Empty islands
Unlike almost every other African country, Seychelles had no settled population before the modern era. Austronesian and Arab sailors knew the islands, and pirates are said to have used them, but the first permanent settlement came only in 1770, when the French established a colony and brought enslaved Africans to work it. The population that grew up was Creole from the start — a blend of French, African and later Indian and Chinese, speaking a French-based Creole.
Britain took the islands during the Napoleonic Wars and formalised control in 1814, though French language and culture endured. Slavery was abolished in the 1830s, and liberated Africans intercepted from slave ships were later resettled here. For most of the colonial period Seychelles was a quiet dependency of Mauritius, living off coconuts, cinnamon and copra.
Independence and the coup
Seychelles became a separate British colony in 1903 and moved slowly towards self-rule after the Second World War. Two rival leaders emerged: James Mancham, urbane and pro-Western, who favoured close ties with Britain, and France-Albert René, a socialist who wanted full independence. Independence came on 29 June 1976 with Mancham as president and René as prime minister.
It lasted a year. In June 1977, while Mancham was abroad, René seized power in a coup. He turned Seychelles into a one-party socialist state, aligned with the Eastern bloc, and survived a bizarre 1981 attempt by South African mercenaries — smuggling weapons in as a rugby club, the "Ancient Order of Froth-Blowers" — to overthrow him.
The peaceful turn
The socialist experiment brought genuine gains in health, education and literacy, but by the early 1990s, with the Cold War over and Soviet support gone, René bowed to pressure and reintroduced multi-party democracy in 1993. Remarkably, he then won free elections and handed power to his chosen successor, James Michel, in 2004 — a rare orderly exit.
The long dominance of René's party finally ended in 2020, when Wavel Ramkalawan, an Anglican priest who had contested and lost repeatedly over decades, won the presidency — the first transfer of power to the opposition since independence, and a quietly historic one for a country that had known only one ruling movement for 43 years.
Tuna, tourism and a vast ocean
The economy rests on two pillars: tourism, drawn by the beaches and the granite peaks, and tuna, landed and canned at Victoria, one of the world's major tuna ports. Both make Seychelles wealthy by African standards but leave it exposed — to global travel shocks, to overfishing, and above all to a warming, rising sea.
Seychelles has responded by making itself a leader in ocean protection. It pioneered "debt-for-nature" swaps, writing off national debt in exchange for protecting marine areas, and has designated large stretches of its enormous exclusive economic zone — some 1.3 million square kilometres of ocean around a tiny land area — as protected. Its two UNESCO sites, the Aldabra atoll and the Vallée de Mai, are guarded as global treasures.