What if Washington wanted one of our islands? Chagos and Emancipation’s unfinished business

As we reflect on August 1, and Emancipation, imagine an island with a church, a cemetery and children running beneath coconut trees. Families have lived there for generations and their dead lie within earshot of the sea. Then, in distant capitals, men unfold a map and decide that the island is strategically indispensable. Its people are told, perhaps not in words, but unmistakably in policy, that their homes obstruct security, their history can be folded into a suitcase, and their belonging matters less than a military base.

Would international law save them? Would the flag above the administrative building matter? Would a great power see a living community, or merely useful land with inconvenient people upon it?

The Chagossians know the answer. This Emancipation Day, the Caribbean must know it too and act upon it.

Their history should not feel foreign to us. Chagos was peopled through the same violent currents that created Caribbean societies. Enslaved Africans were taken there to labour on coconut plantations and indentured workers from India later joined them. From bondage and displacement, they made a people, families, churches, cemeteries, music, memory and a French-based Creole language. They built a life around copra and the sea.

They are our cousins across an ocean, an Afro-Asian Creole plantation people. Lloyd Best taught us that the plantation is not merely a place but rather it is a structure of power. On Chagos, that structure survived, only the crop changed from coconuts to strategic geography.

In 1965, three years before Mauritius became independent, Britain detached the Chagos Archipelago and created the British Indian Ocean Territory. The United States wanted Diego Garcia for a military facility and Britain supplied the territory. The base, however, required a fiction, that these islands had no permanent people whose rights had to be respected.

Between 1968 and 1973, the Chagossians were expelled. Some who travelled for medical care or holidays were simply prevented from returning. Supplies were restricted. Families were shipped to Mauritius and Seychelles, where many were deposited into severe poverty. Their dogs were killed, an act remembered not only for its cruelty, but for the warning it conveyed.

The official language was scarcely less brutal. In 1966, a senior British diplomat referred to the islanders as “some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure.”

Read that sentence again. It was written in 1966, not 1666.

Three centuries after slave codes converted African people into property, imperial officials converted an entire Creole society into an administrative inconvenience. The planter’s whip became a memorandum and the auction block became a map room. The colour line entered the ministry, the defence agreement and the confidential file.

Official records counted workers and dependants. They did not count the midwives who delivered generations, the mothers who kept Creole alive in exile, or the women who rebuilt families in Mauritian settlements without land, security or recognition. Dispossession had a gender, and much of its suffering was made silent.

Yet the Chagossians refused to disappear. They organised, marched and litigated across decades. Their struggle forced courts and international institutions to name what power preferred to blur. As Chagossian leader Olivier Bancoult has insisted, Chagos is not merely an “ancestral home.” It is home.

In 2019, the International Court of Justice concluded that the decolonisation of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed and that Britain should end its administration of Chagos as rapidly as possible. The United Nations General Assembly endorsed that opinion by 116 votes to six. The law did not return the islands, but it stripped empire of the comfort of pretending that the injustice was settled.

In May 2025, Britain and Mauritius signed an agreement recognising Mauritian sovereignty over the entire archipelago while preserving British authority over Diego Garcia for an initial 99 years, with possible extensions. Mauritius would be able to resettle Chagossians on other islands but not Diego Garcia, the island at the centre of their removal.

Chagossians are not of one mind about the agreement. Some regard it as the most realistic route to sovereignty, resettlement and material support. Others condemn a bargain negotiated without meaningful Chagossian consent and one that keeps the heart of their homeland closed. Both positions deserve to be heard. What cannot be defended is the recurring assumption that the people most injured may be consulted last.

Then, in February 2026, President Donald Trump posted: “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” The words carried no legal authority in Britain yet American approval was treated as indispensable. The implementing bill fell when Parliament was prorogued on April 29, and the signed treaty remains unratified. Once again, the preferences of a great power acquired more practical weight than the voices of a displaced people.

The question in this headline is therefore not hypothetical for the Caribbean. In 1941, Britain granted the United States 99-year base rights across British Caribbean territories, including Antigua, without effective West Indian consent. At Chaguaramas, Eric Williams later mobilised against an imperial bargain inherited by Trinidad and Tobago. The land eventually came home.

Diego Garcia is Chaguaramas without the return.

Nor is this merely history. Great-power rivalry is returning to our seas through military access, surveillance systems, submarine cables, shipping routes, seabed resources and digital infrastructure. Climate change adds another danger as these islands may be valued as strategic platforms even while the people who inhabit them struggle for financing to survive. The Chagos precedent whispers a warning, your land is yours only until someone with a larger map declares another use for it.

International law matters and Chagossian legal victories preserved truth, built legitimacy and narrowed the room for imperial denial. But law without organised power can become only a beautifully written record of justice postponed. Small states must convert principle into leverage through unity, diplomacy, economic strategy and the willingness to become inconvenient.

Emancipation ended the legal ownership of our bodies. It did not automatically end the imperial assumption that Black and brown communities may be rearranged whenever powerful states find their land useful.

August- Emancipation- must therefore be both commemoration and warning. We should look not only backward at chains once broken, but outward at maps still being redrawn over the heads of small peoples.

The Chagossians are still waiting to go home. Their exile asks the Caribbean a question we cannot safely dismiss as distant. When a small people’s home collides with a great power’s strategy, who is permitted to count as fully human?

• Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus