When a retired US Secretary of State Dean Acheson lamented, in 1962, that the UK “had lost an empire, but not yet found a role”, he clearly overlooked what role the fading power would soon play in handing one of its outposts to America’s defence complex: the little-known atoll of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean’s disputed Chagos archipelago. Per Philippe Sands’ new book, Chagos remains — but may soon cease to be — The Last Colony (2022) of Britain in Africa.

Two years before Acheson’s phrase, PM Harold Macmillan had wrapped up a month long tour of Britain’s African satrapies by famously pledging in Cape Town that his government would let the “winds of change” blow across the empire, thus effectively aligning the Tories’ posture towards decolonization with the more internationalist Labour party’s. Yet the right to self-determination that Macmillan’s speech wrestled with, codified that same year by the UN General Assembly’s resolution 1514, would soon collide with America’s geostrategic imperatives amidst the new postwar bipolar order. It would also collide, indirectly, with those of Britain — its main ally.

Chagos agreed to a deal and was paid handsomely

 As Mauritius (then the colony encompassing Chagos) lurched to independence that decade, the US coveted an air base nearby. The archipelago’s halfway location between Africa and Indonesia would prove the ideal look-out to monitor Soviet proxies in both continents. After some bilateral hand-wringing verging on blackmail (Sands quotes from files showing Macmillan’s intention to “frighten him with hope”), Mauritius soon-to-be PM Seewoosagur Ramgoolam came around to acknowledging Britain’s security interests in leasing Diego Garcia to the US. In 1965 — three years before Mauritius’ independence — he let go of the entire Chagos, which Britain turned into what remains to this day a British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Sands zeroes in on Britain’s stratagem, no doubt cruel, to consider Chagos’ 1,500 inhabitants at the time as contract workers — some were, actually. This laid the groundwork for deporting them between 1967 and 1973. He gives less weight to the fact that Ramgoolam’s government received £3 million as part of the deal, which wasn’t spent on bettering the lives of the Chagossian exiles.

Predictably for a barrister who goes by a jurisprudence stemming from these bodies, Sands (mistakenly) reads as settled law the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion and the UN General Assembly’s resolution. Both from 2019, these categorise Britain’s forced relocation of the Chagossians as a crime against humanity. Not only was Britain in the right at the time to uphold its own sovereignty by refusing to implement them (although it has since backtracked, making an overture to Mauritius this month), but the substance of these pronouncements remains hotly contested — and Sands knows it. Human beings have been relocated against their will since the dawn of time. That doesn’t — and shouldn’t — always qualify along with, say, the mass killing of an ethnic minority. If the Spanish government decides to build windmills in the place of my rural estate (akin to the rationale of then foreign secretary David Miliband, as revealed by Wikileaks, for a 20-year extension of the lease in 2016), I may be upset, but that doesn’t make it a crime against humanity.

The relocation was grim, and its consequences may keep rippling for a whilst. The underlying case — which Sands argues not on the individuals’ behalf but on that of Mauritius — is that of Liseby Elysé, who was 21 when she had to leave Peros Banhos with a soon-to-be stillborn son. This is the context framing the story at the book’s core. Seeing as the dogs on those islands were gassed, animal welfarists may even speak of a genocide. Mauritius — which admittedly pays Sands’ bills and to whom most of the displaced Chagossians pay allegiance — agreed, smartly, to have Chagos hived off to clear the way for its independence. It agreed to a deal and was paid handsomely. Would the Chagossians have been better off had none of this occurred? You’d have to discount the ability to live and travel across the Commonwealth, which Mauritius would have forfeited had it sought to keep Chagos within it. Will they be better off when they return? Sentimentally, yes — the islands are an economic wasteland — but the movement clamouring for a Chagos independent of both Britain and Mauritius bodes ill for those affected.

Post-colonial guilt has Sands embrace a noxious paternalism

In fact, one wonders whether Sands — a professor at my left-leaning alma mater in London — isn’t in thrall to a degree of post-colonial guilt that has him embrace a noxious paternalism towards his preferred victim group. On Valentine’s Day this year, Sands joined a group of Chagossians, including Elysé, in raising the Mauritian flag on Peros Banhos (in a Guardian mini-documentary, Sands seems too quick to lay a faulty connectivity on hacking by a British minesweeper nearby). Following the British government’s shift from flat refusal to openness to dialogue, Chagossians have never inched closer to achieving their core demand, the right to return to a decolonized Chagos. If they do so as an island part of Mauritius, should we cheer for them? Their long-melancholised island would be joining a nation enmeshed in ethnic strife for the better part of the last century. Chagossians — largely the descendants of indentured slaves per Sands’ own recognition — would lie at the bottom of the racial pyramid.

Sands seems excessively preoccupied with race — he speaks of “a rule for whites, another for blacks” whilst the book sells in the US under the more wokeish subtitle of “A Tale of Race, Exile, and Justice”. Yet he has no time and space for the racial injustices that blight the country into which he litigates for Chagossians to enter. When, in October 2018, a Financial Times report described Mauritius as “one of Africa’s most stable and multiracial democracies”, the paper had set a low bar by choosing the continent west of Mauritius as a benchmark. Creoles, the descendants of African slaves, make up just under 30 per cent of the population. According to a recent report by the UN’s Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, they face “deep-seated discrimination in all walks of life including housing, education and public office” at the hands of the Hindu majority descended from Indian labourers. If Mauritius let go of the French resistance to gathering data broken down by ethnicity, its caste system would emerge. Consider that the parliamentary seats of the different ethnic communities are capped by a “formula”.

For Literary Review, peace expert James Gow writes that the book is “structured more like a work of fiction than one of law, reinforcing the sense of an intent to manipulate”. He continues: “this is a political work, aimed at creating pressure for the advisory opinion” (referring to the ICJ’s faux ruling) “to be given practical effect”. A good-faith reading would ascribe Sands the motive of shifting British, and Western, opinion in favour of a political move already in the offing when the book headed to the presses. A more jaded one would relate Sands to the wider effort at making Britons feel guilty for colonialism, an effort stretching across every other former empire. Some of Sands’ readers will have guessed this. Others hoping that Britain can exorcise its guilt for subjecting Chagos by returning it to sovereignty may be sorely disappointed, for the stain Sands denounces is indelible.