Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia by David Vine

Author:David Vine [Vine, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, Political Science, Human Rights, History, General
ISBN: 9781400838509
Google: 3ankJb0skpwC
Amazon: 0691149836
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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