By Stephan Gua, Member of Rezistans ek Alternativ & Social Activist
& Satyendra Peerthum, Historian, Lecturer, & Writer
Today, 18th June 2025, marks the anniversary of the slave/maroon revolt led by Anna of Bengal and her companions which took place on 18th June 1695 at Vieux Grand Port. This landmark date clearly highlights that one of the most glaring facts is that there are few women heroes and fighters in Mauritian history like Anna Van Bengale and Anjalay Coopen. Furthermore, coupled with this sorry state of affairs is that until four decades ago, slavery and acts of slave resistance such as slave conspiracies, slave revolts, maroonage, maroon attacks, and the story of Anna Van Bengale during the Dutch East India Company’s administration of Mauritius were largely unexplored themes in modern Mauritian historiography.
The Arrival of the First Slaves in Dutch Mauritius
When the Dutch fleet, under the command of Admiral Wybrandt Warwick, arrived in Mauritius on 17th September, 1598, he was accompanied by a Malagasy interpreter and an Indian sailor from Java, Guzerate Abdul, who helped him negotiate a safe entry into the natural harbour of Grand Port Bay. Mauritius was still a no man’s land and effective Dutch occupation started only in May 1638 with the arrival of Commander Cornelius Gooyer and his men.
The first slaves to reach the shores of T’Eylandt or Dutch Mauritius were three emeritus divers, two from Muscat and one from Bengal. The Dutch commander, Adrian van der Stel, who came to replace Cornelius Gooyer, the first Dutch commander, in November 1639, brought them from Batavia. Following the first slaving expedition of Van der Stel, a first batch of slaves from Madagascar was introduced in May 1642, thus inaugurating the institution of colonial slavery on our soil, which would last until its abolition on April 1st, 1839. Therefore, slavery in Mauritius spanned across almost two centuries and existed under three different European colonial occupations, Dutch, French, and British.
The Genesis of Maroonage in T’Eylandt Mauritius
According to the Dutch author, archivist, and researcher, Dr. K. Heeringa, of the one hundred and five slaves brought from Madagascar by Adrian van der Stel, fifty-two of both sexes took to the woods within the first weeks of their arrival and only eighteen were ever captured. With these first fugitive slaves in the woods of T’Eylandt Mauritius starts the story of maroons and of maroonage which would last until the definitive abolition of slavery on 1st April, 1839.
Within the first decade of the Dutch colonial occupation, maroons had already become a serious threat to the very survival of the fledgling colony. The first maroon hunt was organized in 1644 but without much success. Their numbers were constantly increased through the desertions of the newly introduced slaves and convicts known as banditens from Batavia. Only women with children in their arms could be easily captured as they were not willing to abandon them and run away.
However, they were almost immediately replaced by other slave women who were carried away by the male maroons or by new deserters who joined them. A plan was mooted to physically destroy the maroons by shooting them on sight and had even received the approval of the Dutch governor-general in Batavia (modern-day Java) but was rejected by the Council of Seventeen, the Directorate of the Dutch East India Company.
The problem of control over slaves as a result of the fear of slave rebellions or attacks by the maroons was constantly uppermost in the minds of the Dutch colonial administrators and the free burgers. This led them to keep the number of slaves on the low side for ease of control. Fear of number eventually became a decisive factor in the fate of the Dutch colonial experiment in Mauritius.
Their fear was not groundless. There did exist small maroon settlements in the inaccessible forests which then covered the island from one end to another and could never be destroyed by the detachments (or maroon catching units). These settlements were well-organized communities with a social structure of a chief elected from among the maroons. Children were born to them and they supported themselves by hunting and fishing. They made the roads very unsafe by robbing and threatening to kill those whom they met.
Hunters who provided the daily food to the company servants and the free burgers were afraid to venture into the forest. These maroon settlements are known to have lasted 15 to 25 years and even longer. They were continuously replenished by the newly introduced slaves who remained slaves only as long as they wished and could very easily escape to the woods, where they were without any danger of ever being caught.
