Creole houses: living spaces, shared memory and global connections

Kawthar Jeewa,

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(architect and doctoral student in architecture)

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The Creole houses of Mauritius fascinate as much as they question. Furthermore, Often photographed for their ancient charm. Moreover, admired for their verangues and their lace, they evoke a past with fuzzy contours: between colonial nostalgia, vernacular inheritance and silent resistance. For example, In a first article on the Forum page (the Mauritian) published Tuesday July 22. In addition, we retraced the origin of these houses, their construction by people who are enslaved, and the contemporary issues of their preservation. Furthermore, This second part continues exploration.

From Port-Louis to Saint-Louis du Senegal. Similarly, including Reunion or Louisiana, Creole houses draw a shared architectural language, born in the pain of history, but also in the creativity of the displaced peoples. Therefore, It is not only creole houses: living spaces, shared a question of talking about walls. Furthermore, roofs or foundations, but what these houses have housed: lives, rituals, know-how. Furthermore, This article invites you to take a fresh look at these places. Therefore, not as frozen objects from the past, but as living spaces, deeply rooted in our present.

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Lakour: the shared space of the Mauritian daily life

Behind the coquette facades of the Creole houses of Port-Louis hides a world of social interactions. However, daily practices that have long shaped community life.

The heart of this domestic life was in yardan interior courtyard, often hidden at the back of the house. However, This place served as a link between the different rooms of the house: Lakwizinn (the kitchen). For example, the Kabine (the sanitary facilities) and sometimes small workshops or discounts. For example, There are also typical objects like kari ros et Praise low. Moreover, creole houses: living spaces, shared More than a simple service space, Lakour became a theater in family life: we cooked, washed, chatted, laughed. The children played there, the neighbors met there, and the knowledge passed on to it.

Lavarang

At the front of Creole houses, Lavarang separates the sidewalk or garden living room. Lavarang is a living space that houses bad weather. Otherwise, the sidewalk extended the space of the house. In the working -class districts. he became an open -air show: we took tea there, exchanged news or settled to embroider in the shade. These practices show an extended conception of habitat. in which the interior and the exterior constantly dialogue, where intimacy coexists with conviviality.

Lakaz Kreol: a redefinition of Mauritius

During this research. I developed a definition of the Mauritian Creole house, based on the Mauritian context, taking into account its materiality, its landscape, its climate and its socio -cultural dimension. This creole houses: living spaces, shared definition will be the subject of a research article which will be presented during the Heritage 2025 conference. submitted for publication. The definition was presented in Kreol Morisien.

“In the Mauritian context. I propose that the Home of Creole can be defined as: a sudden wooden house on a stone in the style of Creole architectural that has been baptized by artisans and workers in the work of typical two islands of Mauritius transmitted to our colonial and slaves. A Creole House uses sustainable materials as woods, sheet metals, shingles, bastard land, and forged. A Creole House has architectural traits that are unique. adapted to Mauritian and tropical clerks, it has a raised structure, the big opening to be aeration, such as its lavarang, its foretold, his cabinet and outside kitchen. Sometimes the Creole House has a yard or it falls directly on the sidewalk.”

Port-Louis Groupe: colonial architecture. invisible creole houses: living spaces, shared Creole knowledge

Port-Louis, during the French colonial era, was designed according to the principles of European town planning: an imposing administrative center, commercial axes, a central market and a cutting in the grid of residential neighborhoods. This spatial organization aimed to reflect order, control and the hierarchy specific to colonial power.

But behind this rigid planning hiding the erased stories of those who have truly built the city. People reduced to slavery. who came from West Africa, the Swahilia coast, Madagascar, India or Southeast Asia, who have implemented their knowledge to adapt French architecture to tropical realities. They are the ones who have cut the volcanic stone, assembled the frames, invented techniques to manage humidity and heat.

Despite their fundamental role, the official archives hardly recognize their contribution. It is necessary to read between the lines of the cost and maintenance registers to guess their presence. The development plans highlight creole houses: living spaces, shared the houses of the settlers. the elites, but ignore the way in which Creole builders have transformed these imposed structures into living areas.

Today, this invisibilization persists: heritage speeches valued the “colonial” aesthetics without paying tribute to the hands that shaped it. It is urgent to reread the city through other stories, those of forgotten builders.

A cross-sectional aesthetic: beyond Mauritius

Mauritian Creole architecture does not live in a vacuum. It is part of a constellation of Creole architectural expressions that are found in the four corners of the Indian Ocean. but also in the Antilles, Louisiana or West Africa.

In Reunion. Seychelles, Saint-Louis du Senegal, or New Orleans, there are similar elements: generous veranda, sloping roofs, raised wooden walls, decorated shutters, sheet metal lace. These similarities are not the result of chance, but the result of colonial traffic, transfers of knowledge and shared adaptations.

Each territory has shaped this creole houses: living spaces, shared common base according to its climatic constraints, its available materials and especially its local cultures. In Mauritius. for example, the use of volcanic rock, native wood or lime-coral gives Creole houses a particular texture, rooted in the island.

Thinking about this architecture as a transoanic makes it possible to forge links between the heir communities of these. built forms. It is an invitation to recognize common filiations in difference. and to inscribe Maurice in a global history of silent resistances and shared creations.

A continuation to write together

Far from being frozen in the past. Creole houses continue to live through their uses, their inhabitants and the memories they house. They remind us that heritage is not just about what is monumental. ancient, but to what is inhabited, transmitted, transformed.

To recognize their value is to make room for a plural story. It is to give voice to anonymous, invisible creole houses: living spaces, shared hands, silent communities that built Mauritius yesterday and tomorrow.

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