By Nosmot Gbadamosi
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.
The highlights this week: An impeachment in Kenya, Mozambique votes, and a memoir of France’s dirty dealings in Africa.
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Britain Returns Chagos Islands to Mauritius
Shadow Home Affairs minister, Andrew Rosindell (2R) joins members of the Chagossian community as they gather with banners and placards outside Parliament on Oct. 7. Adrian Dennis / AFP
The United Kingdom said Thursday that it will transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, ending its last African colony and a decades-long acrimonious legal battle. The deal secures the future of a vital U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean as China competes for influence.
The Chagos Archipelago contains Diego Garcia, the largest of 58 islands and home to a joint U.K.-U.S. military base strategically positioned about halfway between East Africa and Southeast Asia. Diego Garcia is of huge importance to U.S. security interests in the Indo-Pacific. It allows surveillance of the Middle East and was critical to air operations during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Britain detached Chagos from Mauritius three years before its independence in 1968 and governed it as a new colony—the British Indian Ocean Territory. More than 1,000 inhabitants were forcibly evicted to build the military base in exchange for a $14 million discount on the U.K. purchase of Polaris nuclear missiles at the time—an act British officials now regard as a shameful episode in Britain’s colonial legacy. Mauritius was paid some $8.4 million in compensation.
For years, Britain dismissed various court rulings on the islanders’ right to return home. In 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion noting that “the process of decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed” and that the U.K. had violated United Nations resolutions that prohibited the breaking up of colonies before granting independence. In his book The Last Colony, Philippe Sands, who consulted on the Chagossians’ 40-year legal case, wrote that neither the ICJ nor the U.N. General Assembly had the power to force the U.K. and United States to comply with international laws.
Britain and Mauritius started formal negotiations over Chagos in 2022, at a time when African leaders began presenting a unified voice within the General Assembly against what they perceived as hypocrisy from the U.K. and United States, which were ignoring multiple international court rulings on Chagos while calling for African nations to support their stance against Russia’s colonization and war in Ukraine.
Perhaps drawing on those criticisms, Labour Member of Parliament Tim Roca said the Chagos agreement “sends a message to aggressors like [Russian President] Vladimir Putin that negotiation and dialogue are the ways to resolve disputes in the 21st century, not war.”
Opposition figures from the U.K. Conservative Party and senior U.S. Republicans worry that ceding Chagos to Mauritius gives Beijing an opportunity to build its own base there. U.S. Sen. James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the transfer of sovereignty “gives in to Chinese lawfare and yields to pressure from unaccountable international institutions like the International Court of Justice at the expense of U.S. and U.K. strategic and military interests.”
However, Mauritius is the only African nation other than Eswatini that’s not part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Instead, the likeliest power to benefit from the sovereignty agreement is India, a U.S. ally that has the strongest trade ties with Mauritius and is keen to counter China in the Indian Ocean, argued Samuel Bashfield, a defense researcher at the Australia India Institute who follows Mauritian security partnerships. India has built a military facility on the Mauritian island of Agaléga to keep watch on China, and most Mauritians have Indian ancestry, wrote David Vallance, a research associate at the Lowy Institute.
But there are other contested colonies that U.K. officials now fear losing. Former British Armed Forces Minister Mark Francois said the deal would “embolden nations like Argentina to press for control of the Falklands.” Britain still has 13 contested territories in regions from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, including Gibraltar and the Cayman Islands. On the other hand, by ignoring the African Union and Mauritius, the West gave China the upper hand in projecting itself as an anti-colonial ally of African nations. China ramped up investments and signed a free trade agreement with Mauritius the same year as the ICJ ruling—its first free trade agreement with an African country.
“The status quo was clearly not sustainable,” British Foreign Secretary David Lammy told lawmakers in the House of Commons on Monday. “A binding judgment against the U.K. seemed inevitable.”
Thursday’s deal was welcomed by the White House, the African Union, and Chagossians who can now return to homes in Peros Banhos and Salomon Atoll.
Marie Sabrina Jean, the chair of the Chagos Refugees Group in the U.K., said the agreement “represents the culmination of decades of our efforts.” Jean is a second-generation Chagossian born in Mauritius. “I have often stated that if the British government were to expel me, I could return to my country of origin. My father, however, who was born on Peros Banhos, would have nowhere to go as neither Mauritius nor England is his homeland. Today, I can joyfully tell my dad, ‘You can now go home,’” she told Foreign Policy.
The deal, however, bans resettlement on the island of Diego Garcia because Mauritius has pledged to honor the U.S. lease for 99 years with possible extension.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote in an email statement that exclusion of Diego Garcia from the deal continued “the crimes long into the future.” “It does not guarantee that the Chagossians will return to their homeland, appears to explicitly ban them from the largest island, Diego Garcia, for another century, and does not mention the reparations they are all owed to rebuild their future,” said Clive Baldwin, HRW’s senior legal advisor. The activist group Chagossian Voices denounced the deal as a “betrayal.” Chagossians have accused the British and Mauritian governments of excluding them from negotiations and protested outside the U.K. Parliament on Monday for the right to self-determination.
