David’s Reviews > René and Postcolonial Seychelles > Status Update

Wary of the IMF after seeing Manley's Jamaica flounder trying to combine IMF dictates and social goals, René instead sought $50 million (a lot for a nation of <100.000) from commercial lenders. The closing of the US satellite tracking station (the biggest private employer) was the straw that broke the developmentalist back and by 1998 Seychelles had a 22%/GDP deficit. Still René rejected the IMF till 2008.

René's tightening control and Eastern-Bloc security made it easy for some to mischaracterize the regime. A US chargé d'affaires characterized it as 'White Marxists and Black Catholics' ... But it was hard to identify a single real Marxist in the regime.

An attempt by René to launch the National Youth Service, a vehemently atheist Komsomol-style Youth brigade that was to separate all kids from their parents for a certain duration, on an uninhabited island 300km away from Mahé, unsurprisingly wasn't received well. 95% of students enrolled in secundary education protested.

The UK Wilson government was very keen on getting rid of many distant colonies, seeing them as a drain on British finances and a source of geopolitical tension. Ironically, Mancham's mainstream SDP, which pushed for British association, was cold-shouldered by Westminster, while firebrand René, though being ignored, pursued essentially the same strategic goals — up to a very limited point.

René SPUP party created the archipelago's 2nd or so trade union centre, the TGWU. He rode this into the nations first great strike against the largest single employer: the American space observatory.

I could see you leveraging that yes

Instituting universal suffrage was a maneuver by the British overlords to prevent a Rhodesia-style coup, which would make the country diplomatically and politically much more unpredictable than democracy would. The theme of electoralism not as an avancement towards 'democracy' but as a technique to safeguard certain political structures featured centrally in ToBP too.

In Seychelles the cadres for socialist revolution were recruited from Catholic lay organisations, not the Protestants as was the case in Madagascar, Congo, etc. Its subaltern position under Anglican colonialism must've gotten something to do with that.