Herbert Hugo was the Dutch commander between 1673 and 1677 and he once sent a detachment to tract the maroons. The soldiers caught a young man called Simon who had been a maroon for eleven years. On being offered as reward a female companion, he led them to an abandoned maroon settlement in the south of the island where they saw four huts surrounded by palisades, a stable for their cows, a well cultivated garden and a beautiful patch of tobacco. In a corner, there were two tombs where two dead maroons were buried.
The First Freedom Fighters on Mauritian Soil
The climax of slave resistance in T’Eylandt Mauritius or Dutch Mauritius took place on 18th June, 1695, when Anna Van Bengale, Aaron of Amboina, Antoni alias Bamboes, Paul, a recently arrived slave from Batavia, and Esperance, a female slave belonging to the free burger, Class van Wieringen, set fire to Fort Fredrick Hendrik, after weeks of minute preparation.
It is supposed that Anna Van Bengale was enslaved by the Dutch in Bengal in eastern India and taken to Batavia in modern-day Java. She arrived in Mauritius in 1679 as a VOC slave and worked at the fort as a servant. She spent sixteen years witnessing Dutch atrocities on her fellow enslaved workers, which she also endured, and experienced the harsh life in a VOC outpost on the edge of the Dutch colonial empire.
Just before dawn, on the morning of 18th June 1695, everything went up in smoke and Governor Deodati barely saved himself in his shirt. Soon after, in order to underline the seriousness of this situation, he wrote to the Dutch governor of the Cape Colony (located formerly in the present-day Western Province of South Africa) that: “These were matters of very dangerous consequences, tending to the utter ruin of this island.”
In their confessions on 23rd June 1695, after their capture, the slave rebels clearly acknowledged that they had planned several weeks prior to destroy the fort and that their chief objective was to burn the governor and all the Company’s employees and servants. Immediately after, they planned to put the houses of the free burgers to the torch in order to become the masters of the island and bring an end to Dutch rule. This dramatic episode in the history of slavery and maroonage in Mauritius was explored in the recently published booklet entitled Anna Van Bengale by Joel Edouard and launched at the UNESCO Slavery International Conference by Hon. Minister Ashok Subron and leader of Rezistans ek Alternativ in February 2025.
For Deodati, the VOC employees, and the free burgers, this was a nightmare scenario come true. But, at the same time, it was evident that “these first freedom fighters on Mauritian soil” had sounded the clarion call of liberty. The slave rebels were sentenced to death and Governor Deodati ordered his men to carry out the execution order without waiting for instruction from Governor Simon van der Stel from the Cape Colony his superior colonial officer (It is interesting to note that Simon Van der Stel was the first person born in November 1639 in Mauritius and he was the son of Adrian Van der Stel therefore, the first Mauritian).
More than eighty years ago, Herbert Aptheker, an American slave historian, explained that: “A Ruling class, often subjected to periods of panic arising from doubt of its ability to maintain its power, may be expected to develop very complex and thorough systems of control”.
As a result, during periods of social crisis, a ruling class in a slave society developed “numerous psychological, social, judicial, economic, and militaristic methods of suppression and oppression”.
Aptheker’s observations can also be applied to Dutch Mauritius during the 1690s. After all, during the weeks and months immediately following the burning of the Dutch fort, there was a brief period of crisis and panic on the island and in the eyes of the colonial officials and colonists, “desperate times called for desparate measures”. Therefore, the punishment which the Dutch inflicted on these rebel slaves was of the utmost barbarity.
In the process, the objective was for it to serve as a powerful example in order to prevent the other slaves and maroons from attacking the other Dutch settlements as well as openly challenging Dutch colonial authority in Mauritius. However, this act, maroon attacks, and other slave conspiracies played a key role in convincing the Dutch to permanently abandon Mauritius in 1710 which is a rare occurrence in the annals of modern colonial history. As a result, Anna Van Bengale and her companions played an important role in this historical event.
