Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and the UK

Forced displacement and onward migration

Laura Jeffery

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781784993825
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Sozialpolitik

This is the first book to compare the experiences of displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius with the experiences of those Chagossians who have moved to the UK since 2002. It provides a unique ethnographic comparative study of forced displacement and onward migration within the living memory of one community.

I

Marginalisation and mobilisation

1

Marginalisation in Mauritius

My father didn’t like Mauritius. He told us that life in Mauritius was not the same [as life in Chagos]. We didn’t understand because we were children, and we always said that we wanted to go to Mauritius. Our father told us that life in Mauritius was hard; even the Mauritian people were very poor. I was little when we came here for the first time. I was seven years old. At that time all the children liked Mauritius and we said that we wanted to stay, but my father didn’t like it so after a month we returned to Chagos. Then we came to Mauritius in 1968 and at the office my mother was told that the islands had been sold. We had lots of problems here. One day my father asked me if I understood why he didn’t like Mauritius; why he said that life in Mauritius is hard. I’ve never forgotten that. I always remember my father said that. (Mimose, born on Peros Banhos to Chagossian parents)

This chapter outlines the history of colonisation, settlement, and decolonisation in Mauritius and the Chagos Archipelago. It shows that the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago were already marginal within colonial Mauritius, and that their marginality was compounded by their relocation to Mauritius during the decade around independence, which was a period of social, economic, and political unrest.

Colonising Mauritius¹

Malay and Arab or Swahili traders explored the south-west Indian Ocean (see Map 1) over a thousand years ago. However, many of the smaller islands of the Indian Ocean – including Mauritius and Rodrigues, the Chagos Archipelago, Réunion, and the Seychelles islands – were unpopulated prior to European colonial expansion in the region from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. In the decades following Vasco da Gama’s trip around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, Portuguese navigators rediscovered the islands now known as Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues, which they collectively named the Mascarene Islands after a Portuguese navigator. The Portuguese used Mauritius as a stopping place between the Cape and India, but did not establish a permanent settlement on any of the Mascarenes. Portuguese navigators also explored – but did not settle on – several distant archipelagos further north in the Indian Ocean, including Chagos, Agalega and Cargados Carajos Shoals (St Brandon), and the Seychelles. The Dutch East India Company used Mauritius as a stopping place between Europe and East Asia from 1598 onwards, and claimed the island in 1638, naming it after the ruling prince Maurice van Nassau. But the Dutch found it difficult to maintain the small and remote settlement, and by 1710 the island had been abandoned. The French, who had occupied Réunion since 1642, then claimed Mauritius in 1715 and Seychelles in 1742. In 1810, during the Napoleonic wars, the British captured the Mascarenes. Realising the military significance of the natural harbours on Mauritius, the British retained Mauritius and its dependencies – including Rodrigues, the Chagos Archipelago, and the Seychelles – but returned Réunion to French control.

These successive European colonists attempted to turn Mauritius into an economically viable colony (see Allen 1999; Allen 2004; Barnwell & Toussaint 1949; Benedict 1965; Carter 1995; Teelock 2001). The Dutch introduced sugarcane to Mauritius in the mid-seventeenth century, finding the crop resilient and well suited to the rainy and windy climate. Following French experimentation with coffee, cotton, indigo, and spices, the British again favoured sugarcane. Britain raised its quota for imports of Mauritian sugar to match the West Indies quota in 1825, and sugar accounted for 85 per cent of the value of Mauritian exports by the 1830s.

The fact that the Mauritian economy quickly became dependent on sugar in particular had implications for the type of plantation society that developed there. Comparative historians of European plantations in the Caribbean and the Pacific and Indian Oceans have argued that variations in mortality rates depended less on the era and nature of employment contract, the nationality of the colonial power, or the character of the estate manager, than on the technical relations of production. The production of sugar is extremely labour-intensive, and conditions on sugar estates were arguably worse than those on plantations growing crops such as tea, coffee, cocoa, coconuts, spices, cotton, and rubber (Higman 1984; Tinker 1974). The sugar estates on Mauritius were characterised by particularly hard physical labour, poor remuneration, and the widespread use of punishments – violence and the withholding of rations or wages – to extract labour (Allen 1999: 13–14; Tinker 1974: 17–18). High rates of desertion and high mortality rates that outstripped birth rates posed challenges for estate owners, who continually imported overseas workers to supplement their labour forces (Allen 1999: 13–15, 175–176; Teelock 2001: 119).

