There is a Pub Café Jamaicain in Mauritius. The hot spot at Grand Baie, a major tourist centre on the north coast of the tourist island, has a French language advertisement on the tourist map which features the Jamaican flag, and, you guessed it, the iconic international face of Jamaica, Bob Marley.

Incidentally, Shaggy was billed to perform at the fourth International Creole Festival staged by Mauritius, November 28 - December 6.

Picking my way through the ad with my long-ago-two-years-of-high-school French, it says visitors can spend a superb night with a group reservation enjoying reggae and sega. Sega is the kreol (creole) national music and dance, rather like our mento. And, yes, there is seggae for which you don't need a tourist guidebook, like the ones I bought, to tell you, is a fusion of sega and reggae - a fusion driven by Rastafarians in the country.

The café offers Indian, European and Jamaican cuisine. Jamaicans and Jamaican culture pop up everywhere! So sorry that Kim-Marie had to turn back with frostbite from the expedition to Antarctica. Standing on the spectacular southernmost tip of Mauritius and gazing out to sea, the geography comes home that going south the next land stop is Antarctica across a couple of thousand miles of empty ocean.

Visitors to Jamaica arriving at the Norman Manley International Airport get their first urban impression of the country driving through Rockfort and east Kingston, and, to put it mildly, it is not a favourable impression. Touching down at the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam airport (SSR for short), named after the country's founding father, a Bustamante-like figure, after a 13-hour flight from London, and driving cross-island towards the capital, Port Louis, on a six-lane highway, the manicured prosperity and order of the country is everywhere in evidence.

Population

And off the highway too. The deliberate search for potholes and shacks was not very profitable at all, even in the 'poorer' South. This 720-square mile island, roughly the size of St Elizabeth and Manchester thrown together, lives off sugar, textiles and, increasingly, tourism. With 1.2 million people and a population density of 644 per square mile, Mauritius, for most of its history a sugar colony, manages to pull off a gross domestic product per capita of US$5,400 which is about US$2,000, or nearly 60 per cent, better than Jamaica's. But what is even more striking is the obviously carefully planned and executed infrastructural development and public-services delivery on what is really a rather modest national income base.

Mauritius is not only far from Jamaica it is far from everywhere else which explains much of its colonial history. The East African coast is a thousand miles away at its nearest point. India and Australia are 2,000 miles away in the other direction. Apart from a handful of smaller islands, the nearest land mass is the big island of Madagascar, the fourth largest in the world and considerably poorer. But Madagascar is 500 miles away.

Rather like Barbados in our part of the world, nobody lived on Mauritius with the dodo bird before European settlers turned up - in this case the Dutch. The Arabs and Portuguese actually turned up before but never put down settlements. The lasting legacy of the Potuguese was the deliberate introduction of cattle and monkeys as meat supply and the accidental introduction of rats and dogs which hopped off the ships.

The monkeys are still there along with the others and can become quite barefaced and aggressive if they are not fed at one Hindu shrine where food offerings are offered to the gods, our university colleague and tour guide, herself a Hindu, told us.

Settlement

The Portuguese abandoned the island around 1539 when the last sailors left and the Dutch turned up a good half a century later in 1698 naming the island Mauritius after Prince Maurice of Nassau in Holland. But it was not until 1638 that settlement began when a grand defence team of all of 26 men were left on the island to ward off the French and the English and to provide food for Dutch ships stopping there. The Dutch introduced sugar, and slaves mostly from Madagascar and Java, started the cutting of the ancient ebony forests for exporting timer and made there own animal introduction of deer for food. The deer are now farmed. Deer released here more recently roam the Blue Mountain forests I am told. Mauritius has no equivalent of the Blue Mountains. This very flat island boasts a highest peak of only 2,711 feet.

The Dutch settlement didn't work out and they pulled up stakes in 1710 leaving runaway slaves behind which are also called Maroons like those here and in Suriname. Pirates who had established their own republic of Liberalia in Madagascar used Mauritius as a staging point for attacking the ships of the growing East India trade. Piracy off the coast of east Africa and in the Indian Ocean still flourishes today and the exploits of the Somalian pirates are making news headlines today.

