A Seychellois identity

Shiva Naipaul

long Independence Avenue, Victoria's i—vmain thoroughfare, one sees the developing modern profile of the Seychelles capital. Here you will find a couple of newish office blocks, the Ministry of Youth and Defence and, nearing completion while I was there, the building designed to house the State Monetary Authority — which, I was told, would be faced in black marble. At the eastern end of Independence Avenue, towards the harbour, there rises a piece of monumental sculpture, glowing white in the heat, commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of the town. It look me a while to realise that it was a represen- tation of three birds with soaring, sail-like wings. They symbolised Africa, Asia and Europe (l'Afrik, l'Azi e l'Erop — as the Creole would have it), the three continents that had contributed towards the making of the Seychellois people. Going north from this monument, along the Avenue of 5th June — commemorating the date of the coup — you pass a patch of waste ground called Freedom Square and come, eventual- ly, to the radio station. Security here is strict. Tanzanian soldiers lounge at the en- trance, lazily suspicious of everyone who comes near. On the hill above the radio sta- tion is the Union Vale army camp, pro- tected from intrusion by a fence of barbed wire. According to some, it has been used as a detention centre.

South of the avian monument is another centre of the town's social life, the Yacht Club — by no means so fearsome an in- stitution as the name would imply. From the Yacht Club you can see at the top of a hill called La Misere the installations of the American satellite station, its great white globe floating like a moon against the sky. The tracking station, set up in the dying days of colonial rule, was the result of semi- secret negotiations between the British and the Americans. Seychellois sensibilities had not been consulted. Mancham, exhibiting traces of a nascent national feeling, was a little hurt by this, though he had no objec- tion in principle to the deal. Injured pride was tempered by schoolboy exuberance. 'At a stroke the Seychelles had gone from the 18th to the 21st century.' Rene was less welcoming, interpreting the deal as yet another imperialist imposition, a harbinger of every kind of evil. All the same, the tracking station was to survive the Socialist Coup without apparent difficulty. It re- mains on its hill, scanning the southern skies, its great moon exuding a cosmic in- difference to the fates of those below.

Victoria is a singularly characterless !own. It betrays the emptiness and cultural isolation of the Seychellois past. One hun- dred and fifty years of British rule have made remarkably little impact. English, of course, is spoken but most Seychellois are not entirely at ease with it. It remains a for- mal language. French continues to be the more natural medium of expression for the elite; the less educated speak Creole. British dominion cut the Seychelles off from the living root of the French connection and never really replaced it with anything except the superficialities of colonial administra- tion. The islands were too small, too far away, too deficient in the attributes that might have attracted settlers. One or two Englishmen may have acquired coconut estates. A handful of Indian and Chinese merchants ventured out. Their numbers were too small and their activities too minor to make any significant difference. The Seychellois lack not only a history (the islands must be one of the few colonial possessions not to have a fort) but a style. The 'planter's punch' ambience cultivated by the hotels is wholly derived from the Caribbean. Unblessed are the unexploited and unremembered! Mancham — perhaps unconsciously — sought to overcome this characterlessness by transforming the islands into a paradisal garden of sexual adventure. His efforts could, in their bizarre way, be considered an attempt at nation-building. Better a brothel state than nothing at all. Albert Rene also recognised that there was a problem and embarked on his own search for a Seychellois 'identity' that would make sense to the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity.

Socialism requires a past as well as a future, In the Seychelles the former had to be invented; or, at any rate, be subjected to a fundamental reinterpretation. For Rene to make himself and his party credible (if only to each other and the Liberation Com- mittee), it was necessary to concoct visions of oppression and suffering; to stimulate dystopic fantasies. Historical resentment had to be manufactured, the void had to be filled somehow. With so little to hand, the urge to 'revolution', to coup d'etat, had to invent itself. 'For hundreds of years,' Rene proclaimed to the first Congress of his Par- ty, 'the Seychellois people have depended on others — employees on employers consumers on merchants — the whole population on foreigners.' They had been crushed by 'a system of religion which at- tributes all responsibility to God ... ' These abstractions are almost Buddhist in their mantric vacuity. In that airy dystopia, white had brutalised black, class had warred ceaselessly with class. Life, in other words, had been hell.

