Chagossians Erotic

The Chagossians are the only people the Chagos Archipelago has ever had, and they had it for less than two hundred years. The atolls sat empty until the 1780s, when French planters shipped in enslaved Africans and Malagasy to cut copra, and the workforce was later thickened by indentured Indian laborers and by hands drifting over from Mauritius and Seychelles. What grew out of that was not a labor camp but a people: a French-lexifier creole of their own, cousin to Mauritian and Seychellois but marked enough that Mauritians could hear the difference and did; a Catholic calendar of feast days run out of small island chapels; households built around fish, coconut and the copra ration. They lived on three inhabited groups, Diego Garcia, Peros Banhos and the Salomon Islands, and they called themselves Ilois, the islanders. The name Chagossian is recent, adopted deliberately in the 1990s because it stakes a claim to territory rather than describing a condition.

In 1965 Britain detached the archipelago from Mauritius to create the British Indian Ocean Territory, having agreed to hand Diego Garcia to the United States for a military base, and having agreed it would arrive empty. Between 1968 and 1973 the population was removed. Islanders who traveled to Mauritius for medical care found their return passage refused. Those still at home were told the supply ships would stop restocking, and were then put on the ships themselves. In 1971 the administrator had the community's dogs gassed in a copra shed, a detail Chagossians raise first and outsiders tend to file last. They were landed in Port Louis and Victoria into slum housing and no work, and the Creole word sagren, the grief that comes of losing your place, hardened into something close to a diagnosis. What followed is fifty years of litigation and lobbying: the Bancoult cases, a 2002 grant of British citizenship that seeded a large community in Crawley, an International Court of Justice opinion in 2019 that Britain's continued administration was unlawful, and a 2025 treaty transferring sovereignty to Mauritius while leasing the Diego Garcia base back for 99 years. Resettlement of the outer islands is on the table. Diego Garcia is not. Meanwhile the sega tambour of the Chagos, goatskin drums tuned by heating them over a fire, went onto UNESCO's heritage list in 2019, kept alive by people who cannot go home.