“I’m telling you, Mauritians, when they, how can I say it. They found out that you were Ilois, they laughed at you. They said things like, ‘You walk barefoot!’ if you didn’t have flip-flops. What can you do, David? You can’t steal from someone when you family is living in mizer,” said Rita.
“At my children’s school, everyone said, ‘He’s a little Ilois! A little Ilois!’ My children came and told me this,” she continued. “I said, ‘Leave them be, leave them be. Let them talk. You don’t need to say anything.’ Do you understand? My children went to school, they didn’t even have a little tea” to drink. “They didn’t have anything.”
Arriving in Mauritius and the Seychelles, islanders like Rita found themselves in positions vulnerable to ethnic and racial discrimination, as Chagossians and as Afro-Mauritians. Their arrival at times of heightened social tensions was noted with considerable anxiety by many of their hosts sensitive to new economic competition. During the first years in Mauritius, the word “Ilois” shifted from a term of self-identification to a term of insult, pronounced derisively by some Mauritians ZZZEEL-wah.1 As anthropologist Iain Walker noted, many Mauritians began to use the term to describe any person “behaving in an antisocial or immoral fashion.”2 In the Seychelles, Chagossians heard curses of “Anara!” a word suggesting they had no identity, that they were soulless, uncivilized pagans, and that as a people, they were the lowest of the low. Others in both nations were called sovaz—savage—and bet—stupid. Many heard people shout, “Go back to the islands!”3
Francine Volfrin, who was removed from Diego Garcia and then Peros Banhos as a teenager in the 1970s, remembered walking to school from their home in the Seychelles, a shack on a relative’s land, with neighbors throwing apricots fallen from the trees at her and her siblings. Some spit on them. The neighbors were very mean and cruel, she said. Some would say she and her family had not been vaccinated and would make them sick. (This was a common insult aimed at the islanders. If they had not previously been vaccinated, they were vaccinated upon arrival in the Seychelles. And indeed, evidence points to the opposite of the insult’s accusation: Living in the Seychelles and Mauritius has actually made many Chagossians sick.)
Discrimination extended beyond verbal abuse. Employment discrimination was common by Mauritian “employers who favor local Mauritians.”4 In the Seychelles, discriminatory treatment began with the housing of the islanders in a local prison, while Moulinie & Co. “staff” stayed in hotels.5 This discrimination compounded difficulties Chagossians had in finding jobs because they lacked the social connections important to finding work in these small island societies.
Desperate to find work and earn money after their arrival, many used “intermediates” to connect them with employers and jobs. When they were to be paid, the intermediates took most of their salaries. Many intermediates and employers also appear to have preyed upon Chagossians’ innumeracy and relative inexperience with cash. Botte explains how the exploitation worked, particularly against women: “These ‘intermediates’ explained to the employers that these Ilois women are not used to money and some money could be given to the intermediates from the salary of that poor maid-servant or washerwoman. These Mauritian employers preferred to engage the Ilois women because [they] did not know about labour law and the employers had only to exchange a Rs10 note into many coins to make the employees believe that it was much money.” Over time, women realized that they were being cheated and became more assertive with Mauritian employers.6
In Mauritius, and to a lesser extent in the Seychelles, Chagossians entered an environment of long-standing racism and discrimination against people of mostly or entirely African descent, known locally as Creoles. In Mauritius, bigotry and prejudice against Afro-Mauritians has been unabated since Franco-Mauritians began importing enslaved African peoples to the island. Bigotry increased with the post-emancipation introduction of indentured laborers from India, soon to make up the majority of Mauritius’s population and against whom Afro-Mauritians were pitted by the “white” ruling class. Since the nineteenth century, people of French and British descent have remained at the top of the social, political, and economic hierarchies; people of mixed and Indian ancestry have occupied a middle stratum; Afro-Mauritian Creoles have remained primarily working class, generally at the bottom of the hierarchies.7
In the Seychelles, where the population is a more homogeneous collection of people of mostly mixed African and European descent, there is somewhat less discrimination against people of recognizable African ancestry (in part because almost all Seychellois have at least some [recent*] African ancestry). Still, high social and economic status in the Seychelles remains closely linked to lightly pigmented skin and European ancestry. Discrimination is prevalent against those with the darkest skin.8
Being primarily of African or mixed African and Indian descent, almost all Chagossians in Mauritius have been perceived socially as part of the Afro-Mauritian Creole community, the community that has benefited least from Mauritian economic success. Increasingly in Mauritius, scholars and others recognize that Afro-Mauritians, marked as they are by their socially defined race, class, and segregated residential geography, have been excluded from the economic prosperity of the nation as a whole.9 Arriving in a setting where they were lumped with this minority group, the islanders have faced additional barriers to economic success and social acceptance.
