1937 Uba riots at Union Flacq

The Uba riots of 1937 or simply the Mauritian riots of 1937 refers to an outbreak of riots and civil disturbances that broke out amongst small scale sugar cane growers on the island of Mauritius in August 1937. The riots led to the death of 4 people with an additional 6 people being injured.

Uba refers to a variety of Saccharum sinense sugarcane commonly cultivated by small hold owning cane growers and labourers at the time who initiated the riots due to an unexpected reduction in the price sugar mills were prepared to pay for the cane.

Background

Labour conditions

Large sugar estates sold off less productive land to better-off Indian Mauritians from the 1870s onward forming a class of small land owners who came to be known as Sirdars. The Sirdars used family labour to make their sugar plots profitable. The Sirdars also acted as middlemen between sharecropping rural workers and the Franco-Mauritian elite that owned the large Sugar Cane estates. This created a distance between labourers and the land owning elite who ran the Sugar Mills resulting in a lack of any mechanism for the cane labourers to raise grievances with their employers. The owners of the large sugar plantations held a very strong political position within the local government of Mauritius. Both due to their economic power and because the British colonial government was concerned about aggravating pro-French sentiment amongst Franco-Mauritians during the 1800s. Fearing that they would agitate either for independence or to become a French colony again as advocated by the Retrocessionist Movement or Retrocession Movement which was active at that time.