Memories of Chagos, Clement Siatous

The Artist:

On the 17th January 1947, like his parents and grand-parents before him, Clement Siatous was born in Peros Banhos. At the age of five he moved to Diego Garcia and stayed until the coconut plantations were closed down. Since then he has been living on the outskirts of the Mauritian capital Port Louis. He started painting in reaction to the British policy of trying to hide the fact that there used to be a settled population in the Chagos archipelago. He is therefore completing no less than forty pictures based on his memories of how life was like in the Chagos archipelago. The list of paintings below is therefore not complete, but they are still for sale. He intends, whenafter being able to finance the remaining of the project, to establish a fund for the defavourized Chagossian children growing up in poor conditions due to what happened to their parents. In 1998 he was decorated with the Mauritius Star and Key (MSK) for an exhibition in Port Louis the year before.

1) The village of Peros Banhos. Children are going to school in the morning. Here they are pictured outside the ‘gran kaz’, the house of the plantation-manager.

2) Chagossian workers collecting and peeling coconuts before they are to be dried in the ‘kalorifer’

3) The ’Kalorifer’ in Diego Garcia. Women and men are working together while the ‘kommander’ in his white uniform is overlooking the process of opening and chopping up the coconuts.

4) The cocnuts were left to dry in the sun. In case of heavy rain, mobile roofs could be pushed over the produce for protection. This is from Diego Garcia, and at the back from the left you can see a vegetable garden, an office, a shop and the building where the finished copra was stored

5) Embarking of copra. The painting illustrates the work of loading copra onboard the ship ‘Mauritius’ from a quai in Peros Banhos

6) Women clearing the field on Diamon Island, one of the smaller islands of Peros Banhos. The ‘kommander’ dressed in white in the centre of the picture used a long stick to indicate the size of the area to be cleared by each woman. The coconuts gathered on the smaller islands were brought by boats to the central plantations