Even worse, Chagossians are thought to occupy a subset of AfroMauritian Creoles known as ti-kreol (literally, “little Creole”), who by definition are found in the most marginal and lowest-paying occupations. This group resides at the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum from the grand blanc or rich white ruling class. Anthropologist Thomas H. Eriksen describes in stark and commonly held racist terms the place in the national hierarchy of the ti-kreol: They are, “perhaps [the] most stigmatized category of people in Mauritius; that is, the segments of Creoles . . . comprising fishermen, dockers, unskilled workers and artisans.” Eriksen adds, “As an ethnic category, the ‘ti-kreol’ are known by outsiders as lazy, backward and stupid people, as being too close to nature and resembling Africans in a not particularly flattering fashion.”10 With the ti-kreol at the bottom of Mauritian society, Chagossians are widely considered to reside, along with people from the small Mauritian dependency of Rodrigues, at the bottom of the ti-kreol—the bottom of the bottom.11
And these hierarchies are not just a matter of perception. They reproduce themselves in ways that have maintained Mauritius and the Seychelles as relatively rigid hierarchical societies organized around class and ethno-racial stratification.12
Chagossians’ inability to benefit from national macroeconomic growth thus stems in part from structural and individual discrimination and exclusion faced by Chagossians, both as Afro-Mauritians and specifically as Chagossians. Because they belong to two stigmatized groups, the discrimination they have faced often involves a complex array of overlapping prejudice, bigotry, and systemic marginalization. The expulsion thus put the islanders in a position of structural disadvantage in part by making them vulnerable to a kind of double discrimination in ethnically hierarchical societies.
For many, however, the most painful and symbolic form of discrimination and exclusion has been that of being barred from jobs on the Diego Garcia base. Since the 1980s, the base has employed nonmilitary service workers who are neither U.S. nor U.K. citizens, mostly from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius. When Chagossians (men for the most part) have applied for these jobs at recruitment offices in Mauritius, they have been repeatedly rejected. Since the expulsion, no one born in Chagos or the child of someone born in Chagos has ever worked on Diego Garcia. “It has been stipulated that no Ilois,” two Indian Ocean scholars explain, “are to be allowed to go.” When asked about employing Chagossians, a Mauritian recruiter told 60 Minutes in a June 2003 broadcast, “Definitely no. . . . I was given instructions to be careful. They don’t want any kind of claim or demonstration.”13 (Since 2006, a few Chagossian men have been allowed to work on the base.)
Jacques Victor, who was born on Diego Garcia, described going three times to apply for jobs and being rejected each time. As soon as they saw that he was born on Diego, he said, they turned him away. “They judge us” before even knowing us, Mr. Victor said, shifting to address the whole of his experience in exile. It’s as if life is a prison for us here in Mauritius—there’s a lot of discrimination.14
“Beaucoup, beaucoup discrimination. Beaucoup,” he said, switching into French. Lots, lots of discrimination. Lots.
In Peros Banhos, Alex Bancoult and his siblings went to the small one-room schoolhouse on Corner Island. In Mauritius, he started school but didn’t stay long. He left to earn money for the family, taking a job in a cologne factory making Rs9 a week. “He didn’t go” to school for long, “but he was very clever,” Rita recalled sadly.
Rita’s only surviving daughter, Mimose, went to work at fourteen to earn money for the family. Mimose worked for a Mauritian family miles away as a domestic servant and cook. For years, she worked for the family, going stretches of three to four months without seeing her mother and siblings. It was very painful to leave her family, she said. But she had no choice because the family was poor and needed her income. “Plore,” Mimose said. I cried. “Plore, plore, plore. . . .” I cried, I cried, I cried.
Never given a bed to sleep on, Mimose had to sleep on a mat under a flight of stairs. Frequently, the husband in the family abused her. One day she finally walked out of the house and returned to her mother. She told her she was ill and never told her family what had happened with the Mauritians.
“It’s terrible what we experienced, do you understand?” Rita told me. “My children went to school without having flip-flops. My children went to school without having a book. Only Olivier persisted in always going” to school.
