Word: mauritius
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Like last year's winner, Doris Lessing, Le Clézio has strong ties to Africa - he was born in Nice in 1940, but his family history on both sides leads back to Mauritius, an island about 500 miles east of Madagascar that has been best known in the West, at least until now, as the home of the famously extinct dodo. The son of a doctor, Le Clézio grew up in France and Nigeria speaking French and English. He began writing at the age of 8 - one of his childhood efforts, composed on a long voyage...
...never stopped writing - the Nobel citation lists 43 works in French - and rarely stopped traveling: in addition to France and Africa, he has spent years living in Mexico and Central America. Now 68, he and his wife, who is Moroccan, divide their time among Mauritius, Nice and Albuquerque, N.M. He is modern literature's consummate expatriate: the constant in his work is a sense of displacement and alienation, of humanity from the natural world, of adulthood from the idealized homeland of childhood and of Western civilization from its own emotional and spiritual vitality. "We no longer have the presumptuousness...
...past year, for example, was Liberia, which lost more than 250,000 people in two civil wars between 1989 and 2003, but this year rose six places on the governance ranking, to 38th. At the top of the table, meanwhile, were the perennial good performers of Africa: in order, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana and South Africa, whose economy is by far the largest in Africa and whose democracy is the biggest, although the country is afflicted by rampant violent crime...
...Company edict, with farmers ordered to grow poppies to feed colossal opium factories, in whose noxious environs even monkeys slump in "a miasma of lethargy." Their fields given over to drug cultivation, thousands of starving, impoverished villagers leave for new pastures as indentured labor in Mauritius, a place so remote that it is thought to be a "demon-plagued land...
...diamonds finance war in West and Central Africa, there have been no coups and little unrest in Botswana in 41 years of independence. And the country is one of just two in Africa to have graduated to middle-income status, according to the International Monetary Fund (the other is Mauritius...