Paradise Found: Twenty degrees south of the Equator, Mauritius lies at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Celebrated as the pearl of the Indian Ocean, it is truly a land of splendour and human warmth.
—Anahita World Class Sanctuary Mauritius1
If heaven is that painless place where pleasures never pall then Mauritian hideaways provide a close approximation.
—Condé Nast Traveler2
When you arrive in Cassis, you find a maze of rusting corrugated iron fences lining small passageways, dirt paths, and a few paved roads, surrounded by houses and shacks cobbled together in metal, concrete block, and wood. Four major cemeteries dominate the landscape of the slum neighborhood closest to the center of Port Louis. Trash often sits smoldering in empty garbage-strewn lots. Bent, rusted, and torn sheets of metal lie in piles that to an outsider seem like just more detritus but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be emergency supplies for future home repairs. From the balconies of the few two or three story homes (in a neighborhood where the only upward mobility is usually literal), you see a tightly packed clutter of corrugated rooftops, many weighted down against Indian Ocean winds by bedsprings, broken-down bicycle parts, bricks. The rare palm tree juts up from below. An open drainage sewer runs through the middle of the neighborhood, past one of the cemeteries and toward the ocean.
Although Mauritius is known internationally for its beautiful beaches, and although most of Cassis is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, there is little water and beach access in the neighborhood: Between a power station on one side and a sand plant on the other, a small stretch of beach remains. A landing area for fisherfolk lies nearby, small wooden boats dotting the water at anchor just off the shore. Up from the water are about ten yards of beach, across which are scattered pieces of coral, broken shells, and decaying fly-ridden seaweed, along with a collection of shattered bottles, rusted-out cans, abandoned tires, lone shoes, shards of wood, plastic bags, car parts, and shards of splintering white styrofoam. At the end of the beach is a mountain of sand out of which emanate a sulfurous stench and nine large black industrial pipes stretching out over the ocean. A large red and white government sign stands nearby, the bottom half of its message all that hasn’t been stripped away: “BAIGNADE NON RECOMMANDEE.” SWIMMING NOT RECOMMENDED.
Cassis is the neighborhood where Rita and Julien Bancoult found themselves and their family following Noellie’s death. After briefly sharing a home with Rita’s mother and a group totaling seventeen, Rita and Julien found a little shack for the family. When the owner demanded Rs1,500 for the property—a price they couldn’t come close to paying—they found themselves evicted.
For fifteen days they lived in another shack next to Cassis’s St. George’s cemetery. Then the owner told them that his son was getting married and needed the home. Out on the streets again, the family found a small plot of land, across the street from the cemetery, along with some sheets of metal and some wood. Paying the land’s owner a yearly rent, they built a small three-room shack. “Inside there, I—we lived.” That’s where “we went through all our mizer,” Rita said, using the Mauritian and Chagos Kreol word for not just poverty, but abject, miserable poverty.
Julien eventually found some on-again, off-again work as a casual laborer loading and unloading trucks late into the night around Port Louis. When the trucks needed laborers, Julien brought home some cash. When the trucks had plenty of men, Rita explained, he came home empty-handed. She went to work doing washing and ironing in a wealthy woman’s house. But she had to be careful. “If a person went and said that I’m Ilois, the next day I go” to work “the madame pays me and tells me, ‘Go! Don’t come back to work.’ Like we’re inferior, you understand?”
Sometimes though, the woman she worked for was nice and would give her some curry and some bread. “I didn’t eat it,” she said. “I put it in my bag. I brought it home for my children. How will I eat it, David, when my children have nothing to eat? I didn’t eat. I put it in my bag.”
In those days, feeding the children was a daily struggle. “Then, David, I tell you, I had a difficult life, I did. At times the children didn’t eat, didn’t eat. I was worried. I didn’t know what I would do.”
At times, Rita waited for people to throw bags of stale bread in the trash. “I’m not afraid to say it. I only looked out to see if people were watching me. I just took the bag,” got the bread, and went back home. With some wood for kindling, she would light a fire, warm the bread on top of a small shard of metal, and make a tea-like infusion with wild leaves and some sugar. “My children ate that and the bread,” she said.