The picture painted was like a child's drawing of a house — recognisable but lacking in the particularity and concreteness of truth. Out of bloodless invocations such as these, a Seychellois identity, a national purpose, was to be forged. So there descended on the Seychelles the lethal abstractions which were to lead to 'Party Congresses' and, eventually, to coup d'etat, political murder and the One Party State. Consider the language once more: ... the patience of the people ran out and in the early morning of 5 June 1977, a group of dedicated and courageous men... took up arms and overthrew the corrupt regime then in power... hand in hand the entire people, under the banner of freedom...march on towards true liberty, equality and frater- nity...' The event described is hardly real to its perpetrators. It is hardly real because they are telling lies. But lies, reduced to the language of fashionable fable, become a marketable commodity and make those who tell them acceptable to themselves and to a world ready to believe anything.

The search for a Seychellois identity has led in other directions. Not surpris- ingly, it has assumed a linguistic complex- ion. Creole, the language of the street, of the market-place, has been endowed with official status, taking its place alongside English and French. The government newspaper uses all three. They call this trilingualism. Indeed, Creole may be regarded — it being the tongue of the 'peo- ple' — as primes inter pares. It has been designated the 'first national language', and will be employed as the medium of instruc- tion during the first two years of schooling. Its adoption has not been without pro- blems. Not only have new textbooks had to be written, but other predictable difficulties have arisen — Creole having led a mainly oral existence — over its spelling and pro- nunciation.

'Everybody says Creole is a dialect and not a language,' the Director of Informa- tion said to me. 'But what does that mean?' He glowered across the width of his desk.

'How did French begin? Wasn't it a dialect of Latin or something?' A faint air of triumph livened his austere countenance. After 200 years, Creole had established its right to exist; it had come of age. Naturally, they would have to invent new words for certain scientific terms and so on. But why was that ridiculous? Which language didn't have to do that? The Seychellois were now a nation and Creole was an essential element of the national culture. On whose authority was it to be decided that Creole was a mere

dialect? The Director of Information lean- ed towards me. 'Does God only hear you when you speak in English or in French? Doesn't he hear you when you speak in Creole?' I tried to suggest that it was not a question of communication with the Almighty, but, rather, of communication with other men whose languages afforded wider access to worlds of intellect and spirit than that allowed by Seychellois Creole. The objection was waved aside.

The Minister of Education and Com- munication was a no less ardent advocate of the cause. It was, he pointed out, a well- known tactic of colonialism to fool the col- onised into believing that their way of speech was not the 'correct' one. That deception was known as 'cultural aliena- tion'. It was clear that I myself had suffered deep cultural alienation. Did I know what was being done to a Creole-speaking child when he went to school for the first time and was taught in French or English? '/ will tell you. That child is being traumatised. You are destroying his whole means of self- expression. You are destroying his whole means of understanding.'

My mind went back to my own schooldays in Trinidad where there was a clear distinction between the language of the street and the language of the class- room. Street talk played havoc with con- ventional grammar and pronunciation. It could easily be phoneticised into a semblance of autonomy. You moved, as the situation demanded, from one to the other. It was no good, for instance, walking into a rum-shop and using the Queen's English. You would have been laughed out of the place. But I do not believe that I — or any of my contemporaries — was traumatised by our linguistic acrobatics. It all seemed perfectly natural. No doubt part of the ex- planation lies in the fact that the requisite 'political consciousness' did not exist in the 1950s. If you don't know you are supposed to be traumatised you tend not to be. It is an acquired habit. Nowadays, it is altogether different. It is beyond argument, an influential Jamaican intellectual says, that the first language of the Jamaican child is Creole — English-style of course. The phrases of discontent leap from his pages - 'cultural bombardment', 'mental dependency', 'deculturation' ... and so on. To render these notions in Creolised English — or French — would, I imagine, require considerable ingenuity. Needless to say, no serious attempt is ever made to do so. Standard English is used to vilify Stan- dard English.