The youngest of Rita’s sons born in Chagos, Louis Olivier stayed in school longer than his siblings. But when it came time to take exams at the end of high school, Rita didn’t have the money for his exam fees. Some charitable Mauritians had been helping to pay for Olivier’s after-school tutoring (essentially mandatory for educational success and a de facto part of the country’s unequal educational system usually available only to the middle and upper classes). “I wasn’t able to go and ask them again for the money to pay for his fees,” Rita said.
Nor were Alex’s Rs9 a week and Rita’s jobs as a maid enough to pay the fees. So, Rita recounted, Olivier “went to take the exam. He went to take it—he passed. He didn’t get a certificate because he didn’t deposit the money.”
The structural disadvantage the islanders faced was compounded by the low levels of education they brought from Chagos and systematic educational disadvantage in exile (particularly in Mauritius). In Chagos, low levels of formal education and illiteracy were irrelevant to performing the vast majority of jobs. In Mauritius and the Seychelles, having little formal education and being illiterate, or nearly so, have been significant and increasing impediments to securing jobs and to achieving upward job mobility. Most of the new employment created in the two nations since the 1970s (i.e., in the EPZ and tourist sectors) has demanded at least some educational background. At the height of the EPZ boom in Mauritius, remember, it was “the availability of cheap, literate and skilled labour,” in addition to financial incentives and infrastructure, that encouraged “a massive flow of foreign direct investment.”15 By contrast to relatively high levels of education in Mauritius, almost all Chagossians who were adults at the time of the expulsion left Chagos illiterate: Schools only opened in the archipelago in the 1950s, so by 1975, just 2 percent of adults could read “a little.”16
Similarly, most of those who left Chagos as children arrived with a low-quality formal education that had worsened in the last years in Chagos. With their school interrupted, at least briefly, by the expulsion, children were in some cases barred access to Mauritian schools or had significant difficulty enrolling. Many school-age adolescents, like Rita’s children Alex, Mimose, and Eddy, often had to curtail schooling to find jobs and help their families financially. By 1975, 27 percent of school-age children were not in school.17 On the job market, even outside the EPZ and tourist sectors, Chagossians thus competed for jobs with Mauritians and Seychellois who almost always had more formal education than they had.
Among those who entered school, many experienced discrimination and verbal abuse from teachers and classmates. If children managed to finish primary school without having dropped out for work, family, or academic reasons, most could not afford secondary school, which only became “free” in Mauritius in 1976 (compulsory book, uniform, exam, transportation, and other fees make it far from free). Universal free secondary school in the Seychelles only became available in 1981.
Those children who have attended school in Mauritius have found themselves structurally disadvantaged in another important way: Living for the most part in the poorest areas of Mauritius, they have attended the worst schools with the worst teachers in a school system that has been shown to discriminate systematically against poor students.18 Growing up with illiterate parents, moreover, meant they had little help with their studies.
I AM ALONE ON THE EARTH
I am very unhappy
There’s no one anymore
To console me.
The bird cries for me
The bird sings for me
The bird cries for me.
I left my country
I left my little island
I left my family
I also left my heart.
—Song composed and sung by Mimose Bancoult Furcy, posted on the office wall of the Chagos Refugees Group, 200419
On the wall of their home on Diego Garcia, Janette Alexis’s family had a photograph of the Queen of England. Arriving in the Seychelles as a young girl she remembered being confused about her and her family’s nationality. Are we British? Are we Mauritian? she wondered. “What are we?” she and others, in Mauritius and the Seychelles, asked, as a people without a country, without a homeland, without their “ter natal”—natal land.
Many like Janette describe feeling excluded and isolated from mainstream life in exile. As several in Mauritius put it, Chagossians are “eksklu de lavi moris.” They are excluded from Mauritian life.
Some of the sense of exclusion in Mauritius stems from feeling that they are literally not part of the nation. Such feelings are rooted in the history surrounding Mauritian independence and the bargain by which the “father of the nation,” Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, is understood to have “sold” Chagos—and the Chagossians—to the British in exchange for independence. As a result, many feel that Mauritius is, as they say, “not a nation for them.” Like many Afro-Mauritians, many feel that Mauritius is “for the Indians” or “for the Hindus,” the majority ethnic and religious groups. The nation is not, they believe, “for the Creoles,” and it is especially not “for Chagossians.” The exclusion is double: first, as Chagossians who gave up their homeland so the rest of Mauritius could have its independence, and second, as people identified with the most marginalized elements of the minority Afro-Mauritian Creole population.
