StapleMauritius
Rougaille
A tomato, thyme and ginger sauce made with fish, sausage or eggs, served over rice at half the tables on the island on any given evening.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
Chagossians
The people removed from their islands — Ilois families deported from the Chagos Archipelago between 1968 and 1973 to make room for a military base, who have spent half a century in Mauritius and Britain litigating for the right to go home.
Identity
Population: ≈ 10,000 including descendants, mostly in Mauritius, with communities in the Seychelles and in Crawley, England
Location: Cassis, Baie du Tombeau and Pointe aux Sables in Mauritius; Crawley and Manchester in the United Kingdom; the Chagos Archipelago itself remains closed to resettlement
Language: Chagossian Creole, closely related to Mauritian and Seychellois Creole and distinct in vocabulary and song
Language family: French-lexified creole
Traditional governance: No territorial authority; represented by the Chagos Refugees Group and other associations litigating in Mauritian, British and international forums.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Peros Banhos and Salomon islanders
Families from the northern atolls of the archipelago.
Diego Garcia families
Those removed from the largest island, now the site of the military base.
United Kingdom community
Families who took up British citizenship after 2002 and settled largely around Crawley.
Culture
Clothing: Ordinary island dress; sega performance costume kept as a marker of a distinct Chagossian identity within Mauritius.
Food: Coconut, fish and seabird in the islands; a cuisine remembered in exile with particular emphasis on the coconut crab, the fish of the lagoon and the dishes no longer obtainable.
Ceremonies: Sega chagossien with its own rhythms and songs of the islands; the annual commemoration of the deportation; wakes and Catholic observance.
Marriage customs: Catholic marriage and consensual union; marriage into the wider Mauritian population common in exile, which has complicated legal definitions of who counts as Chagossian.
Initiation rites: None formalised; the transmission of island memory, place names and songs to children born in exile has become the community's deliberate substitute.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Mauritius, at national rather than community level — 7 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
National dishMauritius
Dholl Puri
Flatbread stuffed with ground split peas, folded around bean curry and rougaille and eaten in the hand. Mauritius eats hundreds of thousands of these a day and they define the island's street food.
Serves Makes 8 · 2 hours
Street foodMauritius
Gateau Piment
Split pea fritters with chilli and coriander, sold by the bag at every roadside stall and bus station in Mauritius, eaten hot in bread with butter.
Serves Makes 30 · 45 minutes, plus 4 hours soaking
Festival & feastMauritius
Mauritian Biryani
Rice layered with marinated meat, potato and fried onion and sealed to steam, made for weddings and Eid. The Mauritian version uses more potato and less saffron than its Indian ancestor.
Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes, plus marinating
Regional specialityMauritius
Mine Frite
Fried noodles with vegetables, egg and meat, the Sino-Mauritian contribution to the national diet and available on every corner of Port Louis.
Serves 4 · 30 minutes
Regional specialityMauritius
Vindaye Poisson
also Vindaille, Mustard fish
Fish fried and then steeped in a mustard, turmeric and vinegar sauce with garlic and chilli, served cold. A Mauritian dish of Indo-Portuguese descent, made to keep.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes, plus 4 hours steeping
Drink & sweetMauritius
Alouda
Milk with basil seeds, agar jelly and vanilla, served ice cold from stalls at Port Louis market. Descended from Indian falooda and a fixture of a hot Mauritian afternoon.
Serves 4 · 20 minutes, plus soaking
Stories & Oral Literature
The RemovalHistorical account
Between 1968 and 1973 the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago, around 1,500 people, was removed so that Diego Garcia could be leased to the United States as a military base. Families returning from medical trips to Mauritius were told they could not go back; those still on the islands were shipped out, and their dogs were killed. They were landed at Port Louis with little compensation and no housing.
Fifty Years of CourtsLegal history
Chagossians have litigated continuously since the 1970s. British courts have ruled both ways; the International Court of Justice advised in 2019 that the detachment of the archipelago was unlawful and the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for its return to Mauritius. The base remains, resettlement remains barred, and the community's elders have been dying in exile throughout.
Proverbs
“The island remembers the feet that walked it.”
Attachment to place as a claim in itself.
“They took the land; they could not take the names.”
Place names and songs as retained property.
“A court is slower than a lifetime.”
Said by a community whose litigants keep dying first.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Catholic cosmology; identity rests on the islands themselves, and their inaccessibility has made them something close to a sacred landscape in Chagossian narrative.
Beliefs: Roman Catholicism; belief in spirits of the dead who remain at the abandoned island cemeteries, a recurring theme in testimony and song.
Ancestors: The inability to visit ancestral graves is central to the community's grievance; occasional supervised heritage visits since 2006 have been intensely emotional public events.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The Catholic saints
Patrons of the island chapels, now ruined
The abandoned dead
Those buried in the archipelago's cemeteries, unvisited for fifty years
The islands
Addressed in song as a person and a home
Architecture
Traditional settlements: The archipelago's plantation villages, now ruined, with chapel, cemetery, copra sheds and workers' housing; in exile, public housing estates in Mauritius and Britain.
Building techniques: Coral-block and timber construction with palm thatch in the islands; nothing distinctive in exile, which the community itself notes as a loss.
Village layout: Island villages strung along the lagoon shore with the copra works at the centre; exile housing allocated without regard to kinship, breaking the village pattern.
Artifacts
Chagossian sega recordings
Music heritage
Songs naming islands, people and the removal, recorded in exile.
Island place-name maps
Archive
Community-made maps recording names the official charts do not carry.
Copra plantation remains
Heritage site
Ruined chapels, cemeteries and works on Peros Banhos and Salomon.
Deportation-era documents
Archive
Records and correspondence central to five decades of litigation.
Historical Timeline
1780s–1960s
Coconut plantations worked by people of African and Malagasy descent create a settled island society over five generations.
1965
Britain detaches the archipelago from Mauritius to form the British Indian Ocean Territory.
1968–1973
The entire population is removed to Mauritius and the Seychelles.
2002
British citizenship granted to Chagossians born in the islands and, in stages, to descendants.
2019
The International Court of Justice advises that the detachment was unlawful; the UN General Assembly calls for return.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- International Court of Justice advisory opinion (2019)ICJ
- Minority Rights Group: ChagossiansMinority Rights Group International
- Chagos Refugees Group testimony and archivesChagos support organisations
Premium & scholarly sources