Jun 14, 2008
Perhaps it is as well that we never know how any one piece of experience will impact on future experiences. Life would set up some impossible choices if we could see all the consequences of every action.
I think my trips to the Seychelles evolved from my trip to Syria, but one can never be sure. On my second trip to Syria, when I took Pam with me in 1990, not only my controller, Ed Feliu, decided to come with me, but also a Frenchman in charge of legal aid at FAO headquarters and also his charming Brazilian wife. Perhaps they felt they could now risk a trip to Syria, reassured by the fact that I had returned unscathed from my first trip there. Of course there may have been some legal matter that needed attention too, though it was not obvious to me, and Jean-Pierre seemed only to pay a short visit to the French embassy in Damascus and then spend most of the time accompanying his wife on shopping expeditions. The wife spoke no English, but with my halting French I managed to make some sort of conversation with her, which was all she got by way of a change from talking to her husband. I remember them particularly at a dinner Ali Mahmoud arranged for us and the senior staff, with pita bread made on the spot, the dough tossed on a kind of canvas cushion until it thinned and expanded to the right size, then tossed onto the hotplate where it bloated magnificently and was brought hot to the table. The centrepiece on the table was a giant bowl of cracked ice smothered in ripe cherries, that burst cool and heavenly on the tongue. How imaginative and artistic the Syrians can be. Who knows how much the atmosphere at the dinner contributed to my stumbling conversation?
In any case, when we returned to Rome after the visit, Pam and I were invited to dinner with the Chiaradia-Bousquet’s, at there flat in a restored Roman crypt on the Apian Way. It made a cool and very pleasant apartment, and with their Louis XIV furniture, (madam’s daddy held the Mercedes franchise for Brazil). We could hardly have wished for a nicer setting for their hospitality.
In 91 and 92 I had assignments in Africa, but if I saw Jean-Pierre when I passed through Rome on those occasions it was no more than to smile and pass the time of day. However in 1993 I received a phone call from him, asking if I would care to go to the Seychelles Islands, to do some plant protection training for the staff of the Agriculture Department there, and to revise their plant protection legislation.
All I knew about the Seychelles was that Archbishop Makarios had spent a few years in exile there when the British had wearied of his rebelliousness as the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus. I had spent much of my life lecturing on plant protection, and I had worked on plant protection legislation in Tanzania with the support of an Australian lawyer, so the job looked manageable. The Seychelles had been a French colony until 1815 when the British had taken it over, so that although most of the educated people speak English the mass of the people still speak a kind of pidgin French called kreol. It sounds pretty much like French, but when it is written down it is spelt phonetically, and without much regard for syntax or grammar, so it is almost unintelligible until you read it aloud. I presume it was this French connection which had recalled me to Jean-Pierre’s mind as a suitable candidate. I was to be accompanied by a French Canadian lawyer lady to help with work on the legislation. I accepted the assignment.
It was a piece of cake. They flew me there business class, via Singapore on a brand new Boeing 757 of Air Seychelles, with fully reclining seats and an all pervading air of luxury. I had a nice little sleep on the way, and arrived more or less refreshed just as the day was breaking calm and pleasant. By the time I got through customs the sun had risen, and I cashed some American money into local rupees, and got a taxi to take me to the Mountain Rise Hotel, where someone must have told me I would be staying. It was a substantial oldish building near the crest of the ridge that forms the backbone of the main island, - high enough to be above the tropical heat of the day. They were having breakfast as I walked in the door.
A young lady with glasses and a mass of curly hair got up and came over and was introduced to me by the manageress as Josée Fecteau, my legal associate from FAO headquarters. She said she had rented a Suzuki four wheel drive for our use, and handed me a roll of US dollars that would choke a horse, and which FAO had provided for my “daily subsistence”. It seemed like a good start.
