Regina Mandarin died in exile in the UK, whose government had forcibly evacuated her and every one of her compatriots from their idyllic Indian Ocean homeland 40 years ago to make way for a US military base on Diego Garcia. She respected the people of the nation where she died but was highly critical of the Queen and successive British governments, which, she said, had put US military interests before her dream of returning home.

Until shortly before her death from pneumonia on February 16, aged 68, Mandarin could be seen outside 10 Downing Street, the High Court on London’s Strand or the Houses of Parliament – at the forefront of demonstrations by the Chagos Island Community Association, of which she was an executive member and something of a matriarch. Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos archipelago, roughly half way between Africa and Indonesia, and the one island of the archipelago still populated – although only by US armed forces, who lease it from the UK.