The one-party years, 1977 to 1993

France-Albert René called himself an Indian Ocean socialist, and the state he built after 1977 reflected it. A new constitution in 1979 made his party, by then the Seychelles People's Progressive Front, the only legal one, and for the next fourteen years Seychelles was a one-party state. Political life narrowed to a single channel. Opponents were watched, detained or pushed into exile, and the press answered to the government.

It would be dishonest to tell only that side. René's government also delivered things the colonial era never had. Schooling became free and universal, healthcare too, housing programmes spread, and by the measures the United Nations uses, life expectancy, literacy, income, Seychelles rose to among the highest in Africa. For many ordinary Seychellois the period brought real and lasting improvement in daily life. This is why René remains a genuinely divisive figure at home, remembered by some as the builder of modern Seychelles and by others as the man who took their freedom.

The most dramatic threat to his rule came from outside. On 25 November 1981 a group of mercenaries led by the notorious "Mad Mike" Hoare flew in posing as a party of holidaying beer enthusiasts, with weapons hidden in their luggage. A customs search at the airport exposed them, a gun battle broke out, and the invasion collapsed. Most of the mercenaries fled by hijacking an Air India jet. The plot, linked to apartheid South Africa and to exiled opponents, hardened the government and deepened its security state.

The darkest episode of the exile politics of these years was the killing of Gérard Hoarau, a leading opponent, shot dead outside his London home in 1985. The crime was never solved, but it cast a long shadow. By the early 1990s the Cold War that had shaped René's alignments was ending, foreign aid was drying up, and pressure at home and abroad had become impossible to ignore. In December 1991 René announced that Seychelles would return to multiparty democracy.