Mauritius - Music

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Mauritians grow up with music and dancing playing an important role in their lives: at family gatherings, festivals and celebrations.

Ubiquitous is the séga (pronounced ‘say-ga’), which evolved from the spontaneous dances of African and Malagasy slaves. At night, after a day’s toiling in the cane fields, slaves used improvised instruments to create a primitive music to which they could dance and forget their woes. At times, this meant defying their masters’ prohibition of music and dancing, which aimed to sever the slaves from their African and Malagasy roots.

Songs were often about the slaves’ plight and were highly critical of their masters. Girls danced to songs composed and sung by their admirers while the spectators encouraged them with hand clapping, foot stomping and chanting. The more impassioned the lyrics, the more heated the music and the more tempestuous the dancing.

On Mauritius’s accession to independence, séga was adopted as the national dance and it has been flourishing and evolving ever since. Traditional séga is a courtship drama, beginning slowly with couples dancing apart from each other. As the beat intensifies, they shuffle closer together, hips swinging in time, but they never quite touch. The girl will sink to her knees at the cry of en bas, leaning back in the manner of a limbo dancer passing under a pole. Her partner leans over her, still not touching, as they both shimmer and shake, while the music races to a crescendo. The music slows and the partners retreat. What makes séga unique is the combination of musical influences it has absorbed over the centuries, until it has assumed its own immediately recognisable beat. Like the ka-danse or zouk music of the French West Indies, also sung in Creole patois, it has a similarity to Latin American music in its jaunty rhythms. Séga is as prolific on Rodrigues and Réunion as it is in Mauritius, but each of the islands has developed its own distinctive version.

Descendants of the primitive instruments used by the slaves can still be seen in séga bands today. Vital to séga is the distinctive drumbeat provided by the ravane, a goatskin tambourine. The maravane is a container (either wooden or fashioned from a gourd) filled with seeds or pebbles, which is shaken like the maracas. A triangle beaten with vigour adds a carillon voice echo, just as a cowbell does in ka-danse.

Séga is a fantastic dance with a wonderful, joyful music that seizes spectators with an urge to join in, which they are encouraged to do at hotel performances. At hotel shows, the men will usually wear the traditional pedal pushers and a colourful shirt, while the women are sensational in a billowing skirt.

Kaya, the popular Creole singer who was found dead in a police cell in February 1999, pioneered a new musical style in the late 1980s: séggae, a blend of reggae and séga. Kaya’s work has been continued by his fellow Creole musicians and the mellow séggae is now popular throughout the western Indian Ocean islands

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Mauritius - Music

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Mauritius - Music