Tyler McBrien
Liseby Elysé was born in 1953 on Peros Banhos, an island in the Chagos Archipelago. As she tells it, life was good on her Indian Ocean “paradise island”:
Everyone had a job, his family, and his culture. But all that we ate was fresh food. Ships which came from Mauritius brought all our goods. We received our groceries. We received all that we needed. We did not lack anything. In Chagos, everyone lived a happy life.
That is, until Western militaries came to town. In his book The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Britain’s Colonial Legacy, Philippe Sands tells the story of how, in the 1960s and 1970s, the United Kingdom and the United States forcefully expelled the Chagossian people from their ancestral homeland. Almost overnight, an administrator told Elysé and everyone she knew that they had to vacate their houses, leave most of their belongings, and board a ship to faraway Mauritius and elsewhere, beginning a perilous journey often crammed at the bottom of boats “like animals,” in Elysé’s words.
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