Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (8 page)

Wages remained low and paternalistic: Men harvesting coconuts earned about £2 a month, while women shelling the nuts earned less than half that. Artisans, foremen, and commandeurs earned six times what female laborers earned, and those in privileged “staff” positions earned considerably more. No matter the position or the gender, workers’ monthly rations included about £3 worth of rice or flour, coconut oil, salt, lentils, fish, wine, and occasionally vegetables and pork.
⁵⁵
Work benefits also included construction materials, free firewood, regular vacations—
promne
—with free passage to Mauritius, burial services, and free health care and medicines. Workers continued to occupy and receive land near their homes. Many used the land for gardens, raising crops like tomatoes, squash, chili peppers, eggplant, citrus and other fruits, and for keeping cows, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, and ducks.

After the day’s work task was completed, generally around midday, Chagossians could work overtime, tend to their gardens and animals, fish, or
hunt for other seafood, including red snapper, tuna, and other fish, crab, prawns, crayfish, lobster, octopus, sea cucumber, and turtles.

“Whatever time it was, you went to your house and your day marched on,” Rita recounted. “A commandeur passed by, asked you if you were going to do overtime. So then you went to work for another day’s work. . . . If you didn’t go do it, no one made you.

“But,” she continued, “our money, at the end of the month we got it, we just put it in our account. And what we earned from overtime, that we used for buying our weekly supplies, understand?”

On payday people went to the store and “the women would go to buy a little clothing. . . . That was the only thing we had to buy: our clothing, cloth to make clothing, sugar, milk.

“Apart from that, there was nothing we had to buy. Apart from cigarettes, which if you smoked, you needed to buy. There was beer at the shop to buy. There was rum to buy, but we made our own drink,” Rita added, referring to Chagossians’ own fermented drinks of dhal-based
baka
and palm toddy
kalu
.

“Then, you know Saturday
laba
,” Rita explained, “Saturday what we did, with our coconut leaf brooms, we swept the court of the manager’s house, everywhere around the chapel, the hospital, everywhere. When we finished that, then we’d go to the house. Around nine o’clock, we finished and left. Then we had Saturday, Sunday to ourselves. Monday, then we went back to hard work.”

But on Saturday “the house, all the family, everyone was there. We had some fun. . . . We had an accordion, later we had a gramophone. . . . On Saturday, Saturday night, we had our
sega
.”

Although the longstanding popular institution featuring singing, playing, and dancing to sega music is found on islands throughout the southwest Indian Ocean, Chagos and most other islands had their own distinctive sega traditions. In Chagos, segas were an occasion for entire island communities to gather. On Saturday nights everyone met around a bonfire in a clearing. Under the moon and stars, drummers on the goat hide–covered
ravanne
would start tapping out a slow, rhythmic beat. Others would begin singing, dancing, and joining in on accordions, triangles, and other percussion and string instruments.

The sega allowed islanders to sing old traditional songs or their own originals, which were often improvised. Most segas followed a call-and-response pattern, with soloists singing verses, supported by dancers, musicians, and onlookers who joined in a chorus, providing frequent shouts, whistles, and outbursts of encouragement. In Chagos, segas were
filled with themes of love, jealousy, separation, and loss. Much as in the blues and other musical traditions, the sega was an important mode of expression and a way to share hardships and gain support from the community.

“The segas,” Rita recounted, “at night, people opened their doors, everyone came out, beat the drum, sang, danced. And we carried on until early in the morning. Early in the morning, six o’clock. . . . six o’clock, until seven o’clock too, and then even the old ones went home.”

I asked Rita if she danced to the sega. She said, “Yes.”

I asked if she sang sega. She said, “Yes.”

“What did you sing?” I asked.

“Everything. Those that I knew, I sang. I know how to sing sega very well. . . . I’m full of segas that I know,” said Rita. And then she started to sing . . .

My father, you’re yelling “Attention passengers! Embark passengers!”

This madame, her husband’s going but she’s staying.

Crying, madame, enough crying madame.

On the beach, you’re crying so much,

The tears from your eyes are drowning the passengers list.

Crying, madame, even if you cry on the beach, even if you cry Capitan L’Anglois isn’t going to turn the boat around to come get you.

O li la e, O la e, O li la la.

O li le le, O li le la la.

L’Anglois answer me, L’Anglois, my friend

Answer me, L’Anglois, this sega that you left down in Chagos.

“FRENCH COASTAL VILLAGES”

“The people of Île du Coin were exceptionally proud of their homes,” Governor Scott wrote of Rita’s Peros Banhos after World War II. “The gardens usually contained an arrangement of flower-beds and a vegetable patch, almost always planted with pumpkins and loofahs trained over rough trellis-work, with a few tomato plants and some greens.”
⁵⁶

By that time Salomon had a large timber industry for export and was known as the home of Chagos’s boat building industry, widely renowned in the southwest Indian Ocean. Three Brothers, Eagle Island, and Six Islands had been settled for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the plantation company moved their inhabitants to Peros and Diego to consolidate production. Eagle’s population rose to as many as 100 and was “regarded by its inhabitants,” according to Scott, “as a real home,” with a “carefully tended” children’s cemetery and evocatively named places like Love Apple Crossing, Ceylon Square, and Frigates’ Pool.
⁵⁷

Looking on “from the seaward end of the pier,” Scott compared Diego Garcia’s capital East Point to a French coastal village: “The architecture, the touches of old-fashioned ostentation in the
château
and its relation to the church; the disposition of trees and flowering shrubs across the ample green; the neighbourly way in which white-washed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages, cluster round the green; the lamp standards along the roads and the parked motor-lorries: all contribute towards giving the village this quality.”

