The Chagossians
The Chagos Archipelago was uninhabited when first visited by European explorers, and remained that way until the French successfully established a small colony on the island of Diego Garcia, composed of 50-60 “men” and “a complement of slaves”. The slaves came from what are now Mozambique and Madagascar via Mauritius. Thus the original Chagossians were a mixture of the Bantu and Austronesian peoples.
The French surrendered Mauritius and its dependencies (including the Chagos) to the UK in the 1814 Treaty of Paris, and the British immediately outlawed the slave trade. However, nothing precluded the transport of slaves within the colony, and so the ancestors of the Chagossians were routinely shipped from Mauritius to Rodrigues to the Chagos to the Seychelles, and elsewhere. In addition, from 1820-1840 the atoll of Diego Garcia in the Chagos became the staging post for slave ships trading between Sumatra, the Seychelles, and the French island of Bourbon, adding a population of Malay slaves into the Chagos gene pool.
The British Government abolished slavery in 1834, and the colonial administration of the Seychelles (which administered the Chagos at the time) followed suit in 1835, with the former slaves “apprenticed” to their former masters until 1 February 1839, at which time they became freemen. Following emancipation, the former slaves became contract employees of the various plantation owners throughout the Chagos. Contracts were required by colonial law to be renewed before a magistrate at least every two years, but the distance from the nearest colonial headquarters (on Mauritius) meant few visits by officials, and that meant that these contract workers often stayed for decades between the visits of the Magistrate, and this is little doubt that some remained for a lifetime.
Those workers born in the Chagos were referred to as Creoles des Iles, or Ilois for short, a French Creole word meaning "Islanders" until the late 1990s, when they adopted the name Chagossians or Chagos Islanders. With no other work to be had, and all the islands granted by the Governor of Mauritius to the Plantation owners, life continued for the Chagossians as it would in a Eurocentric slave society with European managers and Ilois workers and their families.
On the Chagos, this involved specific tasks, and rewards including housing (such as it was), rations and rum, and a relatively distinct Creole society developed. Over the decades, Mauritian, Seychellois, Chinese, Somali, and Indian workers were employed on the island at various times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the Chagossian culture, as did as Plantation managers and administrators, visiting ships crews and passengers, British and Indian garrison troops stationed on the island in World War II, and residents of Mauritius - to which individual Chagossians and their families traveled and spent lengthy periods of time.
Significant demographic shifts in the island population began in 1962 when the French financed, Mauritian Company, Societe Huiliere de Diego et Peros, which had consolidated ownership of all the plantations in the Chagos in 1883, sold the plantations to the Seychelles Company, Chagos-Agalega Company, which then owned the entire Chagos Archipelago, except for six acres at the mouth of the Diego Garcia lagoon. Thus, at no time did anyone living on the islands actually own a piece of real property there. Even the “resident” managers of the plantations were simply employees of absentee landlords.
In the 1930s, Father Dussercle reported that 60% of the plantation workers were “Children of the Isles”; that is, born in the Chagos. However, beginning in 1962, the Chagos-Agalega Company began hiring Seychellois contract workers almost exclusively, along with a few from Mauritius, as many of the Ilois left the Chagos because of the change in management; by 1964, 80% of the population were Seychellois under 18-month or 2-year contracts.
At this same time, the UK and U.S. began talks with the objective of establishing a military base in the Indian Ocean region. The base would need to be on British Territory as the U.S. had no possessions in the region. The U.S. was deeply concerned with the stability of the host nation of any potential base, and sought an unpopulated territory, to avoid the U.N.'s decolonisation requirements and the resulting political issues of sovereignty or anti-Western sentiment. The political posture of an independent Mauritius, from which the remote British islands of the central Indian Ocean were administered, was not clearly known, but was of a nature expected to work against the security of the base.
As a direct result of these geopolitical concerns, the British Colonial Office recommended to the UK Government in October 1964 to detach the Chagos from Mauritius. In January 1965, the U.S. Embassy in London formally requested the detachment of the Chagos as well. On November 8, the UK created the BIOT by an Order in Council On December 30, 1966, the U.S. and UK signed a 50-year agreement to use the Chagos for military purposes, and that each island so used would be without a resident civilian population. This and other evidence at trial led the UK High Court of Justice Queen’s Bench to decide in 2003 that the UK government ultimately decided to depopulate the entire Chagos to avoid scrutiny by the U.N.'s Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, known as the “Committee of 24”.
In April 1967, The BIOT Administration bought out Chagos-Agalega for £600,000, thus becoming the sole property owner in the BIOT. The Crown immediately leased back the properties to Chagos-Agalega but the company terminated the lease at the end of 1967, after which the BIOT assigned management of the plantations to the former managers of Chagos-Agalega, who had incorporated in the Seychelles as Moulinie and Company, Limited.
Throughout the 20th Century, there existed a total population of approximately one thousand individuals, with a peak population of 1,142 on all islands was recorded in 1953. In 1966, the population was 924. This population was fully employed. Although it was common for local plantation managers to allow “pensioners” and the disabled to remain in the islands and continue to receive rations in exchange for light work, children after the age of 12 were required to work In 1964, only 3 of a population of 963 were unemployed.
In the latter half of the 20th century, there were thus three major strands to the population - Mauritian and Seychelles contract workers (including management), and the Ilois. There is no agreement as to the numbers of Ilois living in the BIOT prior to 1971. However, the UK and Mauritius agreed in 1972 that there were 426 Ilois families numbering 1,151 individuals who left the Chagos for Mauritius voluntarily or involuntarily between 1965 and 1973. In 1977, the Mauritian government independently listed a total of 557 families totaling 2,323 people - 1,068 adults and 1,255 children - a number which included families that left voluntarily before the creation of the BIOT and never returned to the Chagos. The number reported by the Mauritian government in 1978 to have received compensation was 2,365 - 1,081 adults and 1,284 minor children. The Mauritian Government’s Ilois Trust Fund Board certified 1,579 individuals as Ilois in 1982.
The entire population of the Chagos, including the Ilois, was removed to Mauritius and the Seychelles by 27 April 1973.
Read more about this topic: Depopulation Of Diego Garcia