Seychelles

• 1. Introduction

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  Seychelles, a country of tropical islands scattered across the Indian Ocean, was almost seized by mercenaries in 1981. A team of 43 South African mercenaries, led by Mike Hoare, flew in disguised as holidaying rugby players. Their goal was to topple the government of President France-Albert René. The plot failed, but it points to a puzzle. Seychelles is the smallest country in Africa, with an estimated 100,600 people in 2022. It has no known oil or gas. Yet outside powers have schemed over it, traded in it and defended it for centuries. Why do these islands matter so much? Who first reached them, and who stayed? How did a place that started with almost nothing come to top African rankings for wealth and human development? And what lives on the land and in the sea that makes it a model for protecting nature?

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• 2. Ships Without Settlers

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  On the 15th of March 1503, Vasco da Gama's 4th Portuguese India Armada sailed past an elevated island, probably Silhouette Island. The first sighting was made by Thomé Lopes, aboard the ship of Rui Mendes de Brito. The next day the ships passed Desroches Island. Later the Portuguese mapped a cluster of seven islands and called them The Seven Sisters.

  Earlier visitors left only hints. Arab and Swahili sailors on the Indian Ocean trade routes likely knew of the islands. Computer simulations of Austronesian migration suggest those voyagers had a good chance of visiting. Tombs at Anse Lascars on Silhouette Island, visible until 1910, have been guessed to belong to Maldivian and Arab traders. Nobody found proof of permanent settlement. The earliest recorded landing came in January 1609, when the crew of the Ascension, under Captain Alexander Sharpeigh, came ashore during the fourth voyage of the British East India Company.

  In 1756, Captain Corneille Nicholas Morphey laid a Stone of Possession on Mahé, and France began to take control. Before that, pirates were said to have used the islands now and then. The French named the archipelago after the politician Jean Moreau de Séchelles and made it part of the colony of Isle de France. In August 1770, the ship Thélémaque, under Captain Leblanc Lécore, landed 15 white settlers and 13 African and Indian slaves on Ste. Anne Island.

  On the 16th of May 1794, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Orpheus, under Captain Henry Newcombe, reached Mahé during the French Revolutionary Wars. The senior administrator refused to fight. He negotiated instead, and the islands stayed under French control as "neutral" territory. That ended in December 1810, when British forces completed their invasion of Isle de France and took over Seychelles. The 1814 Treaty of Paris, which ended the War of the Sixth Coalition, made the change official. Britain then split Seychelles from Mauritius as its own crown colony in 1903.

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• 3. Coups and One-Party Rule

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  Independence arrived in 1976, when Seychelles became a republic outside the United Kingdom. In the 1970s it was "the place to be seen, a playground for film stars and the international jet set". The glamour did not last. On the 5th of June 1977, supporters of Prime Minister France-Albert René overthrew the first president, James Mancham, and installed René in his place. René wanted to limit dependence on tourism and said he wished "to keep Seychelles for the Seychellois". The 1979 constitution declared a socialist one-party state, and it held until 1991.

  Between 1979 and 1983, several plots against René's non-aligned government were backed, according to leading participants, by the United States, France and South Africa. Commonly cited motives were his socialism, his refusal to side with either Cold War bloc, and an American military lease due to expire in 1990. Every attempt in this period failed.

  The 1981 plot ended in a gun battle at the airport. Most of the mercenaries then escaped aboard a hijacked Air India plane. The hijack was led by D. Clodo, a German mercenary and former member of the Rhodesian SAS. He later stood trial in South Africa, where he was acquitted, and in his home country of Germany for air piracy.

  In 1986, the danger came from inside the government. Defence Minister Ogilvy Berlouis led an attempted coup, and René asked India for help. The Indian Navy sailed into Port Victoria in a mission called Operation Flowers are Blooming, and the coup was averted.

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• 4. Power at the Ballot Box

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  Every five years, Seychellois choose a president who serves as both head of state and head of government. The president appoints and presides over a cabinet, subject to approval by a majority of the legislature. The unicameral National Assembly has 35 members. Twenty-six are elected directly, and nine seats are allocated in proportion to each party's share of the vote.

  The Supreme Court, created in 1903, is the highest trial court and the first court of appeal. The Court of Appeal is the final authority. Justice once produced a startling statistic. In 2014, Seychelles had the highest incarceration rate in the world, at 799 prisoners per 100,000 people, 15% above the United States. The real number was 735 prisoners, 6% of them women, held in three prisons. By 2022 the rate had fallen to 287 per 100,000, only the 31st highest worldwide.

  Outside observers rate the country well. The 2024 V-Dem indices rank it 43rd among electoral democracies worldwide and first among African liberal democracies. In January 2020, Transparency International named it the least corrupt country in Africa.