'Identity' is an addictive notion. As a member state of the Organisation of African Unity, as clients of Tanzanian military might, the Socialist regime likes to stress its African credentials. This too has not gone down well with everyone.

`Do I look African?' asked a young woman I met. 'I'm not African. We are not African.' She waved at the people sitting round the table; she gestured towards the ocean glittering below us. 'Africa is somewhere way over there. More than a thousand miles away. What have we got to do with Africa?'

'Well — what do you belong to if not Africa?'

'Seychelles . . what else? We're Seychellois, not Africans.'

'And what does it mean to be Seychellois?'

She laughed. 'That is a more difficult question.' Her ancestry was typically con- fused. At the turn of the century, her grandparents — they were traders — had emigrated from India. They had become converts to Christianity. At some point, Ethiopian blood (so she put it) had crept in- to their veins. Their ties with India were severed; the sub-continent was forgotten. To say you are Seychellois is one way of saying you are nothing in particular: a waifish confection, out of touch with Africa, out of touch with Asia, out of touch with Europe. Those who are afflicted by this malady of un-belonging all, to a greater or lesser degree, become unhinged.

L'Afrik, l'Azi (for the proletariat) — e (for the Francophile Creole aristocracy) l'Erop. 'Our cultural reality,' the avuncular Foreign Minister — Dr Maxime Ferrari says, 'is also very related to Europe, above all to France.' Latterly, there can be no doubt that France has tried to instil new life into that moribund cultural reality. As is well known, the French and British have different ideas about these matters. The British do not have that sense of cultural mission felt by the French. 'Anglophone' does not pack the same messianic punch as `Francophone'. Whatever the status ac- corded to English, whatever the communal rivalries between Creole and French, Ia creolophonie remains a sub-species of Ia francophonie. Mancham goes so far as to suggest that his overthrow was connived at by extremist Francophones in the Quai d'Orsay who saw the would-be rebels as possible conduits of a resurgent French pre- eminence. Certainly, France was one of the first countries to accord legitimacy to the coup. In addition, it quickly filled the man- power shortage caused by the expulsion of British officials and advisers. Rene, despite his University of London education, is not a card-carrying Anglophile. He once accus-

ed Mancham of wanting . to adopt everything British — British language, British prostitution, British homosexuality and all'. To a leading light of the new regime the Chef du Service de la Fran- cophonie is alleged to have said: 'Thank you, dear friend, for chasing out the British and for having returned Seychelles to its family.'

The Seychelles, in its quest for an 'identi- ty', twists first this way and then that. But in no one direction is there a consummate satisfaction to be had. The people are con- fused and distracted.

the National Youth Service has ... made me a true and good militant ... Before I joined the NYS I was a good for nothing who didn't know how to plant and do other work, but now I feel I am prepared to do anything that I know will benefit others as well as myself'(NYS student).

The National Youth Service remains the most fundamental and controversial in- novation introduced by the new regime: an attempt to flesh out with substance the im- age of New Seychellois Man. Next to it, the patronage of Creole pales into eccentricity. To take children away from their families, to confine them in camps (with minimal in-

terludes of release) for two years, to put them into quasi-military uniform and sub- ject them to all the rigours of barrack-room discipline, to attempt to instil all the ar- dours of collective egalitarianism, adum- brates totalitarian urges out of all propor- tion to the scale of Seychellois existence. As is so often the case, home-spun Third World 'socialism' collapses into unreflec- tive cultism.

After some effort a guided tour to a Na- tional Youth Service camp had at last been arranged for me. Early one morning Gilbert and I set off on our little excursion. 'Would you,' I asked him, as we drove through jungly verdancy, 'would you have liked to have gone to one of these camps?' He nar- rowed his eyes evasively — he with his fond- ness for double Camparis, his leisurely working habits, his devotion to his expense account... he who, a day or two before, had told me that the people were 'stupid' and, consequently, had to be herded and goaded ...Gilbert, brother to a minister, whose job bordered perilously on that of in- former, one of the more novel vocations in- troduced into the islands by the Revolution.

