“A camp of sombre faces” – by Shiva Naipaul

Shiva Naipaul, Novelist and travel writer.

This is an article which appeared in The Spectator – a British weekly political journal in November 1985. The author was a very famous travel writer who visited Seychelles in 1984 and paid a visit to the National Youth Service village at Cap Ternay. As he was born in Trinidad, Naipaul had a unique perspective of island life – hence his very perspicacious observation of the strange goings on he encountered in the camp. Naipaul, who was the younger brother of the Noble Laureate V.S. Naipaul, died of a heart attack shortly before the article was published.

The NYS was a controversial institution. When Rene announced in 1979, his plan to take all children away from their parents at the age of 16 and confine them in re-education camps for two years on the outlying island of Coetivy, thousands of students demonstrated in the streets of Victoria. In response Rene agreed not to make NYS compulsory and to build the camps on Mahe and Ste Anne Island. At the same time however, he outlawed all private schools and deprived those who did not attend NYS of further eduction.

The National Youth Service remains the most fundamental and controversial innovation introduced by the new regime: an attempt to flesh out with substance the image 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 interludes of release) for two years, to put into quasi-military uniform and subject them to all the rigours of barrack-room discipline, to attempt to instil all the ardours of collective egalitarianism, adumbrates totalitarian urges out of all proposition to the scale of Seychellois existence. As is so often the case, homespun Third World ‘socialism collapses into unreflective cultism.

After some effort, a guided tour to a National 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 jungle verdancy, ‘would you have liked to have gone to one of these camps?’ He narrowed his eyes evasively- he with his fondness 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 bothered perilously on that of informer, one of the more novel vocations introduced 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 reconstruction.  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, questioned 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 colourful 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, furnished 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 Poweful’.  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 organized in ‘clusters’.  Each cluster was further divided into three ‘units’.  This arrangement found visual expression 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 wheel. 

Each unit had an animateur, an older student of settled progressive outlook, who provided ideological as well as practical inspiration 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 forbidden.  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 ‘persuasion’ and the techniques of ‘re-education’.  If persuasion and re-education proved ineffective the authorities could resort to ‘necessary punishment’ – the infliction a heavier burden of communal duty and the withdrawal of certain privileges.  An especially grave offence could lead to expulsion.  (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 test 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 appeared 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 gaze 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 equipment 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 surfaces, feeding on the remains of vegetables that had not been cleared away.  I looked askance at my companions.  The village coordinator 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 grassed. 

I remarked on the quietness of the place.  ‘It’s the time of day,’ the village coordinator said. 

I remarked on the somberness 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 raised and we returned to the outside world.

July 06, 2007
Copyright 2007: Seychelles Weekly, Victoria, Mahe, Seychelles