Chagossians were brought to the archipelago as enslaved people from Africa and indentured laborers from India (another system of forced labor) by Britain and France, the latter of which ceded Chagos to the U.K. more than 200 years ago. A British government memo at the time of the expulsion dismissed the islanders as “some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure.”
Conservation also became an instrument to keep Chagossians away, according to U.K. Foreign Office records published by WikiLeaks in 2010. A Foreign Office official told Washington in a cable that setting up a “marine protected area” would “effectively end the islanders’ resettlement claims.” The marine reserve was declared illegal by a U.N. court because it voided Mauritius’s fishing rights.
Diego Garcia had the largest number of people living there at the time of expulsion, and some consider it the only island that can reasonably be inhabited today without great expense. Some Chagossians living in Britain and the Seychelles wanted to remain British citizens but be allowed to return home to Diego Garcia. On paper, that dispute has only been kicked further down the line.
Wednesday, Oct. 9: Mozambique holds a presidential election.
Nigeria’s Federal High Court in Abuja will rule on whether to release Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan on bail.
Thursday, Oct. 10: Rwanda releases inflation data for September.
Sunday, Oct. 13, to Tuesday, Oct. 15: U.S. President Joe Biden has postponed his first trip to the African continent due to the impending landfall of Hurricane Milton in Florida. He had planned to visit Angola this weekend but will reschedule the trip and has pledged to visit before the end of his term.
Saied wins flawed Tunisia election. Tunisian President Kais Saied secured a second term in office on Sunday gaining 91 percent of votes in an election with just 28.8 percent turnout—the lowest since Tunisia gained independence from France almost 70 years ago. Saied had used the country’s legal system to imprison and arrest nearly all opposition candidates in the run up to the ballot.
Mozambican elections. Mozambicans vote on a new president on Wednesday. For the first time, the Frelimo party, which has ruled Mozambique since the country gained independence from Portugal in 1975, is fielding a presidential candidate born after independence, 47-year-old Daniel Chapo.
Current President Filipe Nyusi has served his two-term limit, and Chapo has sought to distance himself from the corruption that has plagued Frelimo. He is competing against three opposition leaders and is widely expected to win. His rivals are Venâncio Mondlane, an independent; Ossufo Momade of the main opposition Renamo party; and Lutero Simango, competing for the presidency for the first time under the banner of the country’s third-largest party, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique. The exclusion of some opposition parties from the vote is likely to trigger unrest, intelligence firm Pangea-Risk warned in an email to subscribers.
Ethiopia replaces president. The Ethiopian parliament approved Taye Astike Selassie as the country’s new president on Monday. The role of president is largely ceremonial, with power concentrated in the office of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Taye was previously foreign minister and replaces the country’s first female head of state, Sahle-Work Zewde, a former U.N. diplomat who in recent years has fallen out with Abiy over ongoing conflicts in Oromia and Amhara.
Kenyan impeachment. Kenyan lawmakers voted on Tuesday to impeach Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua on corruption allegations. There were 281 votes for impeachment, 44 votes against and one abstention. Lawmakers say Gachagua amassed assets worth 5.2 billion Kenyan shillings (about $40 million) in two years, despite an annual salary of $93,000. Divisions between Gachagua and President William Ruto arose following youth-led anti-government protests that began in June. Gachagua and several other politicians accused of funding the protests were investigated by police last month.
A joint scientific committee will review Madagascar’s request that France return the skull of King Toera, who was beheaded by French troops in 1897 during a rebellion against colonization. The committee will also consider a request to return the remains of two chiefs from Madagascar’s Sakalava ethnic group, all held in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. It follows a law passed in December 2023 approving the return of human remains less than 500 years old and held in French public collections.
France’s alleged dirty dealings. A new memoir by former French lobbyist Robert Bourgi claims he facilitated millions of dollars in cash transfers from Francophone African leaders to French presidents in his 40-year career.
Published late last month, ‘Ils savent que je sais tout’: Ma vie en Françafrique (‘They Know I Know Everything’: My Life in Françafrique) alleges that Jacques Chirac’s 1995 presidential election campaign was financed by “at least $10 million” from various African leaders including Gabon’s Omar Bongo, the Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré, and Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko.
Botswana’s toxic diamond work. Women polishing diamonds for De Beers in Botswana are working without mandatory protective equipment and face sexual harassment, Louise Donovan reports in an investigation by New Lines and the Fuller Project. At least eight women have accused a manager at Gaborone-based contractor Dharm Cutting Works of sexual harassment and assault. De Beers has said it is conducting an independent investigation into the allegations.
Mali’s gold-funded insurgencies. Lacking jobs in their hometowns, young men from Nigeria’s North West region are migrating to Mali to work in gold mines located in rebel-controlled areas. Few make it back home after working in unregulated mines or getting caught in deadly fighting, Abiodun Jamiu reports in an investigation for HumAngle. Gold mining has become a source of income for rebels fueling terrorism in Mali.