Five years after the Dutch pulled out, the French turned up and has left the most lasting European stamp upon the country. The French backed the pirates issuing them Letters of Marque authorising them to attack foreign shipping in the name of France. Captured ships were brought into Port Louis the capital which became a rich and riotous place. Port Royal? The French imported slaves heavily for the growing sugar industry from their West African holdings

The Dutch, and the introduced rats, dogs and monkeys which devoured eggs and chicks drove the native dodo bird into extinction by the end of the 17th century, the world's most famous example of an extinction. The dodo, now the 'national' bird appearing everywhere in over-abundance as a craft item for tourists, was in real life a big, fat, tame and friendly and flightless bird of up to 50 lbs. The dodo was clumsy and stupid and today stands as a metaphor for same. The Mauritian economy and social organisation are certainly no dodo.

Ostensibly to eliminate the pirates preying upon shipping, the English seized the island in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars. They never really settled in terms of putting in colonists. They maintained a garrison, imposed English government and official language, but left the French culture and economy intact. Although by then the slave trade had been officially abolished in the British Empire (1807), the English allowed the importation of slaves and Emancipation with Apprenticeship did not come until 1835, a year after the West Indies.

The massive importation of indentured Indians then followed on a scale proportionally larger than Trinidad or Guyana. Today the population is 68 per cent Indo-Mauritian. Chinese migrants came during and after World War II largely in search of economic opportunities and fleeing hardships at home.

People of darker shade

An intense creolisation has taken place in Mauritian space very much like here but with different mixes. It is hard not to notice that the hewers of wood and the drawers of water in Mauritian society are preponderantly people of darker shade whether of African or southern Indian origin.

In a remarkable parallel, nationalism and the push for self-government began with labour unrest in 1937 in the cane piece and on the docks. The Mauritius Labour Party had been founded in 1936. Later on Sewoosagur Ramgoolam, a medical doctor returned from 14 years in London where he had met Mahatma Ghandi while serving as secretary of the London Branch of the Indian National Congress, headed the Labour Party and the push for self-government. Independence came in 1968 and was promptly followed by ethnic upheavals the following year.

As Culture Shock! A Survival Guide to Custom and Etiquette - Mauritius puts it, "racism does not exist in Mauritius - or so the political leaders would like the population to believe. Instead they prefer to use the word 'communalism", a euphemism for ethnic groupings recognised in the census.

But "the apparent harmony of different races working and having fun together hides under currents ... Most Mauritians are conscious of this and try their best to avoid rocking the boat." The boat appears steady as Mauritians have controlled their divisions to build a peaceful, orderly and remarkably prosperous society. The Mauritian rupee is three times stronger than the Jamaican dollar against the pound.

The extensively flat land is covered with sugar cane profitably cultivated and heavily researched. The coast is ringed with tourism and the locals and tourists freely mingle on the Negril-like white sand beaches with no sign of either exclusion or harassment.

The country will need no visa for the United States come 2012, but is in a position to be attractive to illegal immigrants like The Bahamas, Barbados and The Cayman Islands in our region. "Expat workers to get more protection", says The News on Sunday, an English language newspaper in a place where French dominates.

Tourist attractions

The country is immaculately clean and groomed with parks and tourist attractions everywhere including in the interior. Mauritius has recently established a spanking Cyber City.

A forensics project conference took us to Mauritius but compared to Jamaica crime is relatively low. Burglar bars are as scarce as potholes and people gasped at our murder data.

Education, free up to the secondary level, is officially conducted in English, but several other languages are recognised and taught in schools including the dominant French, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic. For higher education people, multi-lingual and multi-cultural, stay at home or go to France and the United Kingdom with equal facility. The French-based creole, which everybody speaks with at least two or three other languages, is the language glue which holds this diverse population together. Media, like the people, are gloriously multi-lingual. A single ad or sign or even newspaper article can have an integrated mix of English and French. With a strong orientation towards India in news and entertainment many broadcasts are in Hindi.

To my short-term visitor's eyes, it does appear that Mauritius has had a better go of its circumstances, many of them unfavourable, than we have done here in Jamaica, an island six times bigger and with much more resources.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.