“Laba” is all Rita had to say. Meaning, “out there.” Chagossians in exile know immediately that out there means one thing: Chagos.
“Laba there are birds, there are turtles, and plenty of food,” she said. “There’s a leafy green vegetable . . . called cow’s tongue. It’s tasty to eat, really good. You can put it in a curry, you can make it into a pickled chutney.
“When I was still young, I was a little like a boy. In those times, we went looking” for ingredients for “curries on Saturday. So very early in the morning we went” to another island and came back with our food.
“By canoe?” I asked.
“By sailboat,” Rita replied.
Peros Banhos “has thirty-two islands,” she explained. “There’s English Island, Monpatre Island, Chicken Island, Grand Bay, Little Bay, Diamond, Peter Island, Passage Island, Long Island, Mango Tree Island, Big Mango Tree Island. . . . There’s Sea Cow Island,” and many more. “I’ve visited them all. . . .”1
“A great number of vessels might anchor there in safety,” were the words of the first naval survey of Diego Garcia’s lagoon. The appraisal came not from U.S. officials, but from the 1769 visit to the island by a French lieutenant named La Fontaine. Throughout the eighteenth century, England and France vied for control of the islands of the western Indian Ocean as strategic military bases to control shipping routes to India, where their respective East India companies were battling for supremacy over the spice trade.2
Having occupied Réunion Island (Île Bourbon) in 1642, the French replaced a failed Dutch settlement on Mauritius (renamed Île de France) in 1721. Later they settled Rodrigues and, by 1742, the Seychelles. As with its Caribbean colonies, France quickly shifted its focus from military to commercial interests.3 French settlers built societies on the islands around enslaved labor and, particularly in Mauritius, the cultivation of sugar cane. At first, the French Company of the Indies tried to import enslaved people from the same West African sources supplying the Caribbean colonies. Later the company developed a new slaving trade to import labor from Madagascar and the area of Africa known then as Mozambique (a larger stretch of the southeast African coast than the current nation). Indian Ocean historian Larry Bowman writes that French settlement in Mauritius produced “a sharply differentiated society with extremes of wealth and poverty and an elite deeply committed to and dependent upon slavery.”4
Chagos, including Peros Banhos and Diego Garcia, remained uninhabited throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, serving only as a safe haven and provisioning stop for ships growing familiar with what were sometimes hazardous waters—in 1786, a hydrographer was the victim of a shipwreck. But as Anglo-French competition increased in Europe and spilled over into a fight for naval and thus economic control of the Indian Ocean, Chagos’s central location made it an irresistible military and economic target.5
France first claimed Peros Banhos in 1744. A year later, the English surveyed Diego Garcia. Numerous French and English voyages followed to inspect other island groups in the archipelago, including Three Brothers, Egmont Atoll, and the Salomon Islands, before Lieutenant La Fontaine delivered his prophetic report.6
Like tens of millions of other Africans transported around the globe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rita’s ancestors and the ancestors of other Chagossians were brought against their will. Most were from Madagascar and Mozambique and were brought to Chagos in slavery to work on coconut plantations established by Franco-Mauritians.
The first permanent inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago were likely 22 enslaved Africans. Although we do not know their names, some of today’s Chagossians are likely their direct descendants. The 22 arrived around 1783, brought to the island by Pierre Marie Le Normand, an influential plantation owner born in Rennes but who left France for Mauritius at the age of 20.7 Only half a century after the settlement of Mauritius, Le Normand petitioned its colonial government for a concession to settle Diego Garcia. On February 17, 1783, he received a “favourable reply” and “immediately prepared his voyage.”8
Figure 1.1 The Chagos Archipelago, with Peros Banhos and Salomon Islands at top center, Diego Garcia at bottom right.
Three years later, apparently unaware of Le Normand’s arrival, the British East India Company sent a “secret committee” from Bombay to create a provisioning plantation on the atoll. Although they were surprised to find the French settlement, the British party didn’t back down. On May 4, 1786, they took “full and ample Possession” of Diego Garcia and Chagos “in the name of our Most Gracious Sovereign George the third of Great Britain, France and Ireland King Defender of the faith etc. And of the said Honourable Company for their use and behoof.”9
Unable to resist the newcomers, Le Normand left for Mauritius to report the British arrival. When France’s Vicompte de Souillac learned of the landing, he sent a letter of protest to Bombay and the warship Minerve to reclaim the archipelago. To prevent an international incident liable to provoke war, the British Council in Bombay sent departure instructions to its landing party. When the Minerve arrived on Diego, its French crew found the British settlement abandoned and its grain and vegetable seeds washed into the sand.10
While France won this battle, governing Chagos along with the Seychelles as dependencies of Mauritius, its rule proved short-lived. By the turn of the nineteenth century and the Napoleonic Wars, French power in the Indian Ocean had crumbled. The British seized control of the Seychelles in 1794 and Mauritius in 1810. In the 1814 Treaty of Paris, France formally ceded Mauritius, including Chagos and Mauritius’s other dependencies (as well as most of France’s other island possessions worldwide), to Great Britain. Succeeding the Portuguese, Dutch, and French empires before it, the British would rule the Indian Ocean as a “British lake”11 for a century and a half, until the emergence of a new global empire.
