Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (6 page)

THE PLANTATION SYSTEM

Despite being under British colonial rule, Mauritius and its dependencies surprisingly retained their French laws, language, religion, and ways of life—including that of enslaving Africans. “Mauritius became formally British but remained very French,” explains one historian.
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Slavery thus remained the defining feature of life in Chagos from Le Normand’s initial settlement until the abolition of slavery in Mauritius and its dependencies in 1835. Enslaved labor built the archipelago’s infrastructure, produced its wealth (mostly in coconut oil), and formed the overwhelming majority of inhabitants. Colonial statistics from 1826 illustrate the nature of the islands as absolute slave plantation societies relying on a small number of Franco-Mauritians and free people of African or mixed ancestry to rule much larger populations of enslaved Africans.

The considerable gender imbalance in the islands is also important to note. Although it had generally equalized by the mid-twentieth century, the imbalance may help explain the power and authority Chagossian women came to exercise, as we will see in the story ahead.

Plantation owners at the time described their enslaved workforce as “happy and content” and their treatment as being of “the greatest gentleness.” The laborers surely disagreed, working “from sunrise to sunset for six days a week” under the supervision of overseers.
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However, outside these grueling workdays, each enslaved person was allowed to maintain a “
petite plantation
”—a small garden—to raise crops and animals and to save small sums of money from their sale. Significantly, these garden plots marked the beginnings of formal Chagossian land tenure.
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T
ABLE 1.1
Chagos Population, 1826.

Society in Chagos had little in common with the Maldivian islands and Sri Lanka several hundred miles away, sharing much more with societies thousands of miles away in the Americas from southern Brazil to the islands of the Caribbean and north to the Mason-Dixon line. What these disparate places (as well as Natal, Zanzibar, Fiji, Queensland, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Réunion, and others) shared was the plantation system.
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With the plantation system of agriculture well established in the sugar fields of Mauritius by the end of the eighteenth century, Franco-Mauritian entrepreneurs applied the same technology in Chagos. Like societies from Bahia to Barbados and Baltimore, Chagos had all the major features of the plantation world: a mostly enslaved labor force, an agriculture-based economy organized around large-scale capitalist plantations supplying specialized products to distant markets, political control emanating from a distant European nation, a population that was generally not self-sustaining and required frequent replenishment (usually by enslaved peoples and, later, indentured laborers), and elements of feudal labor control. Still, Chagos exhibited important particularities: Unlike most of the Americas, society was based on slavery and slavery alone. Similarly, there was no preexisting indigenous population to force into labor and to replace when they were killed off. And perhaps because of its late settlement, the plantations in Chagos never employed European indentured laborers, or
engagés
.
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Likewise, although Chagos was an agriculture-based economy organized around capitalist plantations supplying a specialized product—copra—to distant markets, the majority of the copra harvest was not produced for European markets but was instead for the Mauritian market. The islands were thus a dependent part of the Mauritian sugar cane economy, which was itself a dependent part of the French and, later, British economies. Put another way, Chagos was a colony of a colony, a dependency of a dependency: Chagos helped meet Mauritius’s oil needs to keep its monocrop sugar industry satisfying Europe’s growing sweet tooth.

From the workers’ perspective, the plantations were in some ways “as much a factory as a farm,” employing the “factory-like organization of agricultural labor into large-scale, highly coordinated enterprises.”
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While some of the work was agricultural in nature, much of it required the repetitive manual processing of hundreds of coconuts a day by women, men, and children in what was essentially an outdoor factory area at the center of each plantation. Still, as in the Caribbean, most of the work was performed on a “task” basis, generally allowing laborers to control the pace and rhythm of their work. Plantation owners—who mostly lived far away in Mauritius—probably viewed the (relatively) less onerous task system as the best way to maintain discipline and prevent greatly feared slave revolts, given Chagos’s isolation and the tiny number of Europeans.
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Authority over work regimens was carefully—and at times brutally—controlled, helping to shape a rigid color-based plantation hierarchy that mirrored the one in the French Caribbean. This was also undoubtedly related to owners’ fears of revolt, which in Mauritius and the Seychelles made “domestic discipline,” armed militias, and police the backbone of society.
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Plantation owners came from the
grand blanc
—literally, “big white”—ruling class and ran the settlements essentially as patriarchal private estates. “Responsibility for the administration of the settlements, before and after emancipation, was vested in the proprietors,” explains former governor Scott. “For all practical purposes, however, it was normally delegated to the manager on the spot, the
administrateur
,” who was usually a relative or member of the
petit blanc
—“little white”—class, running the plantation from the master’s house, the
grand case
.
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Petit blanc or “mulatto” submanagers and other staff recruited to Chagos helped run the islands, and were rewarded with better salaries, housing, and other privileges rarely extended to laborers. The submanagers in turn delivered daily work orders and controlled the workers through a group of
commandeurs
—overseers—primarily of African descent who were given some privileges and, after emancipation, paid higher wages.

As on slave plantations elsewhere, owners and their subordinates generally ruled largely through fear.
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Despite the constraints on their lives, some laborers achieved a degree of upward mobility by becoming artisans and performing other specialized tasks. The vast majority of the population were general laborers of African descent at the bottom of the work and status hierarchy in a system that, as in the U.S. South, became engrained in the social order.