The settlement of Mauritius began under the French, who brought enslaved labourers mainly from Africa and Madagascar. The British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and emancipated enslaved labourers in Mauritius in 1835. They compensated the slave owners financially and replaced slavery with an apprenticeship scheme entitling the former slave owners to continued labour for a maximum of six years. The apprenticeship scheme proved unpopular and was eventually terminated prematurely in 1839, after which many labourers in Mauritius rejected the employment terms offered by their former owners. They left the sugar estates for nearby vacant land, towns, and marginal coastal areas, where they supported themselves through small-scale commercial agricultural cultivation, non-agricultural manual labour or domestic servitude, and fishing (Allen 1999: 112,129; Carter 1995: 19; Vaughan 2005: 267).

From the late eighteenth century onwards, French and later British colonists also brought enslaved and convict labourers from British India. After the 1835 emancipation of enslaved labourers, estate owners supported indentured labour as a way to keep labour costs low, arguing that indentured labourers would work for longer hours at lower wages than formerly enslaved labourers (see Allen 1999: 148–149; Carter 1995: 16–17). The rate of immigration from India increased dramatically, such that Indian immigrants comprised one-third of the population of Mauritius by the mid-1840s and stabilised at two-thirds during the 1860s (Allen 1999: 17; Benedict 1961: 17; Benedict 1965: 17; Carter 1995: 271). A slump in sugar prices led many Franco-Mauritian estate owners to sell plots of their land from about 1875 onwards. By this time, Indian labourers had largely replaced African labourers on the sugar estates, and many were able to purchase smallholdings, which became rural villages and small plantations dominated by Indo-Mauritians (Benedict 1961: 27–31; Teelock 2001: 294). European contractors also recruited labourers from China from 1860 onwards. Once emigration had been legalised, many Chinese sought to escape the economic depression in China during the second half of the nineteenth century (Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo 1985: 22–24). Immigration from China peaked following the Maoist revolution in 1949, and people of Chinese origin constituted over 3 per cent of the Mauritian population by 1952 (Central Statistics Office 2003a: 15–16).

The particular history of settlement via African slavery and Asian indenture in colonial Mauritius resulted in a relatively durable ethnic division of labour, which has to a large extent persisted in postcolonial Mauritius. Indo-Mauritians continue to be over-represented in agriculture and Afro-Mauritians in non-agricultural manual labour, while Sino-Mauritians are over-represented in business and Franco-Mauritians still own the large sugar estates (Benedict 1965: 25–28; Eriksen 1998: 64, 110, 118; Mauritius Research Council 1999: 30; Salverda 2004; Simmons 1982: 10–11; Srebrnik 2002: 277–278). As we shall see below, this ethnic division of labour had particular implications for the Chagos islanders when they arrived in Mauritius in the 1960s and 1970s.

Two centuries of settlement on the Chagos Archipelago

Economic activity, settlement and administration on the Chagos Archipelago were conducted by commercial companies through concessions granted by the government of Mauritius (Scott 1961: 96–101). From about the 1770s onwards, French planters began to populate Chagos with enslaved labourers brought mostly from mainland East Africa and Madagascar via Mauritius (Ly-Tio-Fane & Rajabalee 1986; Scott 1961: 120–121; Toussaint 1966: 64, 272; Walker 1986). They established coconut plantations on the larger islands – including Diego Garcia, the Salomon Islands and Peros Banhos Atoll – producing copra (dried coconut flesh), from which was extracted coconut oil used in the generation of electricity and manufacture of soap in Mauritius and beyond. This gave rise to an alternative name for the archipelago: the Oil Islands (Toussaint 1977: 11).

The copra companies controlled the land use, owned the buildings and other infrastructure, and were responsible for administration, which they often devolved to an onsite manager or administrator (Scott 1961: 136, 153). From 1835 onwards, the government of Mauritius periodically sent magistrates to visit the dependencies, check the conditions for the labourers, arbitrate disputes and administer justice, and report to the governor of Mauritius (Scott 1961: 139, 159–160). Reports by a series of nineteenth-century magistrates – Charles Anderson (1839), Charles Farquharson (1864), E. Pakenham Brooks (1875), J. H. Ackroyd (1878), and Ivanoff Dupont (1884) – along with reports of visits during the mid-twentieth century by a Roman Catholic priest, Roger Dussercle (1934), and a governor of Mauritius, Robert Scott (1961), comprise a fascinating (if limited) resource on working life on the colonial Chagos Archipelago.