Ernestine Marie Joseph Jacques (Diego Garcia). Joseph and Pauline Pona (Peros Banhos). Michel Levillain (Mozambique). Prudence Levillain (Madagascar). Lindor Courtois (India). Theophile Le Leger (Mauritius). Anastasie Legère (Three Brothers).12 These are the slave names and birthplaces of some of the Chagossians’ first ancestors.13 While most arrived from Mauritius, some may have come via the Seychelles and on slaving ships from Madagascar and continental Africa as part of an illegal slave trade taking advantage of Chagos’s isolation from colonial authority.14
Not long after Le Normand established his settlement, hundreds more enslaved laborers began arriving to build a fishing settlement and four more coconut plantations established by Franco-Mauritians Dauquet, Lapotaire, Didier, and the brothers Cayeux. By 1808 there were 100 enslaved people working under Lapotaire alone. By 1813, a similar number were working in Peros Banhos, as settlement spread throughout an archipelago judged to have “a climate ideally suited to the cultivation of coconuts.”15 Less than eight degrees from the equator, Chagos’s environment is marked by “the absence of a distinct flowering season and the gigantic size of many native and cultivated trees.” The islands are also free from the cyclones (hurricanes) that frequently devastate Mauritius and neighboring islands. Meaning that coconut palms produce bountiful quantities of nuts year round for potential harvest. Hundreds more enslaved Africans were soon establishing new plantations at Three Brothers, Eagle and Salomon Islands and at Six Islands.16
Despite being under British colonial rule, Mauritius and its dependencies surprisingly retained their French laws, language, religion, and ways of life—including that of enslaving Africans. “Mauritius became formally British but remained very French,” explains one historian.17
Slavery thus remained the defining feature of life in Chagos from Le Normand’s initial settlement until the abolition of slavery in Mauritius and its dependencies in 1835. Enslaved labor built the archipelago’s infrastructure, produced its wealth (mostly in coconut oil), and formed the overwhelming majority of inhabitants. Colonial statistics from 1826 illustrate the nature of the islands as absolute slave plantation societies relying on a small number of Franco-Mauritians and free people of African or mixed ancestry to rule much larger populations of enslaved Africans.
The considerable gender imbalance in the islands is also important to note. Although it had generally equalized by the mid-twentieth century, the imbalance may help explain the power and authority Chagossian women came to exercise, as we will see in the story ahead.
Plantation owners at the time described their enslaved workforce as “happy and content” and their treatment as being of “the greatest gentleness.” The laborers surely disagreed, working “from sunrise to sunset for six days a week” under the supervision of overseers.18 However, outside these grueling workdays, each enslaved person was allowed to maintain a “petite plantation”—a small garden—to raise crops and animals and to save small sums of money from their sale. Significantly, these garden plots marked the beginnings of formal Chagossian land tenure.19
TABLE 1.1
Chagos Population, 1826.
Society in Chagos had little in common with the Maldivian islands and Sri Lanka several hundred miles away, sharing much more with societies thousands of miles away in the Americas from southern Brazil to the islands of the Caribbean and north to the Mason-Dixon line. What these disparate places (as well as Natal, Zanzibar, Fiji, Queensland, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Réunion, and others) shared was the plantation system.20
With the plantation system of agriculture well established in the sugar fields of Mauritius by the end of the eighteenth century, Franco-Mauritian entrepreneurs applied the same technology in Chagos. Like societies from Bahia to Barbados and Baltimore, Chagos had all the major features of the plantation world: a mostly enslaved labor force, an agriculture-based economy organized around large-scale capitalist plantations supplying specialized products to distant markets, political control emanating from a distant European nation, a population that was generally not self-sustaining and required frequent replenishment (usually by enslaved peoples and, later, indentured laborers), and elements of feudal labor control. Still, Chagos exhibited important particularities: Unlike most of the Americas, society was based on slavery and slavery alone. Similarly, there was no preexisting indigenous population to force into labor and to replace when they were killed off. And perhaps because of its late settlement, the plantations in Chagos never employed European indentured laborers, or engagés.21
Likewise, although Chagos was an agriculture-based economy organized around capitalist plantations supplying a specialized product—copra—to distant markets, the majority of the copra harvest was not produced for European markets but was instead for the Mauritian market. The islands were thus a dependent part of the Mauritian sugar cane economy, which was itself a dependent part of the French and, later, British economies. Put another way, Chagos was a colony of a colony, a dependency of a dependency: Chagos helped meet Mauritius’s oil needs to keep its mono-crop sugar industry satisfying Europe’s growing sweet tooth.
