not quite as far away as Europe. In a country where the 2007 average annual income per capita is approximately $11,900, the disposable income of the middle and working classes is limited, and people will spend their paychecks in the fi rst few days of the month on the basic necessities of life (Jeune Afrique, March 31, 1998, 55). But what counts as “basic necessities of life” in the midst of this consumer revolution? How has the concept of individual need been infl ected by the availability of imported merchandise, the lure of easy credit, and the promise of a more satisfying lifestyle? How have these issues affected women’s lives? And what do we know about the impact of these economic changes on the quotidian practices of a new generation of Mauritian women today? This essay attempts to answer some of these questions by analyzing a fi ctional text, There Is a Tide, by Lindsey Collen (1990), and situating it within the context of those changing
socioeconomic conditions. Collen, a South African-born Mauritian citizen for more than thirty years, is an award-winning Anglophone and Creolophone novelist and a political activist who has fought for human rights and worked closely with grassroots organizations. Her fi ctional treatments of critical social issues offer unique insights into the personal experiences of ordinary citizens, whose social and cultural histories have yet to be fully included in the narratives of “world history.”
