Seychelles historical timeline

Origins

The Seychelles had no indigenous population. Arab and Austronesian sailors knew the islands, and Portuguese ships charted them in the sixteenth century, but nobody settled. The first recorded landing was by an English East India Company ship in 1609, whose crew described giant tortoises, coconuts and no people.

Turning points

France claimed the islands in 1756 and established a settlement in 1770, bringing enslaved East Africans and Malagasy to work spice and cotton plantations. Britain took them in 1814 and administered them from Mauritius until 1903. Slavery was abolished in 1835, and through the nineteenth century the Royal Navy landed thousands of liberated Africans here from intercepted slave ships, which reshaped the population. The economy ran on coconut oil, cinnamon and vanilla and was poor. Everything changed in 1971, when the international airport opened on Mahé; independence followed in 1976, a coup in 1977 installed a one-party socialist state that lasted until multiparty elections in 1993, and tourism replaced agriculture entirely.

Influential people

Pierre Poivre, the French administrator who tried to break the Dutch spice monopoly by planting cloves and nutmeg here. James Mancham, the first president. France-Albert René, who took power in 1977 and held it for twenty-seven years. And the naturalists — among them Charles Darwin, who pressed for Aldabra’s protection — who kept the atoll from being cleared.

Cultural evolution

Seychellois Creole became an official language in 1981, the first French-based creole anywhere to be given that status, with its own orthography and a literature. The moutya, banned under colonial rule, is now UNESCO-listed.

Present-day significance

The Seychelles has the highest income per head in Africa and runs an economy almost entirely on tourism and tuna. In 2018 it completed the world’s first debt-for-nature swap of its kind, restructuring sovereign debt in exchange for protecting thirty per cent of its ocean territory, a model other island states have since followed.