From the workers’ perspective, the plantations were in some ways “as much a factory as a farm,” employing the “factory-like organization of agricultural labor into large-scale, highly coordinated enterprises.”22 While some of the work was agricultural in nature, much of it required the repetitive manual processing of hundreds of coconuts a day by women, men, and children in what was essentially an outdoor factory area at the center of each plantation. Still, as in the Caribbean, most of the work was performed on a “task” basis, generally allowing laborers to control the pace and rhythm of their work. Plantation owners—who mostly lived far away in Mauritius—probably viewed the (relatively) less onerous task system as the best way to maintain discipline and prevent greatly feared slave revolts, given Chagos’s isolation and the tiny number of Europeans.23
Authority over work regimens was carefully—and at times brutally—controlled, helping to shape a rigid color-based plantation hierarchy that mirrored the one in the French Caribbean. This was also undoubtedly related to owners’ fears of revolt, which in Mauritius and the Seychelles made “domestic discipline,” armed militias, and police the backbone of society.24
Plantation owners came from the grand blanc—literally, “big white”—ruling class and ran the settlements essentially as patriarchal private estates. “Responsibility for the administration of the settlements, before and after emancipation, was vested in the proprietors,” explains former governor Scott. “For all practical purposes, however, it was normally delegated to the manager on the spot, the administrateur,” who was usually a relative or member of the petit blanc—“little white”—class, running the plantation from the master’s house, the grand case.25
Petit blanc or “mulatto” submanagers and other staff recruited to Chagos helped run the islands, and were rewarded with better salaries, housing, and other privileges rarely extended to laborers. The submanagers in turn delivered daily work orders and controlled the workers through a group of commandeurs—overseers—primarily of African descent who were given some privileges and, after emancipation, paid higher wages.
As on slave plantations elsewhere, owners and their subordinates generally ruled largely through fear.26 Despite the constraints on their lives, some laborers achieved a degree of upward mobility by becoming artisans and performing other specialized tasks. The vast majority of the population were general laborers of African descent at the bottom of the work and status hierarchy in a system that, as in the U.S. South, became engrained in the social order.
Slavery was finally abolished in Mauritius and its dependencies in 1835. After emancipation, a period of apprenticeship continued for about four years. The daily routine of plantation life during and after the apprenticeship period changed according to the dictates of each island’s administrator. On some islands, like Diego Garcia, life and conditions changed little. On others, daily work tasks were reduced in accordance with stipulations ordered by officials in Mauritius.27
Following emancipation, plantation owners in Mauritius began recruiting large numbers of Indians to the sugar cane fields as a way to keep labor costs down and replace formerly enslaved laborers leaving the plantations en masse; by century’s end, Indians constituted a majority in Mauritius. While plantation owners in Chagos also imported Indian indentured laborers, Indian immigration was relatively light and people of African descent remained in the majority.28 So, too, Chagos did not experience the large-scale departure of formerly enslaved Africans (in fact, at least some of those previously enslaved on sugar plantations in Mauritius appear to have emigrated to work on Diego Garcia).29
This demographic stability, in such contrast to Mauritius, needs explanation: Ultimately it seems to point to a change in the quality of labor relations and the development of a society rooted in the islands. Newly freed Africans and the Indian indentured laborers who joined them massively outnumbered the plantation management of mostly European descent in a setting of enormous isolation. For management, this demographic imbalance and the lack of a militia or police force like the ones in Mauritius and the Seychelles made the threat of an uncontrollable labor revolt frighteningly real. Indeed the islands had a history of periodic labor protest. In one case in 1856, four workers who had been “kidnapped from Cochin” revolted and killed an abusive manager of Six Islands.30 These facts combined with gradual improvements in salaries and workload (especially compared to the brutal work of cutting sugar cane) suggest that despite the continuation of the plantation system after emancipation, the general nature of labor relations probably improved noticeably in favor of the Chagossians. Even before the end of the apprentice period, a colonial investigator charged with supervising apprenticeship conditions found the work to be “of a much milder nature than that which is performed on the Sugar Plantations of Mauritius” and the workers to be “a more comfortable body of people” due “to so much of their own time being employed to their own advantage” (he also credited the archipelago’s absence of both outsiders and liquor).31 In general it appears that Chagossians gradually struck what for a plantation society was a relatively—and I stress the word relatively—good work bargain. Indeed more than a century later, in 1949, a visiting representative of the Mauritian Labour Office commented on the generally “patriarchal” relations between management and labor in Chagos, “dating back to what I imagine would be the slave days—by this I do not imply any oppression but rather a system of benevolent rule with privileges and no rights.”32
