When [Ogilvie Berlouis’s] men attacked the special force’s armory in the early hours of Sunday 5 June 1977, the key was reported to have been in the absent commander’s keeping. The first casualty was from among the group of self-confessed freedom-fighters, mourned at his burial as a martyr by Dr. Ferrari although some contemporary verbal accounts maintained that he was shot accidentally by his own side who alone had firearms. An unarmed policeman was killed with the telephone to his ear, although it was sometimes pretended that he was reaching for a gun. One of the most vocal SDP men, Davidson Chang Him, died in front of the police station next to the Anglican cathedral from what his brother, the Archdeacon and future Archbishop, recognised from the gaping exit wound in his chest as a bullet in the back. Reportedly this angered René, who had wanted no bloodshed of that sort and was remarkably successful later in convincing foreign journalists that his coup had been bloodless; but it was to be followed by other murders in Seychelles and Britain at the presumed instigation of a régime apprehensive of being overthrown by means similar to those that had brought it to power. Gérard Hoarau, President of the Seychelles National Movement, was to be shot dead at Edgware in Middlesex, England, on 29 November 1985 when his part in counter-coup activities had been revealed in public; and immediately after the coup the Islands themselves were shaken by the disappearance and presumed murder there of another SDP man, the Indian merchant Hassan Ali, who could have been suspected of involvement in a possible immediate counter-coup.
The natural prospect of such a riposte had at once encouraged and enabled the SPUP to call the nation to arms, as it said, and recruit an army, again trained with Tanzanian help; the Seychelles army was sworn to support ‘the revolution’, but in 1982 it lost people from its own ranks in a fracas with the Tanzanian military mentors. The police of course had always contained SPUP supporters. The deposed President had tried to rally supporters through the radio on Adnan Kashoggi’s yacht but was now denied its use; when the yacht sailed, with her gold-plated bathroom fittings, it was as though to symbolise the departure of an era. The Seychelles Democratic Party’s era, even so, was not devoid of political freedoms, or marked by the gross financial mismanagement that has been centralised Seychelles Marketing Board. The new régimes tax haven has had its critics too.
Confined to their hotel in June 1977 by a curfew more blood-curdling in the threat than the implementation, tourists had joined the Seychellois – who were confined too – in listening on Radio Seychelles to the carefully planned steps by which Albert René – with an air of faint surprise and even, in his consummate politician’s way, of slight reluctance – agreed to benefit from the overthrow of the senior partner in a constitutionally-elected government to which he had sworn allegiance less than a year before. ‘You have heard on Radio Seychelles this morning that the people of Seychelles have decided to overthrow Mr. Mancham’s Government, and that they have asked me to form a new Government,’ as he put it in a speech which introduced the fifteen years of one-party rule which were to confirm that his own ideal ‘democracy’ was a totalitarian one. ‘It is clear’, he said ‘that today has been an eventful day and naturally I will not able to tell you much.’
So 5 June 1977 became Liberation Day – the day of the coup d’état for a real independence, according to the new regime’s enhanced campaign of socialist indoctrination or, in the new unelected cabinet’s word, ‘education’. ‘Since the 5th June the Seychellois are a Revolutionary People and therefore will not sleep again,’ said President Rene to the independence commemoration crowd at the end of the month, their enthusiasm warmed by cheerleaders strategically placed, as was to happen each year with the public celebration of his birthday. It was the birthday of a local Castro, in effect, regularly re-elected under the new constitution of March 1979 with no great choice offered to voters. The 1976 constitution with its liberal Western freedoms had been suspended immediately; the party became the state; a street was renamed after Bishop Maradan; and a statue of a man in or breaking out of chains went up and was named (in Créole) ‘Zonm Libre’.
Revolutionary fervour was at once seen to involve unquestioning acceptance of presidential decrees seeking to achieve, among other things, social objectives, like an end to drunkenness and absenteeism, which colonialists had attempted to bring about by means that were less extreme. These edicts were sugared by the assurance that the ills in question derived from the capitalist example of the colonialist oppressors – meaning of course the British administrators – rather than the French founders whose successors, educated at Seychelles College and the Convent, offspring of the grands blancs, were liberally represented among the revolutionary régime’s chief guides and beneficiaries. Some able civil servants of Chinese descent, for instance felt insecure. At the United Nations Guy Sinon, formerly Minister of Education and now Minister for Foreign Affairs – who, like other old companions of the President such as Jacques Hodoul and newer allies like Maxime Ferrari, was to fall out with him in the 1980s – asserted Seychelles’ identification with the Third World by claiming for the SPUP’s imprisoned martyrs of the past much greater hardship than their mild treatment could ever have caused, with the possible exception of Guy Pool who was sentenced to twelve years in gaol for bomb-placing. And the Janus-faced element in the régime came to the fore when it decreed the reintroduction of French in the first three primary years, in the face of strong external professional advice to the contrary. The bilingualism of the élite was an enviable skill, making for capable if not necessary resolute people, but even the zoning of schools, which the régime also decreed in order to stop advantaged children from flooding to college and convent, was not likely to bring this skill readily within the reach of the Créole-speaking masses.
