Independence and the coup, 1976 to 1977

It came at midnight. On the night of 28 June 1976, before a crowd at the new stadium and with the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester representing the Queen, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and the flag of an independent Seychelles was raised into the dark. James Mancham took the oath as the first president, France-Albert René as his prime minister, and a nation of roughly sixty thousand people became a sovereign republic. Among the first acts of independence was the return of Aldabra, Farquhar and Desroches, the islands Britain had detached in 1965 to form the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The new state was a coalition of the two old rivals, and it was fragile from the start. Mancham was an expansive, jet-setting figure who saw tourism and foreign friendship as the country's future. René led a party of very different instincts, socialist, wary of dependence on the West, impatient with the pace of change. A coalition between them was less a partnership than a truce.

The truce broke within a year. On 4 June 1977 Mancham flew to London for a Commonwealth heads of government meeting and the Queen's Silver Jubilee. In the early hours of 5 June, while the president was away, armed supporters of René took the police armoury, the radio station and the key points of Victoria. Almost no blood was shed. When the country woke, France-Albert René was in power, and he would keep it for the next twenty-seven years.

Mancham did not come home. He went into an exile in London that would last fifteen years, and the coup opened a division in the Seychellois people, between those who stayed and those who left, that runs directly into the story of today's diaspora. Many of the first Seychellois to build lives in Britain, Australia and Canada did so in the years after 1977.