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  Leslie Harris could not be more different. He is ten years younger and was just not old enough for World War I. He is short, not fat, but slightly paunchy, with a plump reddish face and a constant smile. He is neatly dressed; with clean white stockings when he is wearing shorts. He is not only married but a grandfather. His wife lives in England. It was one of those marriages that amicably and painlessly fall apart as the need to maintain a home for the children ceases.

  Between the wars, and up to 1945, Leslie was employed in the Sudan Civil Service. He retired on a pension in 1945, and has lived in Seychelles ever since. The Continental is his home and base, and he has no ménage; the exact status of a pretty secretary being to his friends a matter of curiosity and conjecture rather than concern.

  Certainly he needs a secretary. He is one of the busiest people in the colony. He is Reuter’s representative. He is special correspondent for the Sunday Express and the Crown Colonist. He runs a side-line in stamps and coins. He writes articles for the local Clarion. On behalf of W. H. Smith & Son he takes orders for books and magazines. He is part proprietor of the cinema. He has a great many irons in the fire. Lily is kept busy. She is quarter coffee-coloured; with straight brown-black hair that she threatens to have darkened, delicate features and fine eyes, and a large mole under her left eye which is no more a disfigurement than Blanche Ammoun’s. She is a tall girl with an easy carriage. She has no fixed duties, schedule, or salary. When you call on Leslie you may find her setting out stamps or wrapping up two-cent coins in packets of twenty-five for postage to America, turning the collar on a shirt, typing invoices, or just sitting on the bed, swinging her long slim legs, playing Seychellois tunes on an accordion, and munching the sandwich that Leslie has contrived to salvage from his lunch.

  It is a varied assignment. Leslie is a varied person. He knows everyone; he is on equally good terms with the C.J. and with the Governor; no one expects him to take sides. He enjoys the immunity of the press. His chief characteristic is an unchanging cheerfulness, a readiness to meet a new acquaintance three-quarters way. He always looks busy, yet he has always time to gossip. He enjoys himself equally as a guest or as a host. He uses constantly the phrase ‘Just the job’. He looks as though he felt in that way about life itself; that life is ‘just the job’.

  Stanley Jones and Leslie Harris were my two pipelines on Beachcomber society. And they were agreed that nowhere in the world could a man of fifty, retired on a pension, have half as good a time. Seychelles is, to start with, the cheapest place in the sterling area where civilised amenities exist. I used to consider cheap the smaller British West Indian islands, but for every fifty pounds I spent in Antigua and St. Lucia in 194S I spent thirty pounds in Seychelles in 1950; and it has to be remembered that since devaluation the pound buys less. Secondly, and this is for the beachcomber the more important factor, nowhere in the world except in Tahiti are amatory emotions less restrained, and nowhere, not even in Tahiti, is there such an accessible variety of young attractive girls.

  There is a considerable man shortage in the colony, 17,000 females to 16,000 males. And the shortage is most pronounced in the marriageable age group. Every ambitious young Seychellois tries to get away. Five hundred young men are, for instance, at the time of writing in service overseas with the Pioneer Corps. Many young Seychelloises can never hope to marry; on practical grounds a girl feels that her best chance of guaranteeing her future is by throwing in her lot with a white man. But it is not only on practical grounds that she prefers a paunchy white man of fifty-five to a young and athletic Seychellois; she has a sense, even if a subconscious one, of racial betterment. Little stigma attaches to illegitimacy. A third of the births are natural’. A girl is proud to have children whiter than herself. Her first question at her baby’s birth is not ‘Boy or girl?’ but ‘How white is it?’ There is a status of near-matrimony in which a man legally acknowledges his natural children and allows them to use his name. The grands blancs attempt to chaperone their children; but in petit blanc and near-white society, parents are prepared to acquiesce in any ménage that offers the promise of stability; a tax on income at twenty-five per cent, is inflicted upon bachelors as an inducement to them to regularise their relationships.

  The girls of Mahé are as attractive as any I have seen. They are so near to being white that in Europe and the United States they would pass as Greeks, South Italians, or South Americans. Their features are delicate; their hair is straight; the coarser signs of their African ancestry have been eliminated, very often by a Chinese strain; they have neat hands and feet; they are well produced; with their French background and a convent training, they are good needlewomen: they make their own clothes and hats; the Sunday church parade is highly picturesque; they are house proud; many of their cottages from the outside may appear little better than shacks, but inside you will find not only cleanliness but elegance, in terms of lace and linen.

  There is only one Tahiti. And the Seychelloises lack the spontaneity, the generosity, the large-heartedness of the Tahitiennes. It is inevitable that they should. The Tahitians are a free-born people. They have never been subjected to a foreign tyranny. ‘Every Tahitian is a born millionaire’, so their saying goes. The rivers are full of shrimps and the sea of fish. There is no talk there of prædial larceny. You pick the fruit you need. Tahitians need not worry about the future. So confident are they of the future that at one time they made a practice of giving away their children to their friends and receiving their friends’ children in exchange, from whence grew up the saying, ‘We are all brothers and sisters on the island’. The Tahitians have a natural capacity for enjoyment; they regard love-making as the most obvious and most amusing of occupations, and they throw themselves with insouciant light-heartedness into a month’s, a week’s, or a week-end’s romance. They meet you upon equal terms.

