People & Culture

Seychelles counts 115 islands, though the constitution lists 155 once every islet, rock and reef is added in, scattered across the western Indian Ocean roughly 1,500 kilometres east of the African mainland. What sets the place apart from every other archipelago at this latitude is what the islands are made of. The forty-two granitic inner islands, clustered on the shallow Seychelles Bank, are the only oceanic islands on earth built from continental granite rather than from volcanic rock. They are not the tips of undersea volcanoes but fragments of Gondwana, sheared off during the break-up of the ancient supercontinent and left stranded in open ocean as India and Madagascar drifted apart, with the granite itself dated by zircon geochronology to roughly 750 million years ago, long before the rifting that eventually set the islands adrift. Beyond the bank lie the low flat coralline outer islands, built from coral rather than from continental crust, a second archipelago within the same nation with an entirely different geological birth. No one lived on any of these islands before Europeans arrived. Seychelles has no indigenous population, no pre-colonial kingdom and no oral history reaching back before the eighteenth century, since every Seychellois today descends from someone who came by ship. That absence of people did not mean the islands were unknown. Long before any European set foot on Praslin, a strange double-lobed seed, the largest produced by any plant on earth and weighing up to twenty-five kilograms, was washing up on the beaches of the Maldives, India, Sri Lanka and the Malay world, with no one able to say where it grew. Malay legend placed its source in a submarine forest at the navel of the seas, the Maldivian sultanate treated every nut that washed ashore as royal property, and one sultan reportedly sentenced to death anyone caught keeping one for themselves. European royalty paid extraordinary sums for specimens sourced through that trade, since the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II is said to have paid four thousand gold florins for a single nut, and a Dutch admiral received one as a diplomatic gift from the Sultan of Bantam in 1602. The mystery held until a French expedition under Marc Joseph Marion du Fresne finally identified the living palm and its source on Praslin and neighbouring Curieuse in 1768, the only two places on the planet where the coco de mer grows wild. The grove where it still grows, the Vallee de Mai on Praslin, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983 for its almost unaltered stand of the palm forest that produced, for two centuries, one of the most valuable curiosities traded across the Indian Ocean. Arab traders working the Indian Ocean's spice and slave routes are thought to have known of the islands long before any European chart recorded them, likely through the coco de mer trade, though how early is impossible to pin down from surviving sources. The first documented European sighting came from Vasco da Gama's fleet, where the scrivener Thome Lopes recorded an elevated island in March 1503, almost certainly Silhouette, which the expedition marked on its charts as the Tres Irmaos, the three brothers. Portuguese navigators saw no reason to settle. The next recorded visit came more than a century later, in January 1609, when the English East India Company ship Ascension put in, its crew becoming the first Europeans known to have set foot on Seychellois soil before sailing on without founding anything. France claimed the archipelago in 1756 and named the main island after Jean Moreau de Sechelles, finance minister to Louis XV, a naming that stuck to the whole nation. Settlement did not follow for another fourteen years, since the ship Thelemaque landed the first colonists on 27 August 1770, a party of fifteen white settlers, eight Africans and five Indians who began clearing land for plantations. What followed was a colonial economy built on forced labour, since French planters imported enslaved people from Madagascar and the East African coast to grow the coconut, cinnamon and later vanilla that Seychelles exported for the next two centuries, and the demographic imprint of that trade still shapes the population today. Britain and France fought over the islands through the Napoleonic Wars, and the man who steered Seychelles through that period, the Chevalier Jean Baptiste Queau de Quinssy, became one of the more unusual figures in the colonial Indian Ocean. When the British frigate Orpheus captured the islands on 16 May 1794, Quinssy negotiated a capitulation generous enough to leave French law and local self-government intact, then repeated the trick each time a British squadron reappeared, by most accounts five or six times before Britain's final and permanent annexation in 1811. Between British visits he ran the colony as a practical neutral, raising the French tricolour when a French ship approached and the Union Jack when a British one did, a strategy that earned him a nickname as the Talleyrand of the Indian Ocean and kept Seychelles almost entirely out of the fighting consuming the rest of the region. Slavery was formally abolished in the British colony in 1835, but the trade did not stop on the East African coast, and Seychelles took on an unusual second role as a result. Through the 1860s and into the 1870s, Royal Navy patrols intercepted Arab dhows carrying enslaved people and brought their human cargo to Mahe instead, and sources differ on the total, giving figures from roughly 2,400 up to nearly 2,900 people landed as Liberated Africans between 1861 and 1874. Many of the children among them were sent to a mission school founded in 1876 in the highlands above Port Glaud, known as Venn's Town, where they