Other days she would make a thin watery broth with bred murum—another wild edible leaf known as the “food of the poor.”
“I took the bred murum. I picked the leaves. I didn’t have oil. I only had salt with a little bit of ginger. I grated the ginger. I put it in the boiling water. I put the leaves in. I added salt. The children wetted the bread that I had warmed, and they ate it.
“But on my island, I was never like that, David. How will I forget? My children went two days without eating.”
Rita’s story is typical of islanders who were barred from returning to Chagos beginning in 1968. They found themselves homeless and jobless in a foreign land, separated from their islands, their communities (both those living and those buried on the islands), and their entire way of life.
After the deportations began in 1971, Chagossians were literally left on the docks of Port Louis. “The Ilois walked bewildered off their ships and tramped through the slums of the capital,” investigative journalist John Madeley recounts, “to try to find a relative or friend who would offer accommodation.”3
Another reporter saw how many had “to go begging to survive, and live in shacks which are little more than chicken coops.”4 More than half lived in single-room houses with as many as nine people in a room. In one case in Cassis, seven Chagossian families moved into a single courtyard that already housed ten other families. They shared one water tap, one toilet, and one shower among them.5
Already scattered over 1,200 miles between Mauritius and the Seychelles, Chagossians dispersed further around Port Louis and the main island in the Seychelles, Mahé. Although many in Mauritius settled around other Chagossians, most of the social networks and village ties that had previously connected people were severely ruptured. Chagossians deported to the Seychelles were even more isolated, crowding into the homes of relatives or squatting on the land of others. Some families lived “anba lakaz,” or underneath another family’s stilt-elevated house. One family lived in a vacant cowshed, slowly transforming it into a formal house over many years.
Figure 8.1 Rita David in her home with box used to take personal belongings from Peros Banhos during deportation to Mauritius, 1972. Photo by author.
In Mauritius, Chagossians found themselves on an overcrowded island that population experts were warning might soon become a “catastrophe” given one of the fastest growing populations in the world.6 Novelist V.S. Naipaul called the island the “overcrowded barracoon.”7 Conditions in Port Louis were particularly bad, according to British experts:
The housing conditions in parts of Port Louis are worse than anything we saw in the villages [in rural Mauritius]. Hundreds of people are crowded into tin shacks hardly fit for animals. Not surprisingly, Tuberculosis and other diseases are very common in these slums, and a large proportion of the families depend on the help, regular and irregular, of the Public Assistance Department. Urban rents are relatively high and there is a serious shortage of housing in the towns; a situation made worse by the cyclone damage in 1960.8
Although by most accounts health in Chagos was “if anything somewhat better than in Mauritius,”9 soon after their arrival, many Chagossians began to fall ill and die. A survey conducted by a support group documented “an impressive number of cases where Ilois have found death after having landed in Mauritius, i.e. from one to 12 months’ stay.” The dead totalled at least 44 by 1975 “because of unhappiness, poverty and lack of medical care.”10 Among them were:
Bertin Cassambeu: Dead through illness, distress.
Eliezer Louis: Had gone to Rogers [shipping company] so as to return to Diego. When he failed, had much grief and died.
Ito Mandarin: Died after landing of grief and poverty.
Victorrien, Michel, Vivil, and Sabine Rabrune: Had no property. Were abandoned by everybody. Died in disgrace.
Willy Thomas: Died in poverty and of grief.
Daisy Volfrin: No food for three days, obtained Rs3 and no more as Public assistance. Died through poverty.11
At least eleven others were reported to have died by suicide. “According to an enquiry made with their parents and friends,” the support group found, “the reasons behind these suicides are disgust of the life they have been living in Mauritius and of poverty: no roof, no job and uncared. They were demoralized, and instead of living a depraved life, they found in death a remedy.”