  The Seychelloises are not like that. In the first place they are not a free-born people. They have been subject in the past to tyranny. They cannot be irresponsible. They have to consider their future. They need stability and security. Though they relax when a man-of-war is in, they are not in the market for romances between boats; they look for a steady proposition. They are not naturally gay; they have too many problems and responsibilities.

  Mentally they are not good company; anyone who is used to the stimulating companionship of the modern English and American woman finds them ‘heavy going’. But we should remember that if we could put back the clock three generations we should find ourselves unutterably bored by the conversation of our great-grandmothers—and the Seychelloises have been brought up in a mental atmosphere not unlike that of the mid-Victorian age. Up till a few years ago the regulations of the Code Napoléon with regard to women were still in force. Legally a Seychelloise was the chattel of her husband; she could not practise a profession without his consent; she could not own property; she could not receive letters unless he had read them first; and Charles Collet, to whom future reference will be made, deserves grateful recognition for having during his régime as Acting Attorney-General legally brought the status of the Seychelloise into some conformity with that existing in Britain and the United States. The fact that this measure was subjected to a great deal of criticism from the grands blancs is proof of the very inferior position occupied by women in the Colony. The mental horizon of the mid-Victorian woman was limited by clothes, babies, and flirtations. So is that of the Seychelloise.

  In her bearing towards love itself there are in the Seychelloise indications of this condition of subservience that are likely at first to disconcert the American and European. The Seychelloise regards man not so much as her superior but as her master. She arrives at a first rendezvous in a submissive mood. She does not expect to be put at ease with cocktails, cigarettes, and banter. She expects to be the object of an immediate and defined attack by whose vigour and duration are conditioned her own powers of response. She is unfamiliar with the varied preliminaries of courtship. She finds them tiresome and uncomplimentar
y to her charms—an attitude that is well-calculated to diminish both the enthusiasm and capacities of the average Westerner. Discouraged by her apathy and nonchalance, he is inclined ‘to call the whole thing off’. If, however, he is sufficiently attracted to persist, he will be rewarded amply. The Seychelloise is very special when her senses are once roused and her heart is touched. She is tender, caressing, ardent, gracious; natural and utterly unvicious. It is on her account that so many emotionally displaced persons have made their homes in Mahé.

  4. The Collet Incident

  J. A. F. Ozanne’s Coconuts and Creoles is dedicated in respectful sympathy “to those unfortunate beings past, present and future who by fate have been, are and will be called to govern Seychelles”. It is a thankless task.

  Practically the first thing that I had learnt on my arrival was that the Governor and the Chief Justice were not on speaking terms. By this dispute I was soon to discover the social life of the island was cut in two, the C.J. refusing to attend any function to which the Governor had been invited, and the C.J. being not only one of the three most influential but also one of the most popular personalities in the colony.

  The quarrel was the direct outcome of the case that brought Seychelles into the news for the first time in its history. By the time these lines appear the three protagonists in the issue will be stationed in different quarters of the globe, and it may seem pointless to recall a controversy that has been forgotten by all except those who were immediately concerned; but the issue in my opinion has its bearing on the whole very insistent problem of backward peoples.

  The dispute was this.

  In the spring of 1947 the Governorship of Seychelles was offered to Doctor P. S. Selwyn-Clarke,1 who was at that time Senior Medical Officer in Hong-Kong. He was fifty-three years old. In World War I he had won the Military Cross for courage in the field. During the second war he was imprisoned by the Japanese, sentenced to death, tortured, and as a result of this treatment he carries a walking-stick to-day. He was awarded the C.M.G. He is slim, fairly tall, grey-haired with a clipped moustache. He has a dignified bearing, and when he speaks in public a clear delivery. Between the wars he filled with distinction a number of appointments in the colonial medical service, mainly on the Gold Coast. As an S.M.O. he had considerable administrative experience, but he was not in the Consular Service and his was a political appointment.

  Two or three such appointments have been made by the Labour Government, and they were much criticised in the Opposition Press, in particular that of Lord Baldwin to the Leeward Islands. There is a great deal to be said for such appointments. Too often in the past the inhabitants of small colonies have complained that their administrators have come to them at the end of their careers, hoping to close those careers in the sunset glow of a K.C.M.G., with the avoidance of trouble as their chief objective, Whitehall’s attitude always being Tor heaven’s sake don’t let’s have a row’. Colonists are not unready to welcome men who have earned their honours in a different sphere, who do not stand or fall by the outcome of this one appointment, who are prepared to experiment, to run risks.

  There is something also to be said against such appointments; there is, in the first place, the injustice to the professional consular official who naturally foresees a governorship as the crown of his career, and secondly there is the suspicion among the colonists that a governor has been appointed to implement the colonial policy of the particular party that is in power. This latter suspicion was at the time of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke’s appointment most unwarranted, since the colonial policies of the two main parties in Great Britain were identical, but any appointment made by a Labour Government was bound to be suspect by the planter class of a Crown colony that not only, as landlords invariably do, held feudal views but had been so long out of touch with Europe and America as to be unaware of the changes that have taken place there in political opinion.