By the middle of the nineteenth century, a succession of laws increasingly protected workers from the continuation of any slavery-like conditions. Around 1860, wages were the equivalent of 10 shillings a month, a dollop of rum, and a “twist of tobacco if times were good.” Rations, which were treated as part of wages, totaled 11–14 pounds a week of what was usually rice. Two decades later, wages had increased to 16 shillings a month for male coconut laborers and 12 shillings a month for women. Some women working in domestic or supervisory jobs received more. Men working the coconut oil mills earned 18–20 shillings a month and had higher status than “rat-catchers, stablemen, gardeners, maize planters, toddy-makers and pig- and fowl-keepers.” A step higher in the labor hierarchy, blacksmiths, carpenters, assistant carpenters, coopers, and junior commandeurs made 20–32 shillings.33
Management often paid bonuses in the form of tobacco, rum, toddy, and, for some, coconut oil. Housing was free, and at East Point the manager “introduced the system of allowing labourers to build their own houses, if they so opted, the management providing all the materials.” The system apparently proved a success, creating “quite superior dwellings,” with wood frames and thatched coconut palm leaves, and “a sense of proprietorship” for the islanders.34 By 1880, the population had risen to around 760.
“As a general rule the men enjoy good health, and seem contented and happy, and work cheerfully,” reported a visiting police magistrate. Fish was “abundant on nearly all the Islands, and on most of them also pumpkins, bananas, and a fruit called the ‘papaye,’ grow pretty freely.”35 Ripe coconuts were freely available upon request. Anyone could use boats and nets for fishing. Many kept gardens and generally management encouraged chicken and pig raising.
Although the exploitation and export of the coconut—in the form of copra, oil, whole coconuts, and even husks and residual poonac solids from the pressing of oil—dominated life in Chagos, the islands also produced and traded in honey, guano, timber, wooden ships, pigs, salt fish, maize and some vegetable crops, wooden toys, model boats, and brooms and brushes made from coconut palms. Guano—bird feces used as fertilizer—in particular became an increasingly important export for the Mauritian sugar fields in the twentieth century, reaching one-third of Diego’s exports by 1957.36
For about six years in the 1880s, two companies attempted to turn Diego Garcia into a major coal refueling port for steamer lines crossing the Indian Ocean. About the same time, the British Navy became interested in obtaining a site on the island.37 The Admiralty never followed through, and the companies soon closed as financial failures, having faced the “promiscuous plundering of coconuts” by visiting steamship passengers and revolt from a group of imported English, Greek, Italian, Somali, Chinese, and Mauritian laborers—which required the temporary establishment of a Mauritian police post.38
By the turn of the twentieth century, a distinct society was well established in Chagos. The population neared 1,000 and there were six villages on Diego Garcia alone, served by a hospital on each arm of the atoll. While conditions varied to some extent from island to island and from administrator to administrator within each island group, growing similarities became the rule. Chagos Kreol, a language related to the Kreols in Mauritius and the Seychelles, emerged among the islanders.39 People born in Chagos became collectively known by the Kreol name Ilois.*40 Most considered themselves Roman Catholic—a chapel was built at East Point in 1895, followed by a church and chapels on other islands—although religious and spiritual practices and beliefs of African, Malagasy, and Indian origins remain present to this day. A distinct “culture des îles”—culture of the islands—had developed, fostered by the islands’ isolation. “It is a system peculiar to the Lesser Dependencies,” Scott would later write, “and it may be fairly described as indigenous and spontaneous in its emergence.”41
Figure 1.2 View of East Point village, Diego Garcia, from the lagoon, 1968. Photo courtesy of Kirby Crawford.
Most mornings, Rita rose for work at 4 a.m. “At four o’clock in the morning, I got up. I made tea for the children, cleaned the house everywhere. At seven o’clock I went for the call to work.”
