Mauritius had no indigenous population, so every faith on the island arrived by ship. The Dutch came and went, the French planted Catholicism along with sugar, and the enslaved Africans and Malagasy they brought were baptised into a creole Catholic culture that remains the church's heart. When Britain abolished slavery, the planters turned to indentured labour, and between 1834 and the early twentieth century roughly half a million Indians passed through the Aapravasi Ghat immigration depot in Port Louis, now a World Heritage site. They carried Hinduism in its Bhojpuri north Indian and Tamil south Indian forms, along with Islam from Gujarat and Bihar, and their descendants made Mauritius the one African country where Hindus are the largest community.
The island's calendar tells the story better than any statistic: Maha Shivaratri empties towns for the pilgrimage to Ganga Talao, Thaipoosam Cavadee pierces the devout of the Tamil temples, Eid and Christmas and Chinese New Year are all public holidays, and Père Laval's shrine at Sainte Croix draws Catholic, Hindu and Muslim petitioners alike to the grave of the missionary beatified for his work among freed slaves. Communal politics exists, and the census counts carefully, but the island's dense interweave of shrines, mosques, temples and churches has held peacefully since independence in 1968.