In the Seychelles, similar feelings of exclusion are widespread. Unlike Chagossians in Mauritius, who gained citizenship upon its independence, those in the Seychelles were not granted automatic citizenship. Many lived in the country for decades as noncitizens and eventually had to buy citizenship. Again this literal form of exclusion combines with widespread feelings of being discriminated against as “foreigners” in access to jobs, housing, schooling, and other opportunities. Many point to their national identity cards in particular as a source of job and other discrimination: One of the eleven digits in the national identification number indicates a holder’s place of birth. A “1” indicates the holder is from the capital, Victoria; “2” means you’re from South Mahé; “3,” from Praslin. The children of citizens born outside of the country and those naturalized, like many Chagossians in the Seychelles, carry the unusual numbers “5” and “6” respectively.20
Many in both countries also speak of never feeling “at home.” And many non-Chagossians have treated them this way, as a people apart. Anthropologist Elizabeth Colson describes how home and a familiar environment generally provide a refuge that is crucial to people’s sense of self and identity. Destroy people’s home, take away their familiar environment, and people are likely to suffer, both materially and psychologically, becoming disoriented and insecure.21
While there is no automatic connection between home and psychological disorder among displaced peoples,22 most Chagossians suffer painful feelings of homelessness and alienation. Janette said she sometimes thinks about what life would be like if they had not been removed. Maybe Diego would be like Seychelles is now, she said, referring to the ways in which the Seychelles has developed economically since she arrived in 1972.23
I would be more at ease there, she continued. I’ve never felt comfortable here in Seychelles. We are treated as foreigners in Seychelles and in Seychelles they don’t like foreigners. We have always been treated as foreigners here.
Like other victimized peoples and individuals, many have internalized blame for the expulsion, questioning how they could have allowed themselves to be exiled. Many in both the first and second generations have been left asking why the expulsion happened, why they were victimized, and why they cannot live in their homeland.
Why didn’t we resist? Janette often asks herself. Even though she remembers Chagossians on Diego Garcia being scared of U.S. military forces arriving on the island with their boats, planes, and heavy equipment, even though she remembers fearing they might be bombed if they did resist, even though she remembers her father protesting the removals, she can’t get the question out of her head: Why did we let it happen to us?
Anthropologist Thayer Scudder explains that to have been moved against one’s will is to have suffered a “terrible defeat.” It is “hard to imagine a more dramatic way to illustrate impotence than to forcibly eject people from a preferred habitat against their will.”24 Colson likewise holds that expulsion causes increased dependence and, as importantly, an awareness among displacees of this increased dependence. Involuntary displacement, she says, is a clear demonstration to a group and its members that they have lost control over their own destiny, that they are literally powerless.25
Among women, this powerlessness has sadly expressed itself in a vulnerability to sexual assault and abuse. Josiane Selmour’s Mauritian husband beat her for years until she finally went to the police and took him to court (which eventually fined him). For Josiane, abuse stems from the fact that Mauritians don’t like Chagossians. She explained, Mauritians call Chagossians “sovaz” [savages] and say, “Alle Zilwa!” [Go away Ilois!]. Husbands too. . . . they take advantage of Chagossian women. They abuse them, they call them names, because Chagossian women are powerless.
Other women have echoed these feelings. Many have reported experiencing abuse from their husbands or domestic partners (especially from non-Chagossian men), as well as physical and sexual abuse at work. Some have described verbally or physically abusive relationships between Chagossian spouses as a result of stress and pressures in the home. When the islanders first arrived, some Mauritian public welfare officers raped or sexually abused Chagossian women, even suggesting that friends do the same: “Some Mauritian men who pretended to help,” Botte writes, “were looking for other benefits.”26 Still, it’s important to note that Josiane was able to go to the police and take her husband to court. And as we shall see, in political organizing, where women play a dominant role, they have proven themselves to be far from powerless.
Like other victims, many have also felt considerable shame. Some of this shame derives from the material poverty and discrimination they have faced. Many tell of the shame they felt attending school (or, like Rita, as parents sending children to school) barefoot when their classmates wore shoes. In the Seychelles, Francine Volfrin felt deeply ashamed that her family couldn’t afford fancy clothing to wear to church like other children; instead they wore secondhand and tattered clothing.
As a result of these and other accumulated forms of abuse, discrimination, and negative stereotyping, many have concealed their identity as Chagossians. While some, especially those who have been heavily involved in political organizing, have maintained a strong sense of Chagossian identity, many young people in particular have grown up with little sense of this identity at all.