Each morning, she said, the manager gave work orders to the commandeurs, who delivered them to other Chagossians. There were many jobs: cleaning the camp, cutting straw for the houses, harvesting the coconuts, drying the coconuts, work for the manager and his assistant, work at the hospital, child care. Most men worked picking coconuts, 500 or more a day, removing the fibrous husk with the help of a long, spearlike pike dekoke knife, planted in the ground. This left the small hard nut within the coconut, which others transported to the factory center. There, like most other women, Rita shelled the interior nut, digging the flesh out with a specialized coconut-shelling knife, the kuto dekoke.
“I put it on the ground. I hit it. It splits. I have my knife. I scoop it in quickly, and I dump it over there: the shell on one side, the coconut flesh on the other,” Rita explained.
Often she would complete the day’s task of shelling 1,200 coconuts by 10:00 or 10:30 in the morning—meaning a rate of about one nut every 10 seconds. The women sat in groups, children often at their sides, amid hills of coconuts, cracked emptied shells, and bright white coconut flesh. Their hands were a concentrated swirl of movement—picking the nut, hitting it once, scoop, scoop with the knife between the flesh and the shell, flesh flying in one direction, empty shell in another. And again, pick, hit, scoop, scoop, flesh, flesh, shell. And again, pick, hit, scoop, scoop, flesh, flesh, shell. And again.
“Then there are other people who take the flesh,” Rita said, “to dry it” in the sun. “When it’s dry, they gather it up and put it in the kalorifer,” a heated shed fueled by burning coconut husks. There the flesh was fully dried, producing copra to make oil. Some of the copra was crushed on the spot in a donkey-powered oil mill. Most, Rita explained, went “to Mauritius—was sent all over.”42
On a seemingly ordinary Monday morning in August 1931, when Rita Bancoult was ten, Peros Banhos commandeur Oscar Hilaire gave his usual work orders to fifteen Chagossian men to go to Petit Baie island for a week to gather and husk 3,000 coconuts each. The fifteen refused the order.43 Two days later they finally left for Petit Baie, but returned the same day, refusing to work any further. For the remainder of the week, the men went on strike and didn’t report to work.
The following Saturday, nine islanders confronted the assistant manager, Monsieur Dagorne, about the size of a task of weeding he was giving some women. Two days later, a group again confronted Dagorne and demanded that he reduce the women’s tasks. This time he complied.
A few hours later, according to a police magistrate’s eventual report, one woman assaulted another “for having advised her fellow workers . . . to obey the orders of the staff and to refuse to obey those who wished to create a disorder on the estate.” When the victim went to complain to the head manager, Jean Baptiste Adam, a crowd followed, yelling “threatening language” at Adam.44
The crowd then turned and hurried into the kalorifer. There they ripped from the wall a rod, the length of a French fathom, used to measure lengths of rope made by elderly, infirm women working from their homes and paid by the length. They rushed back to Monsieur Adam with the rod and protested that it was a “false measure.”45 Moments later they returned to the kalorifer and placed a new measure on the wall—this one about 8 French inches shorter.
The next morning, the same group showed up at the center of the plantation and told the women to stop shelling coconuts. The group threatened to stop all work if Monsieur Adam did not add an extra laborer to the workforce at the kalorifer. The manager agreed to the change. Later they forced him to reduce the women’s weeding and cleaning tasks, and still, all but two of the women walked off the job. The men told the manager they would refuse to unload and load the next cargo ship to arrive at Peros unless he and Dagorne were on the ship when it returned to Mauritius.
The insurgency continued into September. “Adam had lost all authority over these men,” the police magistrate later reported. After a Chagossian drowned to death while sailing from Corner Island to another islet to collect coconuts, his partner and a crowd of supporters entered the manager’s office, barred the exits, and forced him to sign a document granting her a widow’s pension. They also forced him to give her free coffee, candles, sugar, and other goods from the company store to observe the islanders’ traditional mourning rites.46
Over the next two weeks, leaders of the insurgency twice made Dagorne buy them extra wine from the company store. One leader, Etienne Labiche, again protested the task assigned to some women. “You are going on again because I am remaining quiet,” Labiche challenged the managers in Chagos Kreol, according to the police magistrate. “We shall see when the boat arrives. Sa boule-la pour devirer.” Things will be overturned. Within minutes of issuing the challenge, the islanders had left work for the day. Days later Labiche and some supporters forced Dagorne to reveal that he was living with a mistress. Adam suspended Dagorne on the spot for “scandalous conduct.”47
Labor unrest continued into a second month, with Labiche, Willy Christophe, and others forcing the manager to lower the price of soap at the company store when they suspected price gouging and Adam was unable to show them a price invoice. During the protest a few approached the store’s back door. The island’s pharmacist pulled out a revolver and “threatened to blow out the brains of the first man who tried to enter the shop.”48
When two weeks later the cargo ship Diego finally came within sight on its voyage from Mauritius, the blast of a conch shell reverberated through the air as a signal among the islanders. Manager Adam went aboard the ship and returned to shore minutes later with his brother, the captain of the Diego. “The whole of the population met them at the landing stage,” the magistrate’s report recounts, “uttering loud shouts, and demanding to see the invoice” listing the prices for articles sold at the shop. The crowd accompanied Adam and his brother to the manager’s house “shouting and threatening, climbed up the balcony stairs, and even into his dining room.” There Adam unsealed the invoice. Someone in the crowd looked over Adam’s shoulder and read the prices aloud. “Having noticed a mention in the official letter about a case of tobacco (plug) and the rise in the price . . . the crowd demanded the return of the case to Mauritius.”49
At the next morning’s call for work, none of the men appeared. When the captain of the Diego asked them why they were not coming to work, they told him they would only work if his brother and Dagorne were sent back to Mauritius. A standoff ensued. The ship eventually left with its cargo aboard, but with Manager Adam and Dagorne still in Peros.
