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Aapravasi Ghat
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How it came to be
When slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1834, the sugar plantations lost their workers. The British Government chose Mauritius for what it called the great experiment, a test of whether free labour could replace enslaved labour. In 1849 an immigration depot for indentured labourers was set up on the bay of Trou Fanfaron in Port Louis.
Its core was a building from the French period, remodelled in 1864 and 1865. Labourers came from India, Eastern Africa, Madagascar, China and South-East Asia, and every one of them climbed a flight of 14 stone steps into the depot. Sheds, kitchens and a hospital block survive, but a road now crosses the site and less than half of the 1865 depot remains.
Between 1834 and 1920 almost half a million indentured labourers from India passed through, some of them moving on to Réunion, Australia or the Caribbean. Other colonial powers copied the system, which moved more than two million people. The site bears the name Aapravasi, Hindi for immigrant, and was inscribed in 2006.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).