Among the suicides were Joseph France Veerapen Kistnasamy, born on Six Islands, who “burnt himself” two days before Christmas, 1972; Syde Laurique, who had “no job, no roof, drowned herself”; Elaine and Michele Mouza, who as “mother and child committed suicide”; and Leone Rangasamy, born in Peros Banhos, who “drowned herself because she was prevented from going back.”12
Other deaths seem to have been the result of Chagossians’ vulnerability to illnesses that were rare or unknown in Chagos.13 By 1975, 28 children had died of influenza: “Adults and children died of the diphtheria against which Mauritians are automatically vaccinated,” the Manchester Guardian wrote. “And the cultural shock of arriving in the teeming, humid, poorer quarters of Port Louis still takes its toll.”14
At least fifteen more, in addition to Rita, were admitted for psychiatric treatment. They included one islander who “on the death of his child due to lack of food . . . burnt his wife and wanted to commit suicide.” Another “was mentally affected” after having to admit his children to a convent when he was unable to support them. Another “lost his head” on the ship and “was admitted as soon as he landed.”15
Amid their other problems, Chagossians faced a society beset by systemic unemployment and inter-ethnic tensions following gang violence and riots between Indo-Mauritian Muslims and Afro-Mauritians.16 British officials had long acknowledged and anticipated the difficulty of finding employment, especially given the absence of a “copra industry into which they could be absorbed.”17 Following independence in 1968, Mauritius experienced sporadic outbreaks of communal violence. By the time of the last deportations from Diego Garcia in 1971, British officials were predicting a worsening of conditions, with unemployment leading to “outbreaks of disorder, perhaps comparable to those which in September 1970 led to appeals for British military assistance.”18
With such high rates of unemployment, almost half of the islanders depended after their arrival, in whole or in part, on non-work income, including public welfare, the help of family and friends, charity, loans from moneylenders, and other sources.19 By 1975, only around one-quarter of family heads in Mauritius had full-time work. Most of those who were employed at all were working in the lowest-paid jobs as dockers and stevedores, domestic workers, fisherfolk, and truck loaders.20
According to Madeley, by mid-1975, “at least 1 in 40 [Chagossians in Mauritius] had died of starvation and disease.”21 The support group’s report describes how “The causes mostly are: unhappiness, non-adaptation of Ilois within the social framework of Mauritius, extreme poverty, particularly lack of food, house, job. Another cause of this mortality was family dispersion.” The report concludes that “The main cause of the sufferings of the Ilois was the lack of proper plan to welcome them in Mauritius. There was also no rehabilitation programme for them.”22
This conclusion is in fact exactly what forced displacement experts would predict for a population displaced against its will and finding no resettlement program upon arrival. Research aggregating findings from hundreds of forcibly displaced groups around the globe—pushed off their lands by dam construction, warfare, environmental disasters, and other causes—has come to an unambiguous conclusion: Absent proper resettlement programs and other preventative measures, involuntary displacement generally causes “the impoverishment of considerable numbers of people.”23
It was 1973 and the middle of the night when Julien nudged Rita as they slept. “He nudged me. He told me the baby woke up,” Rita remembered. Four years earlier, on July 4, 1969, she had given birth to a son Ivo, their only child born in Mauritius.
After rousing herself from an exhausted sleep and checking on Ivo, she returned and told Julien that he had a bottle and was fine. But “he didn’t respond. I didn’t realize that he was sick. I said to him, ‘I’m speaking and you, you aren’t responding.’”
When Julien still didn’t answer, Rita yelled for her uncle, who, with his wife, was living in the other room. When he came and looked at Julien, he knew right away that he was sick. “His arm, his hand, his foot, it was all dead,” paralyzed. They rushed him to the hospital. “He stayed a month, a month and fifteen days in the hospital. . . . It went on, and on, and on, until he died. He had sagren, David. Sagren is what he had.
“You know, he saw his children, every day they went without food. He didn’t have a job that he could work to be able to give them food. That’s what made him sick. He wasn’t used to life like that, you understand? Oh la la.”
Pointing to the gendered impact of forced displacement, Rita added, “What happened to me—how can I say it—I wasn’t able to bear it. But my husband, he was able to bear it even less than I was, because a man—the load is supposed to be on him. He had six children to feed. How was he going to do it? He suffered a stroke.”