  In this particular instance a new difficulty was added, for the policy that the new Governor had been instructed to implement was one that could scarcely fail to antagonise the planter class.

  Shortly before Dr. Selwyn-Clarke took up his appointment, Whitehall had decided that income-tax regulations must be enforced more strictly in the colonies. This was tricky. Before the first war there had been no income-tax in the colonies. Most of the trade was in the hands of Indians, Syrians, and Chinese, who kept their accounts either in their heads or in incomprehensible hieroglyphics. If income-tax had been imposed it would have been paid entirely by the British-born community. It was considered that such persons, by the mere fact of their residence in a colony, were performing a service to the mother country. They were Empire Builders, and entitled to save such money as they could for their retirement. The costs of government were maintained by customs duties, and all went smoothly.

  Between the wars, not only was it found that certain sections of the Empire could no longer be maintained upon this basis but a sense of imperial obligation had been aroused towards backward peoples. Various welfare schemes were in operation, and income-tax was imposed in order to finance them. The rate of tax was not, however, high, nor was its collection taken very seriously.

  After the second war, however, it was realised that quite a large section of what remained of the Empire had ceased to be an asset. Britain was in debt, and the Treasury was no longer in a position to liquidate with grants this and the other liability. Evasion of income-tax had got to stop. Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, nominee of a Socialist Government, arrived therefore with instructions to supplement a policy of social welfare with a campaign for rigorous tax enforcement; it is unlikely that his régime would have been popular under any circumstances, but Seychelles would not have made the headlines unless two remarkable men had arrived in the island within a few months of one another.

  The first to arrive was a former Seychellois who had been away from the island for over twenty years. The son of a mason who had migrated from Mauritius, Charles Collet gives the impression of being a hundred per cent, coloured. He is bald; his features are more fine drawn than those of the average African, and it has been suggested that he is partly Indian. Nothing is known for certain about his ancestry. He was raised in humble circumstances; he worked hard; he became a schoolmaster; he was befriended by a Quaker and himself joined the Society of Friends; he studied medicine in Paris, and married there a Frenchwoman who is completely white. Shortly before the war he went to London, interested himself in the Society of Coloured Peoples and became its secretary. Both he and his wife read for and were admitted to the Bar. When the war was over, he decided to return to his old home and practice. He was then in the early fifties. He has charm, he is well mannered and well read. Anyone meeting him in London or New York would say: ‘Now here’s the proof that a coloured man if given a proper chance can become just as effective as a white.’

  He returned, the local boy making good’, and it is hard to believe that when he saw the outlines of Mahé take shape and the familiar landmarks grow distinct, he did not contrast with a glow of self-congratulation the obscure student who had left this harbour twenty years before with the august member of the Bar who stood now against the taffrail with a French white wife beside him. The novelist would find it easy to dramatise that moment in terms of the colour conflict; to make the ‘local boy’ recall the hardships and humiliations he had endured in childhood; the efforts and sacrifices he had needed to pull himself out of the rut; the affronts he had received in Europe; the family indignation when he had been presented as a future son-in-law; the hotel porters who had raised their eyebrows on his honeymoon; the surprised, outraged expression at this and the other party when he introduced a white woman as his wife. It would be easy in the light of such past incidents to show him gloating over the prospect of old scores waiting to be settled.

  That is the danger and temptation that confronts the novelist when he abandons fiction. His instinct is to rearrange the scene. He does not want to falsify facts but to bring out their full significance
by a heightening of effects, by making happen not so much what might have happened as what should have happened; he wants to explain, to interpret, to impute motives, to cut off loose threads. In the process he very often takes leave of truth.

  It would be easy to describe scene by scene the chain of events that brought Charles Collet back to his old home in a revengeful mood: but in point of fact there is nothing to suggest that any such chain of events or any such mood existed. As far as I know, he was not the subject of any of those personal affronts that it would be so easy for the novelist to devise: there is no reason to believe he nurtured any special anti-white resentment; or that he had acquired in Europe any violently socialistic doctrines, any ‘soak-the-rich-at-all-costs’ philosophy. Nor again was his return unwelcome to his fellow islanders.

  It might have been assumed that his marriage to a white Parisienne would be resented by the grands blonds, who were finding it increasingly difficult both to preserve the colour line and find husbands for their daughters. They might have been expected to regard Madame Collet as a renegade, who had ‘let down the side’. But there is no indication that they did: on the contrary, the Collets appear to have been welcomed by the planters as two new allies who would defend them in the courts against all these tiresome demands for income-tax. Which is what the Collets did, and so effectively that the Government found itself losing case after case before Collet’s arguments, so effectively that in self-defence the Government decided to enlist Collet on its side, and when a vacancy occurred appointed him Acting Attorney-General with instructions to clear up this income-tax business as quickly and expeditiously as possible.