Three months and two days after the beginning of the insurgency, Mauritian magistrate W. J. Hanning arrived in the atoll along with an armed guard of ten police constables, two police inspectors, and two noncommissioned officers. Hanning and Police Inspector Fitzgibbon charged, convicted, and sentenced 36 Chagossian men and women for offenses including “larceny soap,” “larceny rope measure,” “extortion of document,” “coalition to prevent unloading cargo,” and “coalition to prevent work.” Two were convicted of “wounds & blows.” Punishment for the charges of larceny and extortion ranged from three to twelve months’ hard labor. Labiche received a total of 30 months’ hard labor; others got up to 36 months. Hanning sent three commandeurs back to Mauritius and mandated the reading of the names of the convicted and their punishments throughout the rest of Chagos and the other Mauritian dependencies.50
“I have the honour to state that quiet has been restored at Peros,” Magistrate Hanning wrote. Although he thought the insurgents’ grievances “imaginary” and found the islanders “economically many times better off than the Mauritian labourer,” he concluded his report by calling on the plantation owners to “exercise some leniency” over markups on prices for “articles of necessity” sold at the company store.51
In 1935, new owners in Chagos established the first regular steamship connection between Mauritius and Chagos after completing the consolidation of ownership over the various plantations, which had begun in the 1880s. Previously the islands sent copra, oil, and other goods to Mauritius and received supplies on twice-a-year boats. The new four-times-a-year steamship system decreased travel times significantly and provided a regular connection between Diego Garcia and the northern islands of Peros Banhos and Salomon, over 100 nautical miles away. Peros to Salomon transportation was by sailing ship and later motorboat. Transportation within each group and around Diego Garcia’s lagoon was generally by small, locally built sailboats, and later by motorboats. News from the outside world came primarily from illustrated magazines and other reading materials supplied by the transport vessels visiting Chagos.
Figure 1.3 Schoolchildren in Chagos, 1964. Photographer unknown.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chagos had been so isolated that at the start of World War I, management on Diego Garcia supplied the German battleship Emden with provisions before learning that Britain and its colonies were already at war with Germany. By contrast, thirty years later during World War II, Diego Garcia became a small landing strip for Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft and a base for a small contingent of Indian Army troops. At war’s end, the troops went home, leaving behind a wrecked Catalina seaplane that became a favorite playground for children.
By the mid-twentieth century, Chagos had moved from relative isolation to increasing connections with Mauritius, other islands in the Indian Ocean, and the rest of the world. Copra and coconut oil exports were sold in Mauritius and the Seychelles, and through them in Europe, South Africa, India, and Israel. Wireless communications at local meteorological stations connected the main islands with Mauritius and the Seychelles. Shortwave radios allowed reception of broadcasts from at least as far as the Seychelles and Sri Lanka.52
The Mauritian colonial government started showing increasing interest in the welfare of Chagos’s inhabitants and its economy. Specialists sent by the government investigated health and agricultural conditions. With the help of their reports, the government established nurseries in each island group, schools, and a regular garbage and refuse removal system reported to be better than that in rural Mauritius.53 Water came from wells and from rain catchment tanks. Small dirt roads traversed the main islands, and there were a handful of motorbikes, trucks, jeeps, and tractors.
By the 1960s, everyone in Chagos was guaranteed work on the plantations and pensions upon retirement.54 The vast majority of Chagossians still worked as coconut laborers. A few male laborers rose to become foremen and commandeurs, and a few women were also commandeurs. Other men became artisans working as blacksmiths, bakers, carpenters, masons, mechanics, and in other specialized positions.
