A pioneer in Creole writing: Auguste Le Duc’s speeches to his emancipated former slaves
Résumé
This talk presents two unknown speeches from 1835 pronounced by Auguste Le Duc, the French administrator of the small island of Galéga or Agaléga to his former emancipated slaves. Agalega belonged to the colony of Mauritius but is near to the archipelago of the Seychelles.
The linguistic analysis of the speeches does not reveal any major surprises, but rather confirms the evolutionary trends observed in other Mauritian texts from the mid-19th century.