Seychelles
Capital: Victoria · East Africa & Horn
Granite-island Creole nation blending African, Malagasy, European and Asian roots, expressed in moutya drumming and Kreol Seselwa.
Ethnic communities
- Seychellois CreolesIsland society with African-Malagasy musical heart
More communities of Seychelles
- Gran Blan families · Planter-descended estate lineages
- Indo-Seychellois · Merchant families of Victoria's bazaar
- Sino-Seychellois · Shopkeeper heritage of the port
- Praslin islanders · Coco-de-mer valley communities
- La Digue islanders · Ox-cart isle of fishing traditions
- Outer-island workers · Coralline atoll copra-station heritage
- Fisher lineages · Reef and schooner families of the banks
- Moutya keepers · Drum-dance lineages of the UNESCO art
- Liberated-African descendants · Families from slave-ship rescues
- Catholic parish communities · The islands' processional faith culture
- Boat-builder families · Pirogue and schooner craft heritage
Languages
Major languages: Seychellois Creole, English, French
Language families: French-based Creole
Historical kingdoms & states
- • (No precolonial kingdoms — settled in colonial era)
Heritage sites
- • Vallée de Mai
- • Aldabra Atoll
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Seychelles
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the arts1934–2004
Antoine Abel
Literature
Poet and storyteller regarded as the father of Seychellois literature, who wrote in Creole, French and English.
- Politics & liberation1939–2017
James Mancham
Independence
Founding president of Seychelles at independence in 1976, later a campaigner for reconciliation after the coup that removed him.
- Science, business & activismb. 1968
Rolph Payet
Climate and island policy
Environmental scientist who took the case of small island states to global climate negotiations and led United Nations work on chemicals and waste.
Deep-dive community profiles
Franco-Seychellois
The planter families of the granite islands — descendants of the first French settlers of 1770, who held the coconut and cinnamon estates, gave the islands most of their surnames and place names, and lost their land in the nationalisations after 1977.
Open deep profile →Indo-Seychellois and Sino-Seychellois
The trading families of Victoria — Gujarati, Tamil and Chinese merchants who arrived under British rule, built the shops that supplied the estates, endowed the islands' Hindu temple and mosque, and have long married into the Creole majority.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Outer Islanders (Zil Elwannyen Sesel)
The people of the coral islands — copra workers and fishers scattered across a million square kilometres of ocean on Aldabra, Farquhar and the Amirantes, most of whose settlements have been closed and whose descendants now live on Mahé.
Open deep profile →Praslinois and La Diguois
The people of the second and third islands — boatbuilders, coco de mer guardians and ox-cart farmers of Praslin and La Digue, whose accents mark them out in Victoria and whose islands hold the palm forest General Gordon took for Eden.
Open deep profile →Seychellois Creoles
The people of the granite islands — formed from enslaved East Africans, French planters and later Indian and Chinese traders into a single Kreol-speaking nation, with moutya drumming, a national Creole institute and a language that is one of only three official ones.
Open deep profile →Sino-Seychellois
The Chinese of Seychelles, a few families who arrived from Mauritius and Guangdong around 1900, opened the shops that supplied every district in the archipelago, and became one of the smallest and most thoroughly creolised Chinese diasporas anywhere.
Open deep profile →