Mancham happy with reactions to his new book |07 March 2014

Seychelles’ founding President James R. Mancham has said he is greatly encouraged by the enthusiastic reactions he has received concerning his new book he is working on and which he wishes to release in August on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

Mr Mancham is currently in London engaged in some researches for this new book entitled ‘SEYCHELLES - The saga of a small nation navigating through the cross-currents of a big world’.    
       
On Wednesday, he was hosted by Christopher Lee for lunch at the Athenaeum Club in Westminster. Mr Lee, Professor of History at Cambridge University, was the BBC Defence Correspondent when he wrote ‘Seychelles Political Castaways’ which was published in London at the time of Seychelles’ Independence.

 It is interesting to note what former President Mancham wrote in his autobiography ‘Seychelles Global Citizen’ on this subject: “If the British and the French fought over the Seychelles, it was not for its natural beauty nor for its coconuts, cinnamon or tortoises but because of its strategic location on the important trading route to the East Indies. The history of our archipelago in this respect remains fascinating and is well documented in a book by a British writer Christopher Lee, entitled ‘Seychelles Political Castaways’, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1976 just a few months before we became a sovereign and independent Nation…..   The book was mainly concerned with recent developments in Seychelles and was highly complimentary towards me, indeed almost embarrassingly so. This was too much for Mr René to swallow.   He immediately instructed the Seychelles high commission in London to burn all its copies.  That evening, a man who had been given the instructions turned up at my door with a gunny bag full of them.   ‘Sir’, he said ‘I have brought these for you.  I think Rene should know that you cannot burn history’.”

Mr Mancham will today be meeting Seychellois historian Julien Durup, the academically talented Diguois who settled in Stafford, UK following the coup d’état of 1977.

The former President also received an invitation on Wednesday to attend a memorial service of Andrew Stuart who was head of the Seychelles desk at the Foreign Office at the time of the Seychelles Constitutional Conference in Malborough House, London which drafted the Seychelles Independence Constitution in 1976.   Subsequently, Mr Stuart was appointed UK’s ambassador to Finland.  

“Little Seychelles has navigated and will continue to navigate through calm and stormy weathers in a changing world of unknown future,” Mr Mancham said.