How to build responsibly on an island that had no before

Mauritius is an island society that was born directly into modernity and entirely from colonial encounter—a colony without indigeneity, a manufactured geography, rather than one layered over pre-colonial presence.

The first architecture school in Mauritius opened when I left to study cities and architecture abroad. Before that, I never recalled much of an architectural culture. Not to say there were no architects or building culture; there was an absence of discourse. Architecture operated largely within a status quo shaped by the logics of neoliberal tourism and imported paradigms of development.

Throughout my studies, a discursive awakening that gained traction in the field turned toward decolonial pedagogies and epistemic reparations. The 2023 Venice Biennale, curated by Leslie Lokko, became a landmark for this decolonization and decarbonization zeitgeist: architects reclaiming local materials, revaluing indigenous knowledge systems, and advancing technologies of soil, fiber, and nature-based craft over the synthetics of late modernity. Anti-extractivist principles seek autonomy from unsustainable global systems. Perhaps there is much to learn from imagining how we might (re)build our communities as if each were an insular island world.

Yet the island analogy feels uneasy. With most island states, the fantasy of local resilience dissolves under the weight of global dependence. Despite their geographic isolation, island economies hinge on neocolonial tourism and neoliberal trade. Their survival often depends on complicity with the structures of Empire, a Faustian bargain dressed in the language of development. Mauritius is a perfect example. I come from an island where there are no autochthonous ancestors of the land to learn from. No inherited architectural language except modern colonialism and its creolizations. What does decolonial practice mean in a place whose history begins with colonization? What does local knowledge mean when locality itself was manufactured? I ask myself these a lot especially when I am far from home, which these days is always.

During my travels in the past year, these questions began to meet other voices. In Morocco, Salima Naji offered a response to the Mauritian question: to understand its calamities in order to invent a neovernacular way of building—to devise forms and biosourced materials adapted to cyclones based on what is already there. Material Cultures’s George Massoud suggested a cartographic exercise to map epistemes: draw three concentric circles around Mauritius—a small one, a larger one, then another—and learn from the nearest building cultures that fall within those rings. The relatable ones are often those in proximity.

From Zürich, Mariam Issoufou emphasized the importance of solidarity networks and cross-pollination for building within African contexts, recounting how her practice’s knowledge of earthen brick construction in Niger was passed onto her team from Francis Kéré’s. Kéré himself, at Paris’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, refused to overtheorize—urging me not to circle questions, but to begin the work and leave the talking to others. Each conversation carried a different climate but the same impulse: to start where you are, and figure out what you have.

As a low-income student from a country like mine, studying abroad is never only personal—it is only made possible by scholarships, by trust, by the hopes of others. This kind of movement carries an unspoken weight—an inflated sense of responsibility towards what you left. I am still searching for the scale of what responsibility really means. I am still learning, still without means; I cannot build what I do not yet know how to sustain.