StapleSeychelles
Ladob
Plantain, cassava and sweet potato simmered in coconut milk with nutmeg and vanilla, served sweet as a pudding or savoury with salt fish. One name, two dishes.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes
La Diguois
The people of the third island — a granite outcrop of five square kilometres where ox carts outnumbered cars until the 1990s, whose beach is on half the postcards printed in the Indian Ocean, and whose community has watched tourism buy the island out from under it.
Identity
Population: Around 3,000
Location: La Digue and the satellite islands of Félicité, Marianne and the Sisters, east of Praslin
Language: Seychellois Creole, with English and French
Language family: French-lexifier creole (Seselwa)
Traditional governance: A district administration within the Republic of Seychelles; the island's small size and single road make it effectively a single community.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
La Passe and La Réunion families
The two main settlements on the west coast, where nearly everyone lives.
Grand Anse households
The exposed eastern side, reached by the cross-island track.
Outer island families
Households connected to Félicité, Marianne and the Sisters.
Culture
Clothing: Light Seychellois dress; the wide hat for the boat and the plantation; the bicycle is more definitive of the island than any garment.
Food: Fish grilled with chilli and lime, breadfruit, coconut, and the octopus curry the island is known for; vanilla, once a plantation crop here, is now a tourist product.
Ceremonies: Moutya, the drum-and-response dance descended from slave gatherings and now UNESCO-listed; sega; Catholic feast days; the Festival Kreol in October.
Marriage customs: Catholic marriage and, very commonly, long-term unmarried partnership, which is a Seychellois norm rather than a La Digue peculiarity; matrifocal households are usual.
Initiation rites: Catholic sacraments; competence with a boat and the reef passes, which on an island this size is simply growing up.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Seychelles, at national rather than community level — 6 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
National dishSeychelles
Kari Koko
Fish or chicken curry in coconut milk with curry leaves and green mango, the Seychellois national dish. Milder and more coconut-heavy than its Indian ancestors.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Street foodSeychelles
Grilled Fish with Chatini
Red snapper or job fish scored, rubbed with chilli and garlic and grilled over coconut husks, served with a green mango or bilimbi chatini.
Serves 4 · 40 minutes
Festival & feastSeychelles
Kat-Kat Banane
Green banana stewed with salt fish and coconut milk, served at family Sundays and at Creole festival. The bananas are cut in quarters, which is what the name means.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes, plus soaking
Regional specialitySeychelles
Satini Reken
Shark meat boiled, shredded and pounded with lime, onion and bilimbi into a fibrous relish, eaten with rice. Unique to the islands and made from the by-catch.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Drink & sweetSeychelles
Kalou
also Coconut toddy
Fermented coconut sap, drunk in the islands' interior and at Creole festivals. Sweet within hours of tapping and vigorously alcoholic by the next day.
Serves Varies · Tapped daily
Stories & Oral Literature
The Island With No CarsSocial account
La Digue had almost no motor vehicles into the 1990s. Ox carts met the ferry, bicycles did everything else, and the absence was not a policy but an economy. It has since become a policy, more or less, and also a selling point. Residents point out that the bicycles were there before anyone thought to photograph them.
Anse Source d'ArgentContemporary account
The beach on the island's south-west, with its weathered granite boulders, is among the most photographed in the world and appears in advertising that never names it. The visitor economy it generates now dominates La Digue: land prices have risen far beyond local incomes, and families who have farmed the same plots for generations are increasingly selling to guesthouse developers.
Proverbs
“The island is small; the sea is not.”
Horizons on five square kilometres.
“A bicycle needs no petrol and no permission.”
The island's own account of how it moves.
“They photograph the rocks and buy the land behind them.”
Tourism's second effect.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Roman Catholic cosmology; the granite of the inner islands, which is continental rather than volcanic, features in local accounts of the archipelago as a fragment of somewhere older.
Beliefs: Roman Catholicism, overwhelmingly; gris-gris, the Seychellois practice of protective and harmful magic, officially disapproved and widely acknowledged; sea observances before fishing.
Ancestors: Descent from enslaved Africans, French planters and Indian Ocean labourers; the island's cemeteries hold nearly every family on it.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The Christian God
Worshipped in the parish church of La Passe
The saints
Feast days that structure the island's year
Gris-gris
Not deities, but the practice of protective and harmful magic that persists alongside the church
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Timber Creole houses with steep hipped roofs and verandahs along the west coast track; plantation buildings at L'Union Estate; guesthouses increasingly among them.
Building techniques: Timber frame with corrugated iron, raised on stone piers against damp; coconut and vanilla processing structures; boat building for the reef and the ferry crossing.
Village layout: A single coastal road with houses either side, the church and jetty at La Passe, and the granite hills behind.
Artifacts
Moutya drum
Instrument
Goatskin drum heated at a fire for the call-and-response dance inscribed by UNESCO in 2021.
Ox cart
Craft
The island's transport within living memory, now largely ceremonial.
L'Union Estate
Heritage site
Copra kiln, vanilla plantation and colonial house, the island's working past.
Anse Source d'Argent
Natural heritage
Granite boulders and shallow water, among the most photographed beaches on earth.
Historical Timeline
1770s
French settlement of the Seychelles brings planters and enslaved Africans to the inner islands.
1835
Emancipation in the British Seychelles; freed families settle the smaller islands.
1900s–1970s
Coconut, vanilla and copra sustain the island; ox carts and bicycles are the only transport.
1976
Seychellois independence; tourism begins its rise as the national economy.
2021
Moutya is inscribed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- UNESCO: MoutyaUNESCO
- Britannica: SeychellesEncyclopaedia Britannica
- Seychelles National Bureau of StatisticsGovernment of Seychelles
Premium & scholarly sources