Labour on the coconut plantations was gendered and varied by island and estate (Scott 1961: 163–164). Generally, men and women alike speared and gathered coconuts; men stripped off the husks using a wooden stake topped with a metal blade; women used a curved blade to break open the shells, scraped the flesh from the shells, and laid the flesh out to dry in the sun or in furnaces to form copra; men worked the machines pressing copra to extract coconut oil; men loaded the produce (dried copra and pressed coconut oil alike) onto ships destined for Mauritius and beyond; men and women alike gathered palm leaves for various purposes; and a few labourers rose to the rank of commanders or overseers (Ackroyd 1878; Brooks 1875; Dussercle 1934: 9–10). Outwith copra production, women worked as domestic servants in the plantation managers’ houses; men and women cut and gathered palm leaves and grass to make baskets; and men were employed as fishermen, stablemen, gardeners, cooks, boat manufacturers, brewers, carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, stonemasons, rat-catchers, watchmen, and hospital attendants (Ackroyd 1878; Brooks 1875). Throughout the settled history of the archipelago, commercial activity was dominated by copra production, although by the twentieth century other exports from Chagos islands to Mauritius included guano, salt fish, timber, surplus grain, brushes and brooms, rope, wooden toys, and turtles (Scott 1961: 253–255, 274–275, 287–288).

Copra production is much less labour intensive than sugar production, and during the period of apprenticeship the magistrate Charles Anderson reported that workloads in the dependencies were much more manageable than those in mainland Mauritius (Anderson 1839: 78). Additionally, workers were permitted to plant crops and raise animals, which, Anderson remarked, gave them ‘self interest’ in the land (Anderson 1839: 77). As Anderson predicted, a far larger proportion of former enslaved labourers accepted work contracts to remain on the plantations in the dependencies after the termination of the apprenticeship scheme than was the case in mainland Mauritius. As a result, people of African origin were always in the majority in Chagos, although there were continuous flows of people around Mauritius and its dependencies throughout the colonial period (Anderson 1839: 63–64; Benedict & Benedict 1982: 122; Dussercle 1934: 9–10; Todd 1969: 19–20, 29, 33; Toussaint 1977: 22–23). Since the islands were run by copra companies that issued work contracts for the islanders, unemployment was not a problem on Chagos, although employers could – and sometimes did – dismiss and deport those workers who were considered to be workshy or troublemakers.

Workers received rations and bonuses that varied by island and estate but included rice, maize, lentils, coconuts, coconut oil, salt, rum, coconut toddy, and tobacco (Brooks 1875; Farquharson 1864). Wages were low, although overtime was often available, and pay could be spent in the company shops on additional foodstuffs and other supplies, or else banked to fund trips to Mauritius to visit relatives or purchase items unavailable in Chagos (Ackroyd 1878: 22; Brooks 1875: 64–75; Farquharson 1864). Proprietors were required to provide workers with basic housing or building materials. Islanders often had access to plots of land on which they could plant food crops and raise animals such as poultry and pigs, and they supplemented their diets with fish, seafood, turtles, and seabirds (Ackroyd 1878: 23–30; Brooks 1875; Dussercle 1934; Farquharson 1864). Proprietors were also required to provide basic healthcare and primary education.

The magistrates’ reports depict conditions on Chagos that vary somewhat by date, island and estate, the character of the manager, and the temperament of the magistrate himself. Farquharson (1864) and Dupont (1884) reported that the Chagos islanders were generally content and did not have substantial complaints, and concluded that they benefited from a light workload, regular payment of rations and wages, proportionate punishment for misdeeds, well-stocked stores, and adequate hospitals. Dupont also detailed numerous cases of imprisonment for disturbances such as murder, violence and the threat of violence, attempted rape, theft, drunkenness, desertion, insolence and insubordination. Brooks (1875) and Ackroyd (1878) reported that islanders had substantial grievances against their managers: excessive workloads; irregular provision of rations and wages; excessive punishment (including fines, deduction of wages, detention, imprisonment and violence) for offences such as theft, absence from work, lateness and non-completion of tasks; the absence of written work contracts detailing ration entitlements; the detention of islanders who wished to go to Mauritius; inadequate housing and a lack of hospitals; restrictions on fishing, hunting seabirds, and raising pigs to force islanders to purchase foodstuffs from company stores instead; and excessive price hikes on imported items sold in those stores. Successive commentators were concerned about the gender imbalance, low rates of marriage, competition between men for the limited women, circulation of women between men, and resulting violence and abuse (Scott 1961: 149, 161).