Wages remained low and paternalistic: Men harvesting coconuts earned about £2 a month, while women shelling the nuts earned less than half that. Artisans, foremen, and commandeurs earned six times what female laborers earned, and those in privileged “staff” positions earned considerably more. No matter the position or the gender, workers’ monthly rations included about £3 worth of rice or flour, coconut oil, salt, lentils, fish, wine, and occasionally vegetables and pork.55 Work benefits also included construction materials, free firewood, regular vacations—promne—with free passage to Mauritius, burial services, and free health care and medicines. Workers continued to occupy and receive land near their homes. Many used the land for gardens, raising crops like tomatoes, squash, chili peppers, eggplant, citrus and other fruits, and for keeping cows, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, and ducks.
After the day’s work task was completed, generally around midday, Chagossians could work overtime, tend to their gardens and animals, fish, or hunt for other seafood, including red snapper, tuna, and other fish, crab, prawns, crayfish, lobster, octopus, sea cucumber, and turtles.
“Whatever time it was, you went to your house and your day marched on,” Rita recounted. “A commandeur passed by, asked you if you were going to do overtime. So then you went to work for another day’s work. . . . If you didn’t go do it, no one made you.
“But,” she continued, “our money, at the end of the month we got it, we just put it in our account. And what we earned from overtime, that we used for buying our weekly supplies, understand?”
On payday people went to the store and “the women would go to buy a little clothing. . . . That was the only thing we had to buy: our clothing, cloth to make clothing, sugar, milk.
“Apart from that, there was nothing we had to buy. Apart from cigarettes, which if you smoked, you needed to buy. There was beer at the shop to buy. There was rum to buy, but we made our own drink,” Rita added, referring to Chagossians’ own fermented drinks of dhal-based baka and palm toddy kalu.
“Then, you know Saturday laba,” Rita explained, “Saturday what we did, with our coconut leaf brooms, we swept the court of the manager’s house, everywhere around the chapel, the hospital, everywhere. When we finished that, then we’d go to the house. Around nine o’clock, we finished and left. Then we had Saturday, Sunday to ourselves. Monday, then we went back to hard work.”
But on Saturday “the house, all the family, everyone was there. We had some fun. . . . We had an accordion, later we had a gramophone. . . . On Saturday, Saturday night, we had our sega.”
Although the long-standing popular institution featuring singing, playing, and dancing to sega music is found on islands throughout the southwest Indian Ocean, Chagos and most other islands had their own distinctive sega traditions. In Chagos, segas were an occasion for entire island communities to gather. On Saturday nights everyone met around a bonfire in a clearing. Under the moon and stars, drummers on the goat hide–covered ravanne would start tapping out a slow, rhythmic beat. Others would begin singing, dancing, and joining in on accordions, triangles, and other percussion and string instruments.
The sega allowed islanders to sing old traditional songs or their own originals, which were often improvised. Most segas followed a call-and-response pattern, with soloists singing verses, supported by dancers, musicians, and onlookers who joined in a chorus, providing frequent shouts, whistles, and outbursts of encouragement. In Chagos, segas were filled with themes of love, jealousy, separation, and loss. Much as in the blues and other musical traditions, the sega was an important mode of expression and a way to share hardships and gain support from the community.
“The segas,” Rita recounted, “at night, people opened their doors, everyone came out, beat the drum, sang, danced. And we carried on until early in the morning. Early in the morning, six o’clock. . . . six o’clock, until seven o’clock too, and then even the old ones went home.”
I asked Rita if she danced to the sega. She said, “Yes.”
I asked if she sang sega. She said, “Yes.”
“What did you sing?” I asked.
“Everything. Those that I knew, I sang. I know how to sing sega very well. . . . I’m full of segas that I know,” said Rita. And then she started to sing . . .
My father, you’re yelling “Attention passengers! Embark passengers!”
This madame, her husband’s going but she’s staying.
Crying, madame, enough crying madame.
On the beach, you’re crying so much,
The tears from your eyes are drowning the passengers list.
Crying, madame, even if you cry on the beach, even if you cry Capitan L’Anglois isn’t going to turn the boat around to come get you.
O li la e, O la e, O li la la.
O li le le, O li le la la.
L’Anglois answer me, L’Anglois, my friend
Answer me, L’Anglois, this sega that you left down in Chagos.