  That record took work. The first draft of a new constitution in 1992 missed the 60% of votes it needed, and an amended text passed in 1993. René was forced to accept a multi-party system. He stepped down in 2004 in favour of his vice-president, James Michel, who won re-election in 2006-2011 and 2015. On the 28th of September 2016, the Office of the President announced that Michel would resign effective the 16th of October. Vice President Danny Faure then finished the term.

  On the 26th of October 2020, Wavel Ramkalawan, a 59-year-old Anglican priest, was elected fifth president. He had been an opposition MP from 1993 to 2011 and again from 2016 to 2020, and he led the opposition for most of that time. He beat Faure by 54.9% to 43.5%, the first opposition presidential victory in the country. In the Assembly election that month, the Linyon Demokratik Seselwa coalition won 25 of 35 seats, against 10 for United Seychelles. The wheel turned again in October 2025. Former parliamentary speaker Patrick Herminie won the presidential runoff, and United Seychelles had won 15 of the 26 directly elected seats in that year's general election. On the 26th of October 2025, Herminie was sworn in as the sixth president.

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• 5. Granite and Coral

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  Alfred Wegener, the scientist who argued for continental drift, cited the islands' rock as evidence. Seychelles rests on a large submerged granite block, the Seychelles microcontinent, whose composition resembles that of continents. It was sandwiched between Madagascar and India before Gondwanaland broke apart. After Madagascar separated from India in the Late Cretaceous, the Réunion hotspot made the spreading rift jump several times. One broken-off piece now sits on the Somali plate, carrying Seychelles, Mauritius and Réunion. Another fragment, on the Indian plate, holds Lakshadweep, the Chagos Archipelago and the Maldives.

  Today the country lies in the Somali Sea part of the Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar and about 1600 km east of Kenya. Mahé, the largest island, is 835 nautical miles from Mogadishu. The Constitution names 155 islands and counts 7 reclaimed ones, among them Eden Island. Most of the natural islands are uninhabited, and many are nature reserves.

  The inner islands number 44, of which 42 are granitic and 2 are coralline, and they sit on the shallow Seychelles Bank. Their 244 km2 make up 54% of the land and house 98% of the people. Mahé, Praslin, Silhouette, La Digue and Curieuse are the five largest granitic islands. Far to the south and west lie the coral groups. The Amirantes have 29 islands and the Farquhar Group has 13. The Aldabra Group has 67 raised coral islands, and Aldabra Atoll alone has 46 of them.

  The sea keeps reshaping the coral. South Island in the African Banks has been eroded, and Grand Carcassaye and Petit Carcassaye at St Joseph Atoll have merged into a single island.

  On Mahé, temperatures run from 24 to 30 °C all year. Rain falls at about 2900 mm a year at Victoria and 3600 mm on the mountain slopes. The southeast trade winds blow from May to November, and the hot, humid months, with humidity near 80%, run from December to April. Most islands lie outside the cyclone belt. Even so, in January 2013, torrential rain from the tropical cyclone Felleng triggered flooding and landslides that destroyed hundreds of houses and forced a state of emergency.

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• 6. Refuge for Wildlife

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  About 150,000 Aldabra giant tortoises live solely on the atoll of Aldabra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. From around the year 1500 until roughly the mid-1800s, pirates and sailors killed them for food and drove them close to extinction. Today CITES oversees their protection from poaching and smuggling, and captive breeding has eased pressure on wild populations. Most giant tortoises vanished from the granitic islands once humans arrived. Those islands still support three living species of Seychelles giant tortoise.

  Seychelles sets aside 42% of its territory for conservation, one of the highest shares in the world. Human settlement did bring losses. Coastal and mid-level forests were cut down, and the chestnut flanked white eye, the Seychelles parakeet and the saltwater crocodile disappeared. Extinctions were far fewer than on Mauritius or Hawaii, partly because people arrived later. The Seychelles black parrot, the national bird, is now protected. In 2019 the country scored 10 out of 10 on the Forest Landscape Integrity Index, ranking first among 172 countries.

  The granitic islands hold roughly 268 flowering plant species, and 70 of them, or 28%, grow nowhere else. The coco de mer palm grows only on Praslin and neighbouring Curieuse. Its double coconut resembles buttocks, which earned it the nickname "love nut", and it produces the heaviest seed in the world. The jellyfish tree, a genus of its own called Medusagyne, survives in only a few places on Mahé and seems to reproduce only in cultivation. Wright's gardenia grows only in the Special Reserve on Aride Island. Six orchid species may also be endemic.

  Aride Island carries the largest seabird colonies in the granitic islands, including the world's largest numbers of two species. Aldabra and Cosmoledo host some of the biggest seabird colonies anywhere. More than 1,000 species of fish have been recorded. Local conservationists in the 1960s won a ban on spearguns and dynamite fishing, and as a result the wildlife is unafraid of snorkelers and divers. Coral bleaching in 1998 damaged most reefs, though Silhouette Island's reef shows healthy recovery. In January 2023, Seychelles announced the final stages of a marine spatial plan covering about 1.35 million km2 of ocean.

