For more than a hundred years, slaves from
Africa and Madagascar were taken prisoner and exploited by settlers under the
rule of Governor General Mahé de la Bourdonnais. The island got the name “Reunion” during
the French Revolution, before becoming Bonaparte Island under the empire of Napoleon. The English occupied it from 1810, before surrendering it to France in 1814. 20th December in 1848, is a key date in the history of Reunion. On this day slavery was
abolished in Reunion by Commissioner Sarda Garriga. This date was celebrated as
the day of the traditional ”fete cafre” every year by the Reunionese. “Fete cafre” celebrates the end of slavery and testifies to what all these enslaved men and women have suffered. Réunion was ruled by France as a colony
until 1946, when it became an oversea´s department of France, in 1974 it gained
the status of region as well. The headquarters of the French military forces in
the Indian Ocean were established on Réunion in 1973, with the arrival of personnel
withdrawn from Madagascar. In the late 1970s the Organization of African Unity
(now the African Union) urged that Réunion be given full independence, but that
suggestion was not accepted by the majority of Réunion’s inhabitants and
therefore the suggestion was not pursued. Persistent social and economic unrest,
fueled by the widening gap between the rich and the poor and by high rates of
unemployment, periodically erupted into demonstrations and violence during the
1990s and 2000s. Rioting in February 1991 left 11 people dead, and in 1997
demonstrations were held against proposed civil service reforms. In 2000 a
proposal made by the French government to split the island into two
departements spawned demonstrations both for and against the division; the
proposal was later rejected by the French Senate.
Creole peoples in Reunion
Reunionese
Creole first formed within the first 50 years of Reunion being inhabited. It is a
mix of multiple languages (French, Normand and Gallo), most of the people
living in Reunion were French, Malagasy or Indo-Portuguese. Most families at
that time had at least one native French speaker. It is now the native language of 90% of the island’s
population.
