Mission Ruins of Venn's Town: Visitor and Heritage Guide

The most important heritage site in Seychelles is not a World Heritage property

Venn's Town sits on Seychelles' Tentative List, submitted on 1 February 2013 under criteria four and six, and has not been inscribed. It is nonetheless the site this cluster was built around, and Seychelles' own submission explains why in a single line: it calls the place "An important stop along the slave route of the Indian Ocean and of Eastern Africa."

Almost everything this publication has written about the diaspora concerns the Atlantic. There was a second trade, moving people from East Africa and Madagascar eastward across the Indian Ocean, and Seychelles was one of its destinations.

What was here

The submission records that Venn's Town was set up as an industrious school by the Church Missionary Society, a philanthropic group, and operated from 1876 to 1889 to accommodate the children of liberated slaves.

Liberated is precise, and it matters. These were people taken off slave ships by naval interception and landed in Seychelles rather than delivered to a buyer. The submission notes that the last batch of liberated Africans landed in Seychelles in 1875, and that the institution thereafter took in children born to African parents working on the plantations.

The site originally covered fifty acres, a large part 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.

One thing we could not find

There is no free photograph of the Venn's Town ruins at a size this publication can use. The image on this page is the view from the site, over the forested ridges of the Morne Seychellois to the sea, and it is captioned as exactly that rather than as the ruins.

We note it because the thinness of the visual record for the Indian Ocean trade is itself part of the story.