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• 7. Tourism, Trade and Pirates

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  In 1965, the futurist Donald Prell spent three months in the colony and wrote an economic report for the Governor General. According to his figures, about 33% of working people laboured on plantations in the 1960s and 20% worked for the government. Cinnamon, vanilla and copra were the main exports. Everything changed in 1971, when Seychelles International Airport opened. Tourism became a major industry and split the economy into plantations and tourism. Hotels rose throughout the 1970s, including Coral Strand Smart Choice, Vista Do Mar and Bougainville Hotel, all opened in 1972.

  Between 1976 and 2015, nominal GDP grew nearly 700%, and purchasing power parity grew nearly 1600%. Per capita output rose to about seven times its near-subsistence level. Tourism now employs about 30% of workers, and agriculture about 3%. In 2020, COVID-19 forced the country to close its borders to tourists. They reopened on the 25th of March 2021, after the national vaccination programme progressed well.

  In 2008, the government let the Seychellois rupee float freely, hoping to attract investment. It has also tried to reduce reliance on tourism by promoting farming, fishing, small-scale manufacturing and an offshore financial sector overseen by the Financial Services Authority. Processed fish makes up 60% of exports, and non-fillet frozen fish adds 22%. The United States closed its Indian Ocean Tracking Station on Mahé in August 1996, after the government tried to raise the rent to more than $10,000,000 a year.

  Oil is a puzzle. Companies have explored the waters, and a 2005 deal gave the US firm Petroquest exploration rights to about 30,000 km2 until 2014, yet no oil or gas has been found. Seychelles imports refined fuel instead. In 2023, the United Arab Emirates supplied $298M of it, roughly 83% of the total. The country buys three times what it needs and re-exports the surplus as bunker fuel for ships and aircraft at Port Victoria.

  Piracy by Somali pirates has also hit the economy. Former president James Michel said it cost the international community between $7 million and $12 million a year and 4% of Seychelles' GDP. Fishing suffered a 46% loss in 2008-2009. Patrol boats, planes and drones came from international partners. India gave the coast guard two patrol vessels, now named PS Constant and PS Topaz, plus a Dornier 228 aircraft. In March 2015, Seychelles allocated Assumption Island, covering 11 km2 north of Madagascar, to be developed by India.

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• 8. A Creole Society

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  When Britain took the islands during the Napoleonic Wars, it let the French upper class keep its land. These landowners, called the Gran blan or "big whites", dominated economic and political life. Both French and British settlers used enslaved Africans. Britain prohibited slavery in 1835, yet African workers kept arriving. British administrators also brought in Indians as indentured workers, as in Mauritius, but only a small Indian population resulted. Like a similar Chinese minority, Indians generally entered the merchant class. Because nobody lived on the islands before settlement, Seychellois descend from African, French, Indian and Chinese newcomers. The median age is 34.

  French and English are official languages, alongside Seychellois Creole. About 91% of people speak Creole as a native language, 5.1% English and 0.7% French. Creole is a French-based language related to those of Mauritius and Réunion. National Assembly debates run in Creole, but laws are passed and published in English. Tamil is also prominent among the Indo-Seychellois community. In the 2022 census, 61.3% of people were Catholic, 5.0% Anglican and 8.6% followers of other Christian groups. Hindus numbered more than 5.4% and Muslims 1.6%.

  The Moutya is a dance from the days of slavery, once used to express strong emotions and discontent. In 2021, UNESCO added it to the Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Instruments in local music include the zez and the bom, which is known in Brazil as the berimbau. Kontredans, based on European contra dance, is a favourite at school and district contests during the annual Festival Kreol.

  Fish and rice anchor the table, with fresh flowers as a garnish. Ladob is eaten as a dessert or a savoury dish. The dessert version simmers ripe plantain and sweet potato in coconut milk with sugar, nutmeg and a vanilla pod. The savoury version uses salted fish instead of sugar. Shark chutney combines boiled, mashed shark with bilimbi juice and lime.

  Church missions opened the first schools in 1851. A teacher training college followed in 1959, and since 1981 free education has been required for all children from age six through grade nine. Adult classes lifted adult literacy from 60% to a claimed 96% in 2020. The University of Seychelles opened on the 17th of September 2009, offering University of London qualifications to slow the brain drain.

  Mothers tend to be dominant in the household and control most spending, and unwed mothers are the societal norm. In 2016, a vote of 14-0 decriminalised same-sex activity. Among the islands' notable people is Dr Louis Gaston Labat, a physician and pioneer in regional anesthesia.

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