Seychelles and Diaspora Reconnection

Every reconnection article this publication has written runs west. Gorée, Cidade Velha, Badagry, Cape Coast: forts and doors on the Atlantic, and a crossing to the Americas.

Seychelles runs the other way, and almost nobody in the western diaspora has been told about it.

The sentence this page exists for

When Seychelles put the Mission Ruins of Venn's Town forward for the World Heritage List in 2013, it described the site in its own submission as "An important stop along the slave route of the Indian Ocean and of Eastern Africa".

There was a second trade. It moved people from East Africa and from Madagascar across the Indian Ocean rather than across the Atlantic, and Seychelles, an empty archipelago that had to be populated to be useful, was one of the places they were taken to.

Venn's Town

The site sits on Mahé, in the south west of the Morne Seychellois National Park, at 450 meters above the sea, reached by the road from Victoria through Sans Souci to Port Glaud.

Seychelles' submission records that it was established by the Church Missionary Society, a philanthropic group, and run from 1876 to 1889 as a school for the children of liberated slaves. Liberated is the operative word: these were people taken off slave ships by naval patrol and landed in Seychelles. The submission notes that the last batch of liberated Africans landed in Seychelles in 1875, and that the institution afterwards took in children born to African parents working on the plantations.

It covered fifty acres, much of it under vanilla and cocoa. The main buildings were two dormitories, each 100 feet by 25 feet, one for the boys and one for the girls. It was declared a National Monument in 1984.

A note on what we could not find

We could find no free photograph of the Venn's Town ruins themselves at usable size, and none of moutya being danced. The images on these pages are the setting and a plantation. That is worth saying out loud, because the visual record of the Indian Ocean trade is thin in exactly the way the written record used to be, and thinness is not the same as absence.