The Mauritian economy that the Bancoults and other Chagossians encountered during the late 1960s and early 1970s was undergoing massive transformations. Since the island’s permanent settlement in the eighteenth century, the economy and life of Mauritius had been dominated by sugar. By the twentieth century, Mauritius was the epitome of a colonial monocrop economy, dependent on the fluctuations of the sugar market and powerbrokers in England. When Chagossians began arriving, Mauritius’s population growth, which ranked among the highest in the world, meant that increasing numbers of working-age Mauritians were entering a labor market dominated by a sugar cane sector unable to absorb additional workers.24
In 1970, following examples in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, and Jamaica, the Mauritian Government began attempts to diversify its economy with the establishment of an export processing zone (EPZ) designed to lure foreign investment and create jobs in the production of cheap exports. Spurred by tax breaks, investment from Hong Kong and elsewhere, and loopholes in U.S. and European garment quotas, EPZ factories and employment boomed over the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s, in what some have described as one of the world’s few examples of an EPZ success strategy; we shall see how limited this success was for some in Mauritius, contrary to this popular narrative.
Beginning in the 1970s, Mauritius further diversified its economy with a major expansion of its tourist industry. While sugar cane remained a dominant part of the economy, the two new sectors grew, largely on the basis of Mauritius’s supply of cheap, relatively well-educated female labor. (In recent years, the government has attempted to diversify the economy again, encouraging “offshore” foreign financial investment, higher-end export development, and information-based technology industries, following the Indian model.)25
Over the same period, the economy of the Seychelles underwent a similar transformation. Prior to the 1970s, the Seychelles had an even more stagnant colonial economy dependent on a handful of globally insignificant agricultural exports like cinnamon. Unemployment was “even worse than that in Mauritius,” reaching as high as 27.5 percent.26 In 1971, the Seychelles opened its first international airport, built, as we have seen, by the United Kingdom as compensation for taking three island groups for the BIOT. Weekly tourist arrivals jumped from numbers in the tens to numbers in the thousands; the airport’s opening allowed the explosion of a tourism industry that continues to drive the Seychelles economy to this day. (More recently, the Seychelles has tried to develop its substantial fishing resources and to become, like Mauritius, a center for offshore finance and high-tech services, while continuing to expand its tourism industry.)27
Although the economic booms in Mauritius and the Seychelles have made both nations more economically prosperous on a per capita basis than almost any other nations in all of Africa, Chagossians for the most part have not shared in this prosperity. The experience of expulsion has left the Bancoults and others structurally disadvantaged in Mauritius and the Seychelles in a variety of ways that has largely prevented their benefiting from wider economic prosperity.
Perhaps most importantly, Chagossians arrived in Mauritius and the Seychelles before the major economic changes were underway or before they had taken hold. They arrived in one country, Mauritius, that had a sugar cane monocrop economy unable to absorb additional workers and in another, the Seychelles, described by anthropologists Burton and Marion Benedict as a “rundown plantation,” with even higher unemployment than Mauritius.28 And they arrived, for the most part, with few employable skills. Mauritius had no copra industry (except for a small one in its dependency Agalega, where a few Chagossians relocated). Though copra had been the main export in the Seychelles since the 1840s, the industry was diminishing rapidly in the period when the islanders arrived (overall agricultural employment declined 10 percent from 1971 to 1977, by which point just 2.8 percent of households were earning their primary income from farming).29
Some of the other skills the islanders brought with them were also rendered economically useless. The talents of Chagossian marine carpenters and boat builders were of little commercial use in countries where wood-based boat construction was nearly obsolete. Chagossians’ fishing skills were relatively—but only relatively—more useful after the expulsion, and fishing has remained a source of employment for some to this day. A 1975 article illustrated some of the difficulty in trying to make a living from fishing in Mauritius: “Michel tried to become a fisherman when exiled, but the local [small-scale] fishermen, themselves unable to compete with the new fishing fleets with refrigerated holds, do not welcome further competition.”30
With such competition, earning a profitable living in the fishing industry in Mauritius (and to a lesser extent in the Seychelles) increasingly meant working for the long-distance fleets that cruise away from Mauritius for several months at a time. Employment on these ships thus resulted in further (temporary) displacement and the separation of families for significant parts of each year. One man, for example, left his family every year for six months at a time to work on a fishing boat, returning to work in temporary jobs for the rest of the year, mostly in construction.