In sum, these reports reveal that the colonial Chagos Archipelago can be characterised by paternalistic management, underlying violence and disruption, and basic living conditions throughout its settled history. Importantly, however, both the magistrate Charles Anderson and the priest Roger Dussercle – whose visits took place almost a century apart – remarked that conditions in Chagos were better than those in many other plantations, including those on mainland Mauritius. In comparison with Mauritius, Chagos was characterised by a less arduous workload in return for adequate rations and the freedom to volunteer for paid overtime or instead to use the abundant leisure time to fish, hunt, grow crops, and raise animals for consumption.

These features are reflected in Chagos islanders’ recollections of life on Chagos as akin to a form of slavery [esklavaz], but one in which the workload was manageable and islanders could choose how to spend their plentiful time off work. As Rosemond, a Chagossian man in his sixties, put it, on Chagos ‘we lived like slaves [esklav] – we weren’t free – but we could do whatever we wanted to do’. When I asked him if they had to work hard, Rosemond replied ‘not really’ since working hours were concentrated in the morning and early afternoon, leaving the rest of the day free. Others complained that their tasks were physically demanding and could be dangerous (because of sharp tools), their pay was low, and their employers could be domineering [domineer], but added that they had benefited from guaranteed employment on the islands and did not have to contend with unemployment. Yvonne, a Chagossian woman in her sixties, recalled that ‘life was hard over there – we had to work to get everything we needed – but we all had work’. Most Chagossians I spoke with felt that their low wages were more than offset by the provision of free houses and food rations, which meant that they did not have to worry about money. Raphael, another Chagossian man in his sixties, expressed it as follows: in terms of ‘money we were poor, but food we weren’t poor’ [larzan nu ti mizer, me manze nu pa ti mizer].

Excision and depopulation of the Chagos Archipelago

This way of life was brought to an end between 1964 and 1973. During the Cold War, the US sought to establish a military presence in the Indian Ocean, favouring the Chagos island of Diego Garcia on account of its administration by British allies, its small and politically insignificant population, its central but isolated location, its natural harbours, and its potential to build a runway (Jawatkar 1983: 44; Vine 2009: 61). In 1965 – as part of negotiations leading to Mauritian independence in 1968 – the UK Government excised the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius and created the new British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). In exchange for what was in effect a US$14 million discount on the Polaris missile system, the UK Government agreed to depopulate the Chagos Archipelago and lease Diego Garcia to the US Government (Bandjunis 2001: 26–27; Jawatkar 1983: 17; Vine 2009: 87–88).

The residents of the Chagos Archipelago had been accustomed to making periodic trips to Mauritius to renew work contracts, purchase supplies, receive medical treatment, take holidays or visit family. From 1967 onwards, however, Chagos islanders in Mauritius were refused return passages and were told that the Chagos Archipelago had been ‘sold’ and the islands ‘closed’. They were thus stranded in Mauritius, sometimes separated from family members who had remained in Chagos. In Chagos, proprietors gradually reduced the importation of supplies, wound up copra production, and did not renew employment contracts once they had expired.

Diego Garcia was the first to be depopulated, in 1971. The BIOT administrator, John Todd, called a meeting to announce to the islanders that they would have to leave Diego Garcia (Vine 2009: 108–109). They were told they could either move to one of the settlements on the other Chagos atolls of Salomon and Peros Banhos, or leave the Chagos Archipelago and be taken to Mauritius or Seychelles. Many islanders recall being told they would receive assistance – land, housing, animals, and financial compensation – upon arrival in Mauritius. The authorities deployed several tactics to intimidate islanders into obeying orders to leave (Vine 2009: 112–114). Firstly, the plantations had been wound down, food ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Series editor’s foreword
• Note to readers
• Introduction Forced displacement and onward migration
• Part I – Marginalisation and mobilisation
• Part II – Narrating homeland, displacement, suffering, and loss
• Part III – Onward migration
• Postscribt Legal and environmental barriers to resettlement
• References
• Index