David Smith’s letter from Africa
David Smith shuns the beaches, sailing and diving for which the Seychelles is famous and heads to a museum
Fri 12 Feb 2010 14.05 CET
In one of the world’s smallest capital cities I found the world’s heaviest nut. I was on a gruelling assignment in the Seychelles, inspecting the star exhibit of the otherwise modest Natural History Museum in Victoria. And there it was inside a glass case, a prime specimen of coco de mer, hauled up on scales in 2001 and found to weigh 18.03kg.
Coco de mer palms grow abundantly on the nearby island of Praslin. The nut’s appearance is invariably compared with an often concealed part of the female form. An early French author likened it to “the anterior and posterior parts of the body of a negress”. General Charles Gordon said the nut represented “the thighs and belly … which I consider as the true seat of carnal desires”.
Read tourism brochures about the Seychelles and words such as pristine Garden of Eden, untouched heaven on earth and “a chance to recalibrate one’s soul in harmony with the primal essence of nature” cascade forth. The 115 granite and coral islands are famed for sailing, diving, snorkelling, beaches, mountain hikes and nature trails. So I went to a museum instead.
The Seychelles’ National Museum of History is roughly the size of the British Museum’s cloakroom. It is a single gallery divided into sections, with a narrative that seems to finish around the second world war, which brought airmail and telephones to the islands. The museum receives between 1,000 and 1,500 visitors a year, mostly from overseas, and closes on Saturday lunchtime for the rest of the weekend.
Sometimes quaint and quirky museums possess a charm that can be lost in the age of the interactive touchscreen and blockbuster crowd. There is a section here that has a potent, spare quality in no need of adornment. Slavery thrived in the Seychelles in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the majority of forced labourers shipped from Madagascar and east Africa, particularly Mozambique.
The display includes a collar with three bells attached to the ends of long metal rods, making the wearer an easy target if he tried to escape, and a metal collar with two rings: big for an adult’s waist and small for a child’s. An advert in old typeface capitals promises male and female slaves for sale as casually as rice, grains, paddy, books, muslin, needles, pins and ribbons.
Then there is the story of a slave called Pompée, convicted of murdering a Pierre Michel Inard with a billhook in 1809. It says: “As there was no executioner available to carry out the beheading, the tribunal unanimously ruled that the convicted man should be burned.
“This took place on a beach near the Moussa river at half-past three in the morning of 15 August 1810.”
It is an image not easily dispelled.
The National Museum of History’s closest thing to the Rosetta Stone is the Stone of Possession, placed at La Poudrière in 1756 to signify French ownership of the archipelago. It took its name from Louis XV’s finance minister, Viscount Jean Moreau de Séchelles, only to be later anglicised.
Indeed, this country became a vintage Anglo-French bone of imperial contention. Today you can hear both languages in the streets, as well as Seychelles Creole, and eat a croque monsieur while looking at the elegant Victoria Clocktower, a replica of a clock near London’s Victoria station which has become this city’s best known landmark.
The museum has sections on traditional washing and ironing, tobacco making, creole furniture, board games and kitchen objects such as a “machine for crushing coffee seeds” made by W M McKinnon & Co of Aberdeen. There are musical instruments including the mouloumba, bombe and zeze. A gramophone is on show and we are told the first records played here were country and western.
A couple of the display cabinets are about witchcraft, or “gris-gris”.
A caption notes that: “Many Seychellois still love to consult bonhomme-du-bois and sorcier, also dispense and sell charms, pronounce incantations etc and hold strong beliefs in these spells, incantations, potions and medicines.” The exhibits include an animal jawbone, horn, pack of playing cards, miniature coffin, set of dominoes, battered copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Catholic rosary, scissors, knife and bottle of cologne.
Another section is devoted to the world wars. The Seychelles were not invaded but held air raid drills just in case. A machine gun, steel helmet and German war bell are all displayed. There’s a statuette of Queen Victoria and photographs of former governors including Sir Eustace Edward Twisleton Fiennes, a starched figure with white hair and moustache, military epaulettes and collar up to the cheekbones and arctic stare from an armorial age. Not a man you could imagine singing his babies to sleep.
After that is a section entitled “Seychelles traditional architecture”, but the walls are blank. I emerged into the sunlight and found I could do the rest of my tourist ticklist on foot. Victoria is a small port city with a population about the size of Shipley in West Yorkshire.
I stopped by the colonial era courthouse and post office, then visited St Paul’s Cathedral, where an all-female choir was rehearsing. From near the pulpit, I looked up and saw a banner written in big letters: “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge — Hosea 4v6.” I didn’t see any particular local significance, but thought to myself that museum curators everywhere would approve.
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Source link : https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/12/seychelles-museum-history-africa
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Publish date : 2010-02-12 08:00:00
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