Our Series on Autonomous Territories takes us to Rodrigues, a small island in the Indian Ocean.
Like the other two islands of the Mascarene Archipelago, Mauritius and Reunion, Rodrigues had been known to Austronesian and Arab sailors for a long time when they were discovered and charted by Portuguese sailors in the Sixteenth Century. They had had no permanent population before, and would become settled by Europeans over the next centuries.
While the population of Rodrigues originally came from France, with a large contingent of slaves from Africa, the island, then a dependency of Mauritius, became British in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars. As British sovereignty was confirmed on Mauritius and Rodrigues at the end of hostilities, Rodrigues became a small and distant dependency of Mauritius and, unlike its neighbour, did not receive much new immigration over time. As a result, while Mauritius is very multicultural and fully trilingual in English, French and Mauritian Creole, Rodrigues has remained essentially French speaking over time. The remoteness and cultural specificity of Rodrigues led its population to push for a status of autonomy, which was granted in 2002.
More on Rodrigues
Rodrigues in 2022
