Month: May 2024

An article written by Klara Boyer-Rossol, historian and curator.

Eugène Huet de Froberville (1815-1904), a wealthy annuitant well-versed in the arts and sciences, came from an aristocratic Franco – Mauritian family.

In the 1840s, he embarked on a wide-ranging ethnological study of “the languages and races of East Africa, south of the Equator”. His study was based on interviews with former African captives, transported to the Mascarene islands through the illegal slave trade.

In November 1845, during his short stay on Bourbon island, Froberville came into contact with some 200 ‘Mozambiques’, from whom he gathered vocabulary of East African languages, as well as narratives bearing witness to the violence of the system of slavery that reigned on this colonial plantation island. Himself born in a family of slave owners in Mauritius, during his stay on Bourbon, Eugène Huet de Froberville apparently became convinced of the necessity of abolishing slavery in the French colonies.

Huet de Froberville’s family had set up close links with families of French settlers from Mauritius island (which became British in 1810) who had settled on Bourbon in the 1820s, such as the Lory and the de Tourris families, on whose estates Eugène de Froberville and his wife stayed in Saint-Denis, Sainte-Marie and Sainte-Suzanne.

From the slaves of his estate-owning hosts, Froberville gathered vocabulary of East African languages, which he recorded in notebooks. Eugène de Froberville’s notebooks, manuscript documents, correspondence and drawings, for a long time conserved in the Froberville private archives (in France), are a precious source for reconstructing his study on Bourbon and giving a voice to enslaved Africans.

Among the ‘Mozambiques’ questioned by Froberville on Bourbon, it has been possible to identify four men and one woman, tracing their names, origins, languages and cultural practices, as well as part of their life story. Deported to Bourbon around the 1820s – 1830s from what is now Mozambique, they are among the last captives of the slave trade to have been taken to this French colony in the Indian Ocean. In the context of slavery, their retaining their languages, original names and cultural practices from East Africa, stand outs as forms of resistance by these survivors of forced maritime transport.

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Klara Boyer-Rossol is a historian and curator. In 2005, her doctoral thesis on the ‘Makoa’ in the west of Madagascar (University of Paris 7) received the thesis award of the (French) National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (CNMHE). As a research member of the International Centre for Research on Slavery, and Post-Slavery (CIRESC), she is currently holder of an international grant (2024-2025) at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the university of Bonn.

On 23rd May 2024, to mark the National Day of Homage to the Victims of Colonial Slavery, the Villèle Historical Museum, in association with the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’esclavage (Foundation for the Memory of Slavery), is highlighting the sculpture “Les Trois Frères” (The Three Brothers) by artist Sandrine Plante.

Installed at the Chapelle Pointue, the work evokes the revolt of slaves in Saint-Leu in 1811.
This revolt, which took place from 5th to 8th November 1811, was the only major slave revolt in Reunion Island. It was harshly repressed by the island’s authorities: fifteen rebels were publicly beheaded in April 1812: two in Saint‑Denis, four in Saint-Paul, five in Saint-Leu, two in Saint-Pierre and two in Saint-Benoît.

The sculpture represents three slaves condemned to death.

“The first one, on the left, whose ears have been cut off, is the oldest of the rebels. Beaten and in despair, he is simply leaning on his brother’s shoulder. The one in the centre is filled with rage. Until he has breathed his final breath he will not give up, for his brothers, for his family. The youngest, though the tallest and strongest, never imagined that things would go so wrong …”
Sandrine Plante

Sandrine Plante was born in 1974 in Puy de Dôme, her mother from Auvergne and her father from Reunion.
Her research into the history of Reunion Island and the discovery that she is a descendant of slaves led her to devote her entire career to the history of slavery, running from the 15th century up to the present day.

“It is our duty to remember, serving history so that we never forget…
I do not create for aesthetic reasons, but to tell the story…
This is the case with my work, which seeks to represent the cries of the oppressed throughout history. My characters may be life-size or sometimes bigger, telling the story of slavery and division across the earth… this scourge that continues to repeat itself inexorably, affecting more than 30 million people.
As long as I can, I will never cease to express these cries, as a woman of my times, in my country. All of us gathered together on our shared Mother Earth”.
Sandrine Plante

Read the article by Gilles Gérard The slave revolt of Saint-Leu, November 1811