Not even revolutionary decrees could raise the dead or bury the past, but they could cancel that more open society which certain British Colonial overlords has sought, more than thirty years earlier, only to back off from the kind of inevitable confrontation with propertied Seychellois which, it was refreshing to reflect, had helped to turn more than one proprietor and several proprietors’ sons and daughters into relative radicals. Cheap housing had been and article of faith of successive administrations since the late 1930s, and price-control had operated on essentials. Now a revolutionary régime openly hostile to merchants could easily legislate to control prices and commodities generally – causing the ultimate destruction, for instance, of the Mancham family’s firm, but also great loss to taxpayers. By the financial year 1988-9, some $US32,000,000 was reckoned outstanding in advances to politically–advantaged individuals as well as to state-owned enterprises, and the Indian Ocean Newsletter commented that the ‘artistic fuzziness of Seychelles state accounting of those days left all doors wide open to awkward questions and unlikely responses’.
Réne’s route was always through seas full of known reefs. By 1977 the eminently capitalistic Pirates’ Arms Hotel in
The self-confessed revolutionary party was apparently run by a handful of single-minded and perhaps simple-minded Leninist if not Jacobinesque ideologues, and hardly Marxist thinkers – although they were following the established Cuban model rather than anything approaching the grotesque course of that coming apogee of undigested Leninist orthodoxy in small newly-independent island states: Grenada’s irrational New Jewel Movement with its murderous pursuit of self-destruction following its armed insurrection in Grenada in 1979. Without trial the Seychelles People’s Progressive Front would gaol, exile and apparently cause the murder of its enemies, but it was to shed its own leaders more gently than New Jewel. The SPPF nationalised assets and tended to mismanage them, and from the beginning it was venturing upon what looked like nepotism in a manner that was at least never obvious under Mancham’s free enterprise system. René stepson was appointed to a lucrative revolutionary appointment. Hodoul’s brother became commodore of the navy. Membership of the party with all its identification with the state was not absolutely essential to personal advancement, but it was an advantage. The régime spoke of advancement for the masses and sometimes attempted it through education, which had never, at any level, been far from political indoctrination since 1977; from 1981 till 1991 it embodied two years of socially-isolating National Youth Service. Yet, still the government contained in or near its leadership representatives of groups which the colonial order had, it may be felt, pretty accurately diagnosed as being white-élitist.
Armed activists had more often been Créoles. In the Governor’s office, where Mancham had held open court, sat Ogilvie Berlouis in the early days, mocking Mancham’s lack of security. Promoted colonel by 1986, he was credited in that year with attempting a coup on his own account against the President, and having failed he resigned simultaneously from the army and the Cabinet, before going on in the more open atmosphere of the 1990s to form the miniature Seychelles Liberal Party. Rhetoric has its own sense of reality. René himself has sat puffing his little cigars in a small room tucked away at the back of adjacent ex-Government House, and at first did not seem to venture much into town without armed guards, whereas successive Governors with their children and dogs, and Mancham with his friends, had wandered there freely. In further contrast, and as a comment on fifteen years in the people of Seychelles, when Sir James Mancham came back at last in 1992 (on a visit to discuss Seychelles’ enforced return to multi-party democracy with the collapse of Marxism as a world system, and as a result of increased though very belated pressure for a return to democracy from London, Paris, Washington and Bonn) he brought a guard of about eighteen men, some of them from the British SAS.
For by then South Africa-based mercenaries – instigated yet ill-provided-for by Seychellois exiles reportedly, with the knowledge of Mancham himself, and led by Mike Hoare – had narrowly failed to take the
By then visiting parliamentarians from
Extracted from "Seychelles since 1770", by Dr Deryck Scarr published by C Hurst & Co (publishers) Ltd –