evidence: 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. [...] 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."