The story of Seychelles

Nobody is indigenous to Seychelles. Every Seselwa descends from someone who arrived by ship, which is why a diaspora is not a break from our story. It is our story, continued.

Empty islands, 1500s to 1770

The archipelago was uninhabited before Europeans came. Arab and Swahili sailors knew the waters through the Indian Ocean trade, but no one settled. Vasco da Gama's fleet sighted the islands in 1503, and the first recorded landing was in 1609 by the crew of the Ascension, an English East India Company ship. For another century and a half the granite islands sat empty, a pirate haven and a watering stop.

The French, and the first Seselwa, 1742 to 1810

The Frenchman Lazare Picault charted the islands in 1742 and 1744, and France annexed them in 1756, naming them Séchelles after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, a finance minister in Paris. The nation was born on 27 August 1770, when the ship Thélémaque landed the first settlers at Sainte Anne. That first party was 15 white Frenchmen, 8 Africans and 5 Indians. From the beginning, the islands were mixed, and from the meeting of those tongues Kreol Seselwa was born as the language everyone could share.

French planters brought enslaved Africans, many via Mauritius, to work cotton and grain. They became the ancestors of most Seychellois alive today.

The British century, 1810 to 1976

Britain took the islands during the Napoleonic Wars, formalised in the 1814 Treaty of Paris, and ran Seychelles as a dependency of Mauritius. When Britain abolished slavery in the 1830s, the plantation economy collapsed and planters switched to coconut, vanilla and cinnamon, crops that needed fewer hands. The Royal Navy then landed thousands of Africans freed from intercepted slave ships on the East African coast, and they too became Seychellois. In 1903 Seychelles became a crown colony in its own right. In the 1960s, with work scarce, Britain let Seychellois emigrate to fill jobs in its economy, and the first great wave of the modern diaspora left for London.

Independence and upheaval, 1976 to 1993

Seychelles became independent within the Commonwealth on 29 June 1976. James Mancham was the first President, with France-Albert René as Prime Minister. On 5 June 1977 René took power in a coup, and in 1979 Seychelles became a one-party socialist state. That upheaval drove the second great wave of the diaspora, families who opposed the new order leaving for Britain, Australia and Canada. Under foreign-aid pressure, multiparty democracy returned with a new constitution in 1993.

The modern republic

Seychelles has held competitive elections since 1993. Power passed peacefully in 2020 for the first time to an opposition candidate, Wavel Ramkalawan, and again in 2025 to Dr Patrick Herminie, the country's sixth President. Today Seychelles is a stable high-income republic of about 100,000 people, with a large diaspora, tens of thousands strong, scattered across the world.