'Yes,' he replied. 'I think I would have liked to go to a camp.'

No one was more in need of reconstruc- tion. But I did not believe him.

The tarmac road came to an end. We bumped and shuddered along a rutted track, crossing narrow bridges spanning still, black-watered lagoons. Gilbert, who

seemed unfamiliar with the area, question- ed some labourers. Apparently we couldn't miss the fence: and we didn't. A wooden barrier blocked the access road. Two uniformed young women emerged out of a guard-house. Gilbert stated our business, the barrier was raised. We went past a plot of vegetable cultivation being watered by a revolving sprinkler. Ahead of us were low buildings of unpainted grey brick. We reported our intrusion to the main office. Our guides had not arrived. We sat outside in the shade of an almond tree, gazing out at the loveliest of coves, its waters calm and fringed by dense greenery. Under another dispensation there would have been colour- ful umbrellas here; bodies, hungry for the sun, littering the sand.

Our guides arrived — a middle-aged woman (she was called the 'village co- ordinator') and a younger man of Chinese extraction. We returned to the office, fur- nished in the dour, minimalist style characteristic of collectivist endeavour. A printed exhortation was affixed to the rough wall facing me. 'Washing One's Hands Of The Conflict Between The Powerful And The Powerless Means To Side With The Powerful'. This particular village — so the camp was referred to contained over 800 children. Boys and girls were separated, though all shared equally in the common labours and duties. Both the sexes were organised in 'clusters'. Each cluster was further divided into three 'units'. This arrangement found visual ex- pression in the star-shaped design of the buildings accommodating each cluster, the wings housing each unit radiating out of a central communal area like the spokes of a wheel.

Each unit had an animateur, an older stu- dent of settled progressive outlook, who provided ideological as well as practical in- spiration to those under his care. Once a month the students might be briefly let out to visit their families; at Christmas they were given four days' leave. But, for most of the year, they remained confined within the fenced compound. Everything possible was done to promote the spirit of egalitarianism. The students were permitted only the most elementary of personal possessions. Pocket money was strictly for- bidden. Instead, vouchers were provided, equivalent to about 25 rupees (under £3) a month. These vouchers they could spend as they pleased in the village shop.

Transgressors were dealt with by 'persua- sion' and the techniques of 're-education'. If persuasion and re-education proved inef- fective the authorities could resort to 'necessary punishment' — the infliction of a heavier burden of communal duty and the withdrawal of certain privileges. An especially grave offence could lead to expul- sion. (Expulsion was no blessing in disguise: those who had not completed their two years in the camps were debarred from all further education.) To date, there had been

some 50 expulsions from the village. The girls appeared to be particularly at risk. They were given pregnancy tests every three months — expulsion was automatic if the result was positive.

The village was not as neat as I had half- expected it to be. The sandy soil had a wasted look. Already, the cleared bush was reclaiming its own, subverting and satirising the aims of those who had only unexamined and reflexive notions of individual and social redemption. We stopped at a small clinic. Three lethargic boys were stretched out on cots. The presence of authority ap- peared to rob them of the powers of speech.

One had cut his foot. Another, according to the nurse on duty, claimed that his eyes were hurting him. The third complained of recurrent headaches. Returned outside, I gazed at the ragged vistas of the compound. Here and there uniformed students moved slowly along the sandy lanes winding through the camp. The scene, despite the sunshine, was enervatingly colourless.

I looked into a girls' dormitory, a long room partitioned into cubicles by screens. Within each cubicle were two cots. Here a military precision and austerity prevailed. On each cot was arrayed the spartan equip- ment of its occupant. A tin plate. A mug. A spoon. Next to these — a beret, a brown shirt, a red scarf, a towel.