CHANGE AND CONTINUITY

Slavery was finally abolished in Mauritius and its dependencies in 1835. After emancipation, a period of apprenticeship continued for about four years. The daily routine of plantation life during and after the apprenticeship period changed according to the dictates of each island’s administrator. On some islands, like Diego Garcia, life and conditions changed little. On others, daily work tasks were reduced in accordance with stipulations ordered by officials in Mauritius.
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Following emancipation, plantation owners in Mauritius began recruiting large numbers of Indians to the sugar cane fields as a way to keep labor costs down and replace formerly enslaved laborers leaving the plantations en masse; by century’s end, Indians constituted a majority in Mauritius. While plantation owners in Chagos also imported Indian indentured laborers, Indian immigration was relatively light and people of African descent remained in the majority.
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So, too, Chagos did not experience the large-scale departure of formerly enslaved Africans (in fact, at least some of those previously enslaved on sugar plantations in Mauritius appear to have emigrated to work on Diego Garcia).
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This demographic stability, in such contrast to Mauritius, needs explanation: Ultimately it seems to point to a change in the quality of labor relations and the development of a society rooted in the islands. Newly freed Africans and the Indian indentured laborers who joined them massively outnumbered the plantation management of mostly European descent in a setting of enormous isolation. For management, this demographic imbalance and the lack of a militia or police force like the ones in Mauritius and the Seychelles made the threat of an uncontrollable labor revolt frighteningly real. Indeed the islands had a history of periodic labor protest. In one case in 1856, four workers who had been “kidnapped from Cochin” revolted and killed an abusive manager of Six Islands.
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These facts combined with gradual improvements in salaries and workload (especially
compared to the brutal work of cutting sugar cane) suggest that despite the continuation of the plantation system after emancipation, the general nature of labor relations probably improved noticeably in favor of the Chagossians. Even before the end of the apprentice period, a colonial investigator charged with supervising apprenticeship conditions found the work to be “of a much milder nature than that which is performed on the Sugar Plantations of Mauritius” and the workers to be “a more comfortable body of people” due “to so much of their own time being employed to their own advantage” (he also credited the archipelago’s absence of both outsiders and liquor).
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In general it appears that Chagossians gradually struck what for a plantation society was a relatively—and I stress the word
relatively
—good work bargain. Indeed more than a century later, in 1949, a visiting representative of the Mauritian Labour Office commented on the generally “patriarchal” relations between management and labor in Chagos, “dating back to what I imagine would be the slave days—by this I do not imply any oppression but rather a system of benevolent rule with privileges and no rights.”
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A “
CULTURE DES ÎLES
”

By the middle of the nineteenth century, a succession of laws increasingly protected workers from the continuation of any slavery-like conditions. Around 1860, wages were the equivalent of 10 shillings a month, a dollop of rum, and a “twist of tobacco if times were good.” Rations, which were treated as part of wages, totaled 11–14 pounds a week of what was usually rice. Two decades later, wages had increased to 16 shillings a month for male coconut laborers and 12 shillings a month for women. Some women working in domestic or supervisory jobs received more. Men working the coconut oil mills earned 18–20 shillings a month and had higher status than “rat-catchers, stablemen, gardeners, maize planters, toddy-makers and pig-and fowl-keepers.” A step higher in the labor hierarchy, blacksmiths, carpenters, assistant carpenters, coopers, and junior commandeurs made 20–32 shillings.
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Management often paid bonuses in the form of tobacco, rum, toddy, and, for some, coconut oil. Housing was free, and at East Point the manager “introduced the system of allowing labourers to build their own houses, if they so opted, the management providing all the materials.” The system apparently proved a success, creating “quite superior dwellings,” with wood frames and thatched coconut palm leaves, and “a sense
of proprietorship” for the islanders.
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By 1880, the population had risen to around 760.

“As a general rule the men enjoy good health, and seem contented and happy, and work cheerfully,” reported a visiting police magistrate. Fish was “abundant on nearly all the Islands, and on most of them also pumpkins, bananas, and a fruit called the ‘papaye,’ grow pretty freely.”
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Ripe coconuts were freely available upon request. Anyone could use boats and nets for fishing. Many kept gardens and generally management encouraged chicken and pig raising.

Although the exploitation and export of the coconut—in the form of copra, oil, whole coconuts, and even husks and residual
poonac
solids from the pressing of oil—dominated life in Chagos, the islands also produced and traded in honey, guano, timber, wooden ships, pigs, salt fish, maize and some vegetable crops, wooden toys, model boats, and brooms and brushes made from coconut palms. Guano—bird feces used as fertilizer—in particular became an increasingly important export for the Mauritian sugar fields in the twentieth century, reaching one-third of Diego’s exports by 1957.
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For about six years in the 1880s, two companies attempted to turn Diego Garcia into a major coal refueling port for steamer lines crossing the Indian Ocean. About the same time, the British Navy became interested in obtaining a site on the island.
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The Admiralty never followed through, and the companies soon closed as financial failures, having faced the “promiscuous plundering of coconuts” by visiting steamship passengers and revolt from a group of imported English, Greek, Italian, Somali, Chinese, and Mauritian laborers—which required the temporary establishment of a Mauritian police post.
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