Two of the most economically successful Chagossians who now are among the rare few to have secure, unionized jobs at the port of the Mauritian capital gained their starts at relative prosperity by finding jobs in the merchant marine. This came at the cost of separation from their families for far longer periods, lasting years at a time. One said he “sacrificed” eleven or twelve years of his life away from his parents, sending a portion of every paycheck back to them in Mauritius. As displacement expert Ranjit Nayak explains of many displaced peoples, “Certain occupations . . . may involve further expulsion. These occupations are taken . . . not by choice, but because of compulsion to earn their livelihood.”31
The conventional, and idealized, view of the economic boom in Mauritius is that the nation achieved full employment by the late 1980s. Though unemployment decreased significantly as a result of the growth in EPZ and tourist industry employment, unemployment and underemployment have remained problems. For many poor Mauritians, and especially for Chagossians, moving from unstable, insecure jobs to stable employment has proved impossible.32 Even near the height of Mauritian employment growth, in 1986, more than 30 percent of the labor force was working in the informal sector.33 In short, most Chagossians joined other Afro-Mauritians making up a largely invisible army of low-wage, easily hired and fired workers upon which the Mauritian economy continues to depend. “While Mauritius made remarkable economic progress in the 1980s and a majority of Mauritians benefited from the island’s development,” anthropologist Rosabelle Boswell explains, “a significant heterogeneous [Afro-Mauritian] minority of Mauritians, known locally as Creoles, have not profited from Mauriti[an] economic success.”34
A 1980 survey found 85.8 percent of male Chagossians underemployed and 46.3 percent of women completely unemployed. “The economic situation of the Ilois community,” observed a social worker, was (and we shall see, is) characterized “by low wages, unemployment, [and] underemployment” for people with skills still ill suited for the Mauritian labor market.35 Another 1981 survey showed a male unemployment rate of 41 percent and female unemployment at 58 percent. Most of the few families who had “satisfactorily remunerated jobs” were among a relatively small cohort who arrived in Mauritius prior to 1960 and married Mauritians.36
Not surprisingly, some turned to theft, prostitution, and illegal drug sales.37 When the Chagos Refugees Group surveyed nearly the entire Chagossian population in Mauritius in 2001, 38 were in prison, yielding an adult incarceration rate easily surpassing the U.S. rate of 1 in 100, which ranks highest in the world.38
Given their employment difficulties and having little to no savings from Chagos, many quickly became indebted to local loan sharks to pay rent and other basic living expenses. Others ran up debts to the owners of small neighborhood grocery stores charging often equally exorbitant interest rates.39 Relatively unfamiliar with interest and the Mauritian economy when they first arrived, the Chagossians were particularly vulnerable to exploitation. As social worker Francoise Botte writes, “even the shopkeeper cheated them.”40 Since the economic boom of the 1980s, buying furniture, electronics, and other household items from department stores with similarly high-interest credit has become a widespread phenomenon among the poor of Mauritius.41 Many Chagossians are active participants in this kind of indebtedness, reflecting the multiplication of generally unfulfilled materialistic desires in nations enjoying widespread but unequal economic growth.42
As forced displacement expert Michael Cernea and others have shown among other displaced populations,43 downward mobility was pronounced for the islanders: They were displaced from a society where they enjoyed lives of structural security, where they and their ancestors had worked and lived for generations with universal, nearly guaranteed employment, food, income, housing, health care, education, and other necessities of life, to societies where they were in positions of structural insecurity and marginalization in increasingly competitive economies, where the skills they possessed were generally not in demand, where formal education (which most did not have) was increasingly important to securing employment, and where, as we shall see, most found themselves lumped into dark-skinned “Creole” groups facing employment discrimination in rigid social hierarchies allowing little socioeconomic mobility.