Clearly charmed by the islands, Scott continued, “The association of East Point with a synthesis of small French villages, visited or seen on canvas, was strengthened by the warm welcome of the islanders, since their clothes and merry bearing, and particularly the small, fluttering flags of the school-children, were wholly appropriate to a
fête
in a village so devised.”
⁵⁸

“Funny little places! Indeed they are. But how lovely!” wrote Scott’s predecessor as governor, Sir Hilary Blood. “Coconut palms against the bluest of skies, their foliage blown by the wind into a perfect circle; rainbow spray to the windward where the SouthEast Trades pile in the Indian Ocean up on the reefs; in the sheltered bays to the leeward the sun strikes through shallow water to the coral, and emerald-green, purple, orange, all the rich colours of the world, follow each other across the warm sea,” glowed Sir Hilary. “Its beauty is infinite.”
⁵⁹

A WARNING

In 1962, ownership of the islands changed hands, purchased by a Mauritian-Seychellois conglomerate calling itself Chagos-Agalega Ltd. Around the same time, Chagossians saw the introduction of a more flexible labor supply revolving around single male laborers from the Seychelles, as well as the “drift” of permanent inhabitants from Chagos to Mauritius, drawn by the allure of Mauritius’s “pavements and shop-windows, the cinemas and
football matches, the diversity of food and occupation.” Scott compared the movement to the migration of people in Great Britain from villages to cities after World War I, but emphasized, “it is still only a drift.”
⁶⁰

On the eve of the expulsion that no one in Chagos could have anticipated, Mauritian historian Auguste Toussaint wrote, “The insularity of this archipelago is total and, in this regard, Chagos differs from the Mascarenes and the Seychelles, which are linked with the rest of the world. The conditions of life there are quite specialized and even, believe me, unique.”
⁶¹

“The life that I had, compared to what I am experiencing now, David. All the time, I will think about my home because there I was well nourished and I didn’t eat anything preserved or stored. We ate everything fresh,” Rita told me.

“Doctors know that when we left the islands—they know—your health here isn’t the same. Here, we eat frozen food all the time. . . . But
laba
, no. Even if something is only three or four days old, it isn’t the same as fresh, David. . . .There we ate everything fresh.”

“There, I tell you, you didn’t have strokes, you didn’t have diabetes. Only rarely did an old person die. A baby, maybe once a year, an infant might die at birth, that’s it. Here, every day you hear about—I’m tired of hearing about death.”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“It’s not the same, David. . . .” Rita continued, “I—how can I say this—I didn’t leave there because the island closed. . . . I didn’t realize” that the islands were being closed down. “And then I had a little girl named Noellie.”

Writing in 1961, Governor Scott concluded his book with a sympathetic (if paternalistic and colonialist) description of the Chagossians. In it, one hears a chilling warning from one who as governor of Mauritius may well have known about developing plans aimed at realizing Lieutenant La Fontaine’s original vision for harboring a “great number” of vessels in Diego Garcia’s lagoon:

It must also be recognized, however, that ignorance of the way of life of the islanders might open the way to attempts to jerk them too rapidly into more highly organized forms of society, before they are ready. They have never been hurried. Their environment has
probably inoculated them with an intolerance towards hurry. . . . This is far from being a plea to make the Lesser Dependencies a kind of nature reserve for the preservation of the anachronistic. It is, however, very definitely a plea for full understanding of the islanders’ unique condition, in order to ensure that all that is wholesome and expansive in the island societies is preserved.
⁶²

*
Many today prefer the term
Chagossian
. In exile, the older name has often been used as a slur against the islanders.

Around Washington, DC naval circles, Stu Barber was known as being “exceptionally far-sighted.”
¹
Two decades before President Carter announced his foreign policy doctrine—the consequences of which the world is feeling to this day—that the United States would intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf against threats to its interests, Stu proposed his own version. He called it the “South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine and Force.” Developed during the 1960 presidential election campaign, Stu intended the idea “to be fed, somehow, to both Presidential candidates.”
²

During World War II, Stu served in naval intelligence on Ford Island, Hawai‘i. Rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, he spent most of his time tracking and analyzing statistics from land-based air combat operations in the Pacific—combat flights launched primarily from island bases. After the war, Stu worked for the war housing authority before returning to the Navy as a civilian analyst.

Working at the Pentagon, he helped found a somewhat obscure new office, the Long-Range Objectives Group, in 1955. Called “Op-93” by the Navy bureaucracy, the Group was charged with planning the Navy’s long-term technological, weapons, and strategic needs. The Group’s first annual report declared it “mandatory” to have a “courageous approach” to its mission.
³
According to its highest-ranking staff members, “the brains of the outfit” belonged to Stu.
⁴

Stu began work on his Strategic Island Concept idea around 1958. The premise of the plan was his recognition that in the age of decolonization, local peoples and the governments of newly independent nations were increasingly endangering the viability of many of the Navy’s overseas bases. One of his first memoranda warned that in the event of hostilities in the Indian Ocean region, “access via Suez, and undisputed access via Singapore or through the Indies may be denied, as may air communications other
than via Australia or Central Africa. Access to anchorages and airfields may be denied or limited north of the equator, as the product of anti-colonialist feelings or Soviet pressures.”
⁵

Stu realized that finding base locations somehow lacking “local problems” was the best long-term solution to maintaining the Navy’s positions overseas. The best place to find such locations, Stu saw, was on strategically located, lightly populated, isolated islands still controlled by friendly Western powers. In the words of former Navy official Vytautas Bandjunis, who later helped plan the base, Stu and soon others in the Navy realized that “remote colonial islands with small [colonial] populations would be the easiest to acquire, and would entail the least political headaches.”
⁶