Mauritius

Mauritius is a tiny island nation southwest of Africa. The island was practically uninhabited until the Dutch came in the XVII century, but the harsh conditions forced them to abandon the island. The French arrived some years after that and took control of it (they already controlled the rest of the neighborhood anyway) and kept it until the Napoleonic Wars, when the British took it.

The country achieved its independence on 1968, when it became part of The Commonwealth. It stayed this way until 1992, when it became a republic. Nowadays it’s a growing economy, considered one of the best on Africa, with an upper-high income. It has no permanent army and thanks to British and French legacy, it has both English and French as official languages. However, one troubling area is the gender equality, and violence against women seems to be an awfully frequent thing, even though the government has taken some steps to try to mitigate this.

The Dutch, even though they didn’t stay for long, left two indelible marks on the country. The first of them was the sugar cane, which continues to be the country’s main export. The second was the complete annihilation of one of its natural residents, a bird all people know very well from the media, even though nobody has seen one. I’m talking about the dodo. This bird was big, heavy, incapable of flying and didn’t appear to be too smart, so the Dutch named it dodo, referring to its simpleton attitude. Given its natural dopey-ness, they didn’t take too long to hunt it to complete extinction. That didn’t stop the bird from reaching memetic status, of course, and since then it has appeared everywhere, including Alice in Wonderland and the Looney Tunes, among others; it even appears in the coat of arms of the country. A huge achievement for a bird that seems dumber than a turkey.