The small tin-roofed verandah on Route des Cassis is full of excited chatter in Creole, almost the entire neighbouring chanty-town of the same name in Mauritian capital of Port Louis throngs to enter the tiny barrack.

The office is plain and makeshift. When their leader Olivier Bancoult calls from London to announce the verdict they have waited 40 years to hear, the patient faces waiting around the dining-cum-meeting table break into leathery grins.

The Chagossians’ longstanding struggle attained fruition earlier this week when for the third — and final time, a British appeals court upheld a 2006 judgement by the country’s highest judicial instance, its high court, declaring that the British government must close the dirtiest chapter of its colonial history by returning 4000-odd former coconut farmers to their home of five generations: the British Indian Ocean territory (BIOT) of Chagos.

Between 1965 and 1973, 2000 Chagossians, whom classifed British diplomats in classified notes referred to as ‘Tarzans and Man Fridays”, underwent psychological terror and finally, forcible eviction.

In return for a discount on Polaris rockets, Washington leased the largest island Diego Garcia, while the British government pretended to the international community that the islands had always been uninhabited. The Chagossians were dumped on the shores of Mauritius and Seychelles.

In 2000 and with the help of none less than Nelson Mandela’s attorney Sir Sydney Kentridge, Bancoult launched his daring legal process in British courts. When Britain’s highest judicial instance, the high court, became the second in the country to pronounce the eviction illegal, the desperate British Foreign Office turned to the Queen.

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