Some stress too that they have been prevented from full cultural expression, and thus self-identification, as they have felt forced to adapt to the cultures of Mauritius or the Seychelles, especially in their styles of dance, music, and cuisine. Many describe having hidden their identity by concealing their accents and changing their linguistic practices shortly after arrival. While their Chagos Kreol is related to and mutually intelligible with Mauritian Kreol and Seselwa (Seychellois Kreol), Chagos Kreol is distinguishable in some of its vocabulary and the accent of its speakers. Islanders described to me trying consciously to change their accent. One man explained that people cannot express themselves as they would like: Chagossians have to change their language and their accent, he said. Chagossians have to think twice every time they start to speak.
For years after arriving in the Seychelles, Janette hid her identity for fear of being deported by the government in a one-party state where she held no citizenship. For years she felt ashamed to identify herself as a Chagossian in school when teachers asked where she was born. For years, while an active protest movement was growing in Mauritius, she and others in the Seychelles felt powerless to argue for their rights in the one-party state. Finally in the late 1990s (after the start of a multiparty democracy), Janette decided that she was no longer going to hide her identity. She described this as her “coming out.” Although Janette did not intend to compare her experience to that of nonheterosexuals in heterosexist societies, the parallels are strong. Like many who do not conform to heterosexual norms, Janette experienced discrimination, stigmatization, and fear, giving her good reason to keep her identity secret.
In 1978 and again between 1982 and 1985, most Chagossians in Mauritius received financial and land compensation as a result of their expulsion. No one in the Seychelles received compensation. The 1978 compensation was payment from the £650,000 transferred by the British Government in 1972 to the Mauritian Government to resettle the islanders. Although when the Mauritian Government surveyed them, a majority requested that compensation come in the form of housing, eligible adult Chagossians received only cash payments of around $1,210 and around $200 for children 18 and under.27
Between 1982 and 1985, many but not all Chagossians in Mauritius received land and cash payments totaling around $4,620 for adults (around $8,750 in 2004 dollars). In part the cash was to pay for the government’s construction of a home or to build one’s own home. Since the expulsion, housing had been one of the islanders’ most pressing problems, with most still living in “ramshackle houses and in dire conditions”: By the early 1980s, more than 80 percent were living in two- or three-room “hovels,” with 27 percent of households doubling up with other families.28 Those who opted to accept land and housing received small plots and two-room concrete-block houses built by the Mauritian Government in what became known as a Cité Ilois in either the impoverished neighborhood of Baie du Tombeau or Port Louis’s brothel district Pointe aux Sables. Others who opted not to receive these houses could use their compensation money to purchase new housing or to improve preexisting homes.
Figure 9.1 “Try It and You’re Stuck” (Mauritian Kreol proverb), Baie du Tombeau, Mauritius, 2002. Photo by author.
Many instead used both rounds of compensation and the sale of land and houses to pay off substantial debts. Unscrupulous brokers (Chagossians, among them, according to some) enabled many of the real estate sales, which are widely seen as having significantly undervalued the properties. Some real estate brokers preyed upon islanders desperate for cash, buying at low prices and quickly flipping the properties. Others offered the new homeowners loans, forcing them to put their property up as collateral and then charging high rates of interest; when they were unable to repay the loans, the lenders seized the property.
After leaving school for his job in a cologne factory, Alex eventually found work as a stevedore at the docks in Port Louis’s main harbor. “But then the docks fired him,” Rita said, and “he had no work.” Before long, she recounted, “he wasn’t working . . . sagren . . . he drank.” In 1990, at the age of 38, Alex died, having ruined his body with alcohol and drugs, leaving behind a wife and five boys under the age of 15.
“The same as with Eddy,” Rita said of one of her other sons. One day he “told me he was going out, that he was going to look for work. He went two days and he didn’t come back—I was very worried and went looking all over for him. It was then that his friends from the streets drove him into drugs.”
Eddy grew addicted to heroin and soon “he became like a bone,” Rita said. He was a “skeleton. His insides were completely finished.”
When Eddy died, Rita had to take a Rs7,000 loan to pay for the burial. Like other Chagossians she went to a local “madam kredi”—a moneylender who took Rita’s government-issued pension card, withdrawing her monthly pension to collect the Rs7,000 and interest.
When Rénault died at 11 for reasons still mysterious to the family after selling water and begging for money at the cemetery, Rita buried him in the clothes he wore for his First Communion. “The same clothes, I got them out. The same clothes, I put on him,” she said.
“I have suffered so much, David, here in Mauritius. I am telling you look at how many—three sons, one daughter, and my husband. Five people have died in my arms. It’s not easy. . . . Not easy. It’s not easy, David.”
* I note the qualification in passing to point out that the ancestors of all humans come from Africa.