All the same. All equal.

From behind one of the partitions came a creaking of bed-springs accompanied by a spasm of coughing. One more, I assumed, was about to be added to the sick list. We inspected the communal kitchen. Hordes of flies had settled over the concrete work sur- faces, feeding on the remains of vegetables that had not been cleared away. I looked askance at my companions. The village co- ordinator was apologetic. Unfortunately, the animateur had fallen ill a couple of days before. How fragile a thing is revolution: one sick animateur and the flies move in.

We paused by a playing field, a neglected rectangle of bare, beaten earth and wild grasses.

I remarked on the quietness of the place. `It's the time of day,' the village co- ordinator said.

I remarked on the sombreness of the faces I saw.

`What makes you think they are sad?' she asked. 'They lead very fulfilling lives here.' Even Gilbert seemed thoughtful as the barrier at the entrance to the camp was rais- ed and we returned to the outside world.

Morth-east of Mahe, a 15-minute plane- ride 14 away, lies Praslin, the second largest island in the Seychelles group. I went there to attend the opening of a new hotel which just so happened to be owned by a. brother of the Foreign Minister. The scale of the enterprise was modest; but since anything to do with the tourist trade is big news it was a well-publicised event. What was more, the occasion was to be graced by the presence of the Minister himself. Palm

fronds bedecked with flowers ornamented the pillars of the open-air lounge. Tables were set out under the coconut palms bordering a sugar-coloured beach washed by a placid sea.

Assembled there in the descending dusk was a collection of travel agents and travel writers, each a courted prince of power and patronage, each come to reassess a paradise once suddenly found, then as suddenly lost, and which now yearned to see itself regain- ed. For, after all the treason, all the empty words, all the killing, one humble truth still survived: without tourists, the Seychelles had no reason to be; without tourists, the islands would die. The Minister, easefully tropical in dress, cut a ribbon and made a speech. Many people, he observed with benign incredulity, seemed to have been in- fected by the idea that Socialist Seychelles did not want tourists. He was a little flab- bergasted by that — because nothing could be further from the truth. Seychelles wanted all the tourists it could get. The President himself was as committed as anyone to the revival and expansion of the trade. Le President lui-meme! He was prepared to concede that some mistakes had been made...

My attention drifted. Cameras flashed. The travel agents and travel writers showed polite interest and offered polite applause. Rather incongruously, a church bell tolled somewhere in the distance. The ghost of Jimmy Mancham haunted that Socialist twilight. Through the coconut groves came the strains of a hymn. Later that night I walked back to my hotel along the deserted beach. Moonlight gleamed on the leaves of the bushes and the palms. The dark sea was calm. Blackened garlands of seaweed

striped the pale beach which lay stretched out under the moon like an outsized zebra's hide put out to dry. Stray dogs shadowed my progress, now approaching, now retreating. The silence of the blue night, broken only by the splashing waves and the barking of the pursuing dogs, was unsettl- ing. A primal immediacy imbued the scene.

It was here, on Praslin, in the last quarter of the 18th century, that the coco-de-mer palm was discovered. The macabre sug- gestiveness of this peculiar palm has always encouraged speculation. General Gordon — who visited the islands in 1881 — decid- ed that Praslin was the site of the Garden of Eden. 'Surely,' he wrote, his mind obsessed by the errant Eve, `if curiosity could be ex- cited by any tree, it would be by this.' He concluded that the coco-de-mer — whose nut mimics the female genitalia and whose male inflorescence mimics the phallus must be the Tree of Knowledge. Less con- vincingly (for it is not a native of the islands) he argued that the breadfruit was the Tree of Life.

The Seychelles have never fully recovered from this exegetic exercise. Gordon took it upon himself to devise a coat of arms for the colony. It showed the coco-de-mer sup- ported on the back of a tortoise. Around the trunk of the palm is entwined a snake. The contemporary coat of arms is remarkably similar: the coco-de-mer and the tortoise are still there. Only the snake is missing.