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As a schoolgirl I was told that abortion was illegal in Mauritius No exceptions There was no reason for me to believe otherwise At church I heard men pontificate about God’s will, the sacred foetus, the mother’s responsibility, the sin of murder At school I heard women speak on the virtues of abstinence, of adoption as a gift No-one spoke of abortion at home: my mother perhaps didn’t believe she had any reason to do so When I was six she bought me an illustrated book explaining where babies came from; when I was nine she taught me about contraception; when I was a teenager she prevented me from going out, confiscated my phone, checked my messages    I knew nothing of the protests, the legal challenges to our colonial law, all the work that was being done by Muvman Liberasyon Fam (MLF), the first women’s rights organisation that publicly stood in favour of abortion1 I’d only vaguely heard of Lindsey Collen; whenever her name came up the phrase ‘radical madwoman’ usually followed   It was the early 2000s and all I wanted was perfect grades, a scholarship, an exit from the island Abroad, I hoped for kindness: the girls I knew who’d left for Europe spoke of freedom They said no-one cared about what they did, there was no surveillance; there were problems, yes, but most of the time people – at university, in the workplace – took them seriously, treated them with respect   Kindness, care, respect We had none of that at the Catholic school I attended I called our despotic headmistress Folcoche, after Hervé Bazin’s Vipère au Poing [Viper in the Fist] (1948); Paule Rezeau, named Folcoche (folle-cochonne, or ‘mad pig’ in English) by her sons, is one of literature’s cruellest mothers Our Folcoche was so terrible that a group of older students planned to write a letter to the local newspapers, denouncing her sadism and the malice of some of the other teachers: the way they’d taunt, scream; the way they patrolled the gates in the early morning, ready to castigate teenage girls for talking to the boys at