After breakfast an Indian boy, a Mr Moustache, from the agricultural research station turned up and drove us over the hill to his research area on the west side of the island, discussing his work on the way. When asked what crops they were particularly interested in he said “You name it”, which turned out to be his response to most questions, and as far as crops were concerned, that turned out to be pretty true. Newly independent, they were almost entirely dependent on tourism. (hence the new airline), and there was a strong desire to save foreign exchange by producing all the food requirements that a range of European visitors could demand. So they were growing everything except potatoes and carrots, which they were working on, and they had lettuces, cabbages, eggplants, citrus, pineapples, soursops, casimiroas, jackfruit, duku, mangoes and bananas. It was an impressive display, though the quantities they were growing suggested that commercial objectives were at least as important to them as research results. Perhaps the public service found it a convenient source of supply to supplement their quite modest incomes. Who knows? I had nothing to recommend as to the running of it, except to note that they seemed to be flinging insecticides and fungicides around in a rather reckless and wasteful fashion.
After work we took a walk up the narrow winding road above the hotel, through bits of forest to the ridge where Archbishop Makarios spent his two or three pleasant years of exile from 1956, in a substantial mansion set among trees and spacious gardens, in what is now the American Embassy. I wouldn’t mind being exiled there for the rest of my life.
The Republic of Seychelles is a pleasant little piece of paradise with a rather peculiar history. Unlike most oceanic islands or archipelagos, it is not of volcanic origin, but is a fragment of the ancient Gondwana continent, left isolated when Africa parted company with India about 65 million years ago. It is made of granite, which weathers very slowly into spectacular rock formations, but produces thin and rather poor soils for growing things in. In the past it has produced some fine trees, but nowadays it is mostly covered with regrowth forest or verdant scrub, which in some ways has been its salvation. Unlike Madagascar, which has been cleared and burnt off to yield vast eroding hillsides which are neither use nor ornament, Seychelles has retained much of its forest cover, and until quite recent times has had little attraction for settlers. Apart from the occasional Arab pirate, seeking fresh water or timber or a few giant tortoises to eat, it was pretty well deserted when Vasco Dagama put it on the map in 1509.
However its long isolation from Africa and Asia has given it an interesting flora and fauna. There are 75 species of plants which are indigenous to the islands, including a beautiful waterlily, a peculiar “jellyfish tree” with fruit in the likeness of jellyfish, and of course the “coco-de-mer” with its 50 cm long coconut husks enclosing a great, date-stone shaped seed, which takes three years to germinate, and which is thae largest seed known. Inside it the flesh when mature is as hard as plastic, but when immature is said to be a soft white jelly which makes a wonderful dessert. The 15 kg seed, when stripped of its husk, is grey and somewhat wrinkled, rather reminiscent of the back end of an elephant. Perhaps it was this appearance that led sailors and others to assign to its flesh a strong aphrodisiac quality. Lord Kitchener, on noting the resemblance of the outer husk to the shape of the loving human heart, and of the inner seed to the site of baser emotions, declared that this was the original “forbidden fruit” and that the island of Praslin in the Seychelles, must have been the original Garden of Eden. And he may well have been right, for the Director of Agriculture was a Mr Adam, and his brother was the Minister of Health.
Likewise there are strange animals which have long disappeared from places where mammals have been able to reach. Aldabra, the most westerly atoll of the Seychelles administration, is, for example, the home of the giant turtle, (Dipsochelys elephantine, Bour), which only occurs wild in the Seychelles and in the Galapagos Islands. And there are birds that nest on the ground or deposit their eggs naked in the forks of tree branches.
In 1517 the Portuguese recognised seven islands in the group which they called the Seven Sisters, but they considered the coral reefs too risky to make use of them. However, pirates based in Madagascar and preying on spice ships from the East Indies and China, used the islands as a refuge when pursued by naval vessels. One of the pirates, La Buse, who was hung short and high in 1730 was said to have buried his loot perhaps at Réunion in 1721, and people are still searching for it. But then they are also searching for pirate treasure in the caves of Frégate Island.
