When Cedric Joseph, goalkeeper of the Chagos Islands national team, walks around his hometown of Crawley in West Sussex, he often wears his football jersey whether it’s match day or not.
“Even when I’m not going to training I wear the shirt. I’m proud,” he says.
“People then ask me questions. Some people don’t know anything about the place. I know the history so I can tell them.
“I tell them it’s an island paradise, heaven on earth.”
Joseph, 19, has never set foot on the land he represents.
Growing up in Mauritius, he would beg his grandmother to tell him stories about her homeland, but she would often dodge the question.
Joseph’s grandmother was born on the Chagos Islands, an Indian Ocean archipelago. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the UK evicted the entire population to make way for a military airbase operated jointly with the United States.
Many of the evicted Chagossians were sent to Mauritius,…
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