The history of the Seychelles

Seychelles is an archipelago of some 115 islands in the western Indian Ocean, north-east of Madagascar, whose granite main islands of Mahé, Praslin and La Digue are among the oldest mid-ocean islands on earth. Uninhabited until the eighteenth century, they were settled by the French in 1770 with enslaved Africans and Malagasy, passed to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars and were governed from Mauritius until 1903. Their Creole people descend from Africans, Malagasy, Europeans, Indians and Chinese. Independent since 1976, Seychelles went through a coup and fifteen years of one-party socialist rule before returning to multiparty democracy in the 1990s, and it has seen two peaceful transfers of power to the opposition since 2020.

Unlike almost every other land on earth, Seychelles has no indigenous people. The granite islands are fragments of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, left behind when India broke away from Madagascar, and they evolved a distinctive natural world, including giant tortoises and the coco de mer palm, whose huge double nut washed up on distant shores and was prized as a rarity in Asia and Europe. Austronesian seafarers sailing from South-East Asia to Madagascar in the first millennium CE may have passed through the islands, and Arab and Persian merchants trading along the East African coast probably knew them, but there is no evidence that anyone settled.

The first European record dates from the Age of Discovery. On 15 March 1503, during his second voyage to India, Vasco da Gama's fleet sighted islands that were almost certainly part of the group, and Portuguese charts later marked them as the Seven Sisters. The first recorded landing was made in January 1609 by the crew of the Ascension, an English East India Company ship, who found the islands empty and full of tortoises and birds. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries pirates operating from Madagascar used the islands as a refuge, although stories of buried pirate treasure owe more to legend than to evidence.

The French took an interest as they built up their colonies of Île de France, now Mauritius, and Bourbon, now Réunion. In 1742 the governor, Mahé de La Bourdonnais, sent Lazare Picault to explore, and the main island was later named Mahé after the governor. In 1756 Corneille Nicolas Morphey laid a Stone of Possession on Mahé, claiming the islands for the Kingdom of France and naming them after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, the finance minister of Louis XV.

The first settlers, a small party of French colonists with enslaved workers, landed on Sainte Anne Island off Mahé in August 1770. The colony grew slowly as a supply station for ships and a source of timber and tortoises, and then as a plantation colony producing cotton, spices and food. Its population was overwhelmingly enslaved, brought mainly from Mozambique and other parts of East Africa and from Madagascar, while French planters held the land. During the French Revolution the colonists, like those of Mauritius, refused to apply the 1794 decree abolishing slavery.

War between Britain and France in the Indian Ocean decided the islands' future. When a British squadron appeared off Mahé in 1794, the French commandant, Jean-Baptiste Quéau de Quincy, judged resistance hopeless and capitulated on generous terms, then continued to govern. He would surrender again each time a British warship arrived, while flying French colours in between and supplying French privateers. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain captured Mauritius in December 1810 and took formal possession of the Seychelles in 1811. The 1814 Treaty of Paris confirmed both as British, and Quincy stayed on as a British-appointed official until his death in 1827.

Under the British Empire, the Seychelles were governed as a dependency of Mauritius, but French remained the language of the planters and the church, and the French-based Seychellois Creole developed as the language of the whole population. Slavery was abolished in 1835. Many planters left, and coconut plantations producing copra replaced cotton. From 1861 Royal Navy anti-slavery patrols landed some 2,400 Africans freed from slave ships, mostly from East Africa, who were apprenticed to the planters and settled in the islands. Indian and Chinese traders arrived in the late nineteenth century. The capital, previously known as L'Établissement, was renamed Victoria in 1841.

In 1903 Seychelles became a Crown colony in its own right, separate from Mauritius, with its own governor. The economy rested on copra, cinnamon and vanilla, and many islanders lived in poverty. The remote islands also served Britain as a place of exile for troublesome rulers and leaders, among them Prempeh I of the Asante, sent there in 1900, and Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, detained in 1956. In World War I a labour contingent of about 800 Seychellois served in East Africa, and 335 of them died, mostly of disease.

Party politics began in the 1960s. James Mancham's Seychelles Democratic Party favoured close ties with Britain, while France-Albert René's Seychelles People's United Party called for full independence and socialism. In 1965 Britain detached the islands of Aldabra, Farquhar and Desroches to form part of the new British Indian Ocean Territory, together with the Chagos Archipelago taken from Mauritius. The opening of an international airport on Mahé in 1971 transformed the economy, as tourism quickly became the main industry.

Seychelles became an independent republic within the Commonwealth on 29 June 1976, with Mancham as president and René as prime minister in a coalition government; Britain returned Aldabra, Farquhar and Desroches days earlier. On 5 June 1977, while Mancham was in London, armed supporters of René seized power. René became president and in 1979 made his Seychelles People's Progressive Front the only legal party, ruling a socialist state that was non-aligned in the Cold War but leaned towards the Soviet bloc. The government invested in housing, health and education, but critics were detained or went into exile, and the opposition leader Gérard Hoarau was assassinated in London in 1985.

There were several attempts to overthrow René. The best known came in November 1981, when about fifty mercenaries led by Mike Hoare, posing as a rugby club travelling from South Africa, were discovered at Mahé airport; after a gun battle most escaped by hijacking an Air India airliner. In 1986 René called on India for military assistance in the face of another plot.

After the end of the Cold War, René announced a return to multiparty politics in December 1991, and a new constitution was approved in 1993. René won the elections of 1993, 1998 and 2001, Mancham returned from exile to lead the opposition, and in 2004 René handed the presidency to his long-serving deputy James Michel. Michel resigned in 2016 in favour of his vice-president, Danny Faure, after the opposition won a parliamentary majority. Seychelles developed one of the highest incomes per person in Africa, based on tourism and tuna fishing, while facing debt crises and the threat of rising seas.

In October 2020 Wavel Ramkalawan, an Anglican priest and long-time opposition leader, was elected president, the first time the party descended from René's movement lost power since 1977. In 2025 Patrick Herminie of United Seychelles, as that party is now called, defeated Ramkalawan in a run-off and was sworn in on 26 October 2025, a second peaceful transfer of power in five years.