“The people of Île du Coin were exceptionally proud of their homes,” Governor Scott wrote of Rita’s Peros Banhos after World War II. “The gardens usually contained an arrangement of flower-beds and a vegetable patch, almost always planted with pumpkins and loofahs trained over rough trellis-work, with a few tomato plants and some greens.”56
By that time Salomon had a large timber industry for export and was known as the home of Chagos’s boat building industry, widely renowned in the southwest Indian Ocean. Three Brothers, Eagle Island, and Six Islands had been settled for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the plantation company moved their inhabitants to Peros and Diego to consolidate production. Eagle’s population rose to as many as 100 and was “regarded by its inhabitants,” according to Scott, “as a real home,” with a “carefully tended” children’s cemetery and evocatively named places like Love Apple Crossing, Ceylon Square, and Frigates’ Pool.57
Looking on “from the seaward end of the pier,” Scott compared Diego Garcia’s capital East Point to a French coastal village: “The architecture, the touches of old-fashioned ostentation in the château and its relation to the church; the disposition of trees and flowering shrubs across the ample green; the neighbourly way in which white-washed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages, cluster round the green; the lamp standards along the roads and the parked motor-lorries: all contribute towards giving the village this quality.”
Clearly charmed by the islands, Scott continued, “The association of East Point with a synthesis of small French villages, visited or seen on canvas, was strengthened by the warm welcome of the islanders, since their clothes and merry bearing, and particularly the small, fluttering flags of the school-children, were wholly appropriate to a fête in a village so devised.”58
“Funny little places! Indeed they are. But how lovely!” wrote Scott’s predecessor as governor, Sir Hilary Blood. “Coconut palms against the bluest of skies, their foliage blown by the wind into a perfect circle; rainbow spray to the windward where the South-East Trades pile in the Indian Ocean up on the reefs; in the sheltered bays to the leeward the sun strikes through shallow water to the coral, and emerald-green, purple, orange, all the rich colours of the world, follow each other across the warm sea,” glowed Sir Hilary. “Its beauty is infinite.”59
In 1962, ownership of the islands changed hands, purchased by a Mauritian-Seychellois conglomerate calling itself Chagos-Agalega Ltd. Around the same time, Chagossians saw the introduction of a more flexible labor supply revolving around single male laborers from the Seychelles, as well as the “drift” of permanent inhabitants from Chagos to Mauritius, drawn by the allure of Mauritius’s “pavements and shop-windows, the cinemas and football matches, the diversity of food and occupation.” Scott compared the movement to the migration of people in Great Britain from villages to cities after World War I, but emphasized, “it is still only a drift.”60
On the eve of the expulsion that no one in Chagos could have anticipated, Mauritian historian Auguste Toussaint wrote, “The insularity of this archipelago is total and, in this regard, Chagos differs from the Mascarenes and the Seychelles, which are linked with the rest of the world. The conditions of life there are quite specialized and even, believe me, unique.”61
“The life that I had, compared to what I am experiencing now, David. All the time, I will think about my home because there I was well nourished and I didn’t eat anything preserved or stored. We ate everything fresh,” Rita told me.
“Doctors know that when we left the islands—they know—your health here isn’t the same. Here, we eat frozen food all the time. . . . But laba, no. Even if something is only three or four days old, it isn’t the same as fresh, David. . . .There we ate everything fresh.”
“There, I tell you, you didn’t have strokes, you didn’t have diabetes. Only rarely did an old person die. A baby, maybe once a year, an infant might die at birth, that’s it. Here, every day you hear about—I’m tired of hearing about death.”
“Yes,” I said softly.
“It’s not the same, David. . . .” Rita continued, “I—how can I say this—I didn’t leave there because the island closed. . . . I didn’t realize” that the islands were being closed down. “And then I had a little girl named Noellie.”
Writing in 1961, Governor Scott concluded his book with a sympathetic (if paternalistic and colonialist) description of the Chagossians. In it, one hears a chilling warning from one who as governor of Mauritius may well have known about developing plans aimed at realizing Lieutenant La Fontaine’s original vision for harboring a “great number” of vessels in Diego Garcia’s lagoon:
It must also be recognized, however, that ignorance of the way of life of the islanders might open the way to attempts to jerk them too rapidly into more highly organized forms of society, before they are ready. They have never been hurried. Their environment has probably inoculated them with an intolerance towards hurry. . . . This is far from being a plea to make the Lesser Dependencies a kind of nature reserve for the preservation of the anachronistic. It is, however, very definitely a plea for full understanding of the islanders’ unique condition, in order to ensure that all that is wholesome and expansive in the island societies is preserved.62
* Many today prefer the term Chagossian. In exile, the older name has often been used as a slur against the islanders.