were taught carpentry, gardening and scripture until the mission closed in 1889. The walls and foundations of five of its buildings still stand today. The islands' remoteness gave the British Empire another use for them, as a prison without bars for political prisoners too dangerous to keep close to home. Prempeh I, the Asantehene of the Asante kingdom, was exiled here in 1896 after the sack of Kumasi and spent twenty-four years in the custody of five successive governors before he was allowed home. King Mwanga II of Buganda was deposed and exiled to Seychelles in 1899 and died there in 1903, worshipping at the same small Anglican church where he sometimes sat alongside his fellow exile King Kabalega of Bunyoro. Decades later, in 1956, Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus was exiled to the islands by the British over his alleged support for the EOKA insurgency and held for just over a year before his release. Egyptian, Palestinian, Zanzibari, Maldivian and Malaysian political prisoners passed through Seychelles at various points across the same century. Furthest from Mahe of all the outer islands sits Aldabra, the world's largest raised coral atoll and, since 1982, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right. Its isolation preserved something almost nowhere else survived, a population of giant tortoises numbering well over a hundred thousand, several times the number left in the Galapagos and the last large population anywhere after hunting wiped out every other Indian Ocean island's tortoises. That isolation nearly ended in the 1960s. Britain, weighing sites for a joint Anglo-American military airbase in the Indian Ocean, had settled on Aldabra as its preferred site by 1965, with the BBC also angling to build a transmission tower there. The Royal Society sent two scientists, David Stoddart and Chris Wright, to survey the atoll alongside the military's own team in 1966, and the ecological case they built, warning that the airfield would wipe out the atoll's flightless rail along with much else, grew into a campaign that outlasted the military's patience and budget. Britain abandoned the plan in November 1967, and the Royal Society leased the atoll and opened a permanent research station there in 1971. Seychelles became independent from Britain on 29 June 1976, with James Mancham as its first president. He did not last a year, since on 5 June 1977, while Mancham was overseas, supporters of France-Albert Rene seized power in a coup, and Rene ran Seychelles as a one-party socialist state under a constitution adopted in 1979. The most extraordinary attempt to reverse it came on 25 November 1981, when a group of South African mercenaries under Colonel Mike Hoare flew into Mahe posing as a touring rugby and beer-drinking club, their rifles hidden beneath toys meant for local orphanages. A customs officer found a weapon before the group had even cleared the airport, and a six-hour firefight followed before the surviving mercenaries hijacked an Air India Boeing 707 and forced it to fly them to Durban. One Seychellois soldier and one mercenary were killed. Rene's one-party system held for another decade or so before a new constitution in 1993 restored multiparty elections. More recently, Seychelles turned its geography into a conservation instrument. In 2016, with the Nature Conservancy and creditor governments led by France, it converted 21.6 million dollars of foreign debt into a domestic conservation fund, the first ocean-focused debt-for-nature swap of its kind, in exchange for protecting thirty percent of its waters, an area larger than Germany and one of the largest marine protected zones in the western Indian Ocean. All of that history is still standing wherever a visitor goes. The Vallee de Mai on Praslin remains close to the palm forest the expedition of 1768 found, its coco de mer still dropping seeds that take years to germinate. Aldabra, reachable only by permit and by sea, still carries its tortoises across the same terrain the Royal Society fought to save. In Victoria, among the smallest capitals in the world, the clock tower of 1903, a scaled copy of the tower built on London's Vauxhall Bridge Road for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, still marks the town centre, and the market beside it has traded produce and spice since 1840. On La Digue, the granite boulders of Anse Source d'Argent, reached on foot through the old L'Union Estate coconut plantation, are the same granite that identifies Seychelles as a fragment of continent rather than as a chain of volcanoes. Above Mahe, Morne Seychellois National Park protects more than a fifth of the island and its highest peak, and near its slopes the roofless walls of Mission Lodge still mark where Venn's Town once stood over the children of Liberated Africans. Offshore, Curieuse still carries the ruins of the leper colony that isolated it from 1829 to 1965, along with the Aldabra tortoises relocated there from the 1970s, and Cousin Island, bought in 1968 to save the Seychelles warbler from extinction, still functions as one of the most tightly protected seabird reserves in the ocean. Very little of this is laid out at any single site as a full account, so a visitor who wants the whole picture has to assemble it across islands, finding the coco de mer's myth in one grove, the mercenaries' airstrip in another and the mission children's dormitory walls in a third. Reading that history before arriving, rather than treating each site purely as scenery, turns a photograph of granite boulders or a giant tortoise into something closer to what it actually is, and it is worth remembering, walking through Mission Lodge or the Vallee de Mai, that this ground carries the weight of people who never chose to be there.