Perhaps because of the pirates the French governor of Mauritius, Mahé de La Bourdonnais, annexed the main island in 1742, and his successor took the rest in the name of the King of France in 1756, naming them Séchelles, after Louis XV’s finance controller, Moreau de Séchelles.. In 1768 Marion-Dufresne, (regrettably later eaten in the Bay of Islands) surveyed the northern islands, naming La Digue and La Curieuse after his two ships, and Praslin after his boss, the minister of Marine , Gabriel de Choiseul, duc de Praslin. A little colony was established in 1770 by Pierre Poivre, the pepper king, to grow spices, or at least to drive slaves to grow them. However after the French Revolution, with the local resentment arising from its attempt to abolish slavery, and then under frequent naval attack from the British, the Seychelles administration changed sides between Britain and France no less than ten times before 1810, when the British finally took control. Strangely they had enough sense to leave the French governor, de Quincy, in charge. There were 471 whites, which included the survivors of the 132 unfortunates that Napoleon had sent there in 1801, “for what they have done, and what they might yet do”. There were also 6678 slaves in the colony at the time. When the British also abolished slavery in 1835, many more freed Africans from the mainland took refuge in Seychelles, so that along with the Indian and Chinese merchants and a few Arabs, the present population displays a full range of skin and eye colour from black to pink and from blue to brown. Although children are taught English in school, still their everyday language is the kreol version of French, with its bits of Portuguese and English and African and Indian. Many in senior positions in government and commerce have been educated in France, and are much more at home with French than with English. So when Josée was discussing legal niceties with the Attorney General or with other legal officers, I asked them to use French which was easier for them, and useful training for me.
In 1975 Britain gave Seychelles independence as a republic, and in 1976 the present administration under Albert René took over after a coup. To my mind they run the place very well, with a cautious approach to conserving foreign exchange, and a generally even handed social policy. In agriculture, their exports of coconut products and of cinnamon have pretty well dried up, so they are almost totally dependent for foreign exchange, on tourism and fish exports. Hence the policy of growing as much fruit and vegetable produce as they can, by way of import substitution.
There are plenty of white beaches , only a few occupied by tourist hotels, and as there are no rivers worth mentioning, the water is wonderfully clear. There are glass-bottomed boat trips to some of the smaller islands, one of which is occupied by the British pulp writer Wilbur Smith, and another by the son of another British writer, who saves on laundry bills by going naked. He was the focus of many an old lady’s telephoto lens when we visited the neighbouring island.
The food is good too, mostly based on fish or crabs or oysters, all of which suit me. Cooking styles seem to have a French basis, - few things on the plate, carefully chosen and not unduly mucked about with, - but there are sauces and dressings that suggest an Indian or African influence too. Some of the restaurants have spectacular views over the beaches and the sea.
Of course there are problems. Drunkenness is said to be one of them, and it was impossible to buy methylated spirits, even from a chemist, so I had trouble getting the wherewithal to pickle my insect specimens. I didn’t notice any of the drunks at large, but once when a fellow on the road thumbed us for a lift, the driver refused to stop for him, saying he was drunk. Perhaps he had a local reputation.
On the other hand I noticed only one attempt at thievery, when a kid of ten or twelve at a petrol station disappeared out back without giving me my change, but I only had to tell the boss and it was put right. Perhaps the lad had a reputation too. I suppose crime isn’t very attractive on a small island. There is nowhere to run to. And I imagine President Réné, and ex-priest, would be taking a dim view of it anyway.
From the professional point of view things were pretty straightforward. Josée knew her job, (she had worked for the Chief Justice of Canada before she joined FAO), and we had a good model of quarantine legislation that the Aussie bloke had drawn up with me in Tanzania. On the plant protection side, the staff seemed intelligent and dedicated but they had neither status nor equipment. Nor did they have a satisfactory manual of rules to work from. So I recommended that they be given uniforms or at least some identifying badge to give them equal standing with the Customs officers, and that they be issued with hand lenses and a book of instructions. They also needed an incinerator for disposing of diseased or infested material, and they needed some fumigation equipment. I also gave them a three day course of training and recommended some books for them, and got the South Pacific Commission to send them a set of the plant quarantine leaflets that they issue to the Pacific Islands. But they still lacked scientific support especially in entomology, and although they had a bright little plant pathologist who had just returned from university in Leipzig she had almost no equipment, and of course no experience.
I had the feeling that if I’d had four months there instead of four weeks, I could have got things running pretty well. However, alas! The money ran out, even before we were paid, and they had to raid the till at FAO to make up the shortfall. Such is life.