Our souvenirs of stone |18 April 2009
Far away, on the southern coast of Capucin, deep in the cinnamon forest where the last few coconut palms struggle to survive, the ruins of a copra kiln lie in pathetic oblivion.
And in the east of Mahe, up among the sloping hills of Le Niole, are the dilapidated remnants of cinnamon and patchouli distilleries, their geometries distorted and damaged by the ravages of time.
Similar ruins can be found elsewhere on Mahe and on many other islands, scattered in gloomy concealment and overgrown by scrubland and wild vegetation.
Once upon a time, these modestly simple structures of rock, limestone and clay were essential and indispensable features on all coconut estates. In reality they were instruments of wealth for the estate owners and ipso facto infinitely crucial to the economy of the then British colony. Because those were the days when the value of copra and cinnamon was similar to that of oil today.
Surprisingly enough, the industrial economy of Seychelles did not begin with cinnamon or copra. In fact, the first recorded export crop was cotton in 1796, two years after the British had taken possession of Seychelles.
It was at the wise recommendation of the commandant, Queau de Quinssy (1748-1827), who realised the vital importance to Seychelles of a plantation industry, that by 1810 over 3,000 acres of land were turned into cotton plantations, with many planters in Mauritius having moved to Seychelles with their slaves to capitalise on the clause embodied in the Capitulation Act that stipulated that slavery and slave trading would be maintained in the colony. It was one of the provisos that Queau de Quinssy himself had exacted in his agreement with the British.
Cotton from Seychelles was exported to Europe, where the cotton fibre was spun into yarns for the textile industry. Unfortunately, the unprecedented prosperity that the land owners and even peasant cultivators were enjoying from their products would last only until about Queau de Quinssy’s death in 1827 – because Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin back in 1793 would gradually revolutionise the cotton manufacturing industry in the United States and put small cotton-producing countries like Seychelles at a great disadvantage.
On Mahe, a planter could only produce as much cotton from his plantation as his slave workers could clean by hand, which was slow and tiring work.
While it took a worker in Seychelles an entire day to remove seeds from one pound of cotton, the machine that Whitney (1765-1825) invented could do the work of human fingers in separating the seeds from the cotton fibres at four times the speed.
Actually, one person running a cotton gin could do the work of 50 or 60 people working by hand, which meant that American planters expanded their plantations and produced 200 times as much cotton as before – bad news for Seychellois cotton growers.
As expected, a surfeit of cotton brought the prices down. In 1822, a bale of cotton dropped abruptly from $80 to $30 on the European market. This created widespread frustration and despair among local cotton planters, who had to find another source of revenue, which they did not have to wait so long for or look any further for than at the coconuts growing in abundance throughout the archipelago.
It was certainly around this time that the first copra kilns (kalorifer) were built on the coconut estates to dry copra, from which coconut oil was extracted. The kiln was an oblong structure of limestone rock consisting of a chamber with an arched opening.
A chimney stack was essential to prevent creosote from the smoke from contaminating the copra. A blazing fire of broken coconut shells and husks in the chamber would heat the overhead platform, on the surface of which pieces of the nut kernel were laid out to dry. Oil was subsequently extracted by means of an ox-drawn mill.
This was a simple but ingenious contraption that ground and crushed the copra to release coconut oil. A heavy wooden pole was pulled around by the ox pushing against the horizontal post, in the process of which the pieces of copra were pressed and crushed against the sides and bottom of a large wooden mortar.
The coconut oil ran out of a drain in the mortar and was collected in a bucket. Yes, this was actually the very simple but very expedient method by which hundreds of barrels of our coconut oil ended up in pharmaceutical and confectionery industries of Europe. One ton of copra (produced from 6,000 to 7,000 coconuts) could yield 153 gallons of oil.
That was so many decades ago when coconuts cost R2 per 100, therefore two cents each.
In more recent times, the last attempt to establish an industry to manufacture coconut products was in 1991, when a coconut cream factory called Aromes de L’océan Indien was opened at Anse Royale.
A business partnership between the Seychelles government and a French company called Biotropic, which apparently specialised in processing agricultural products, the factory produced 20 tons of cream a month in 250-milligram packets for the local market.
It employed 12 workers and used an average quota of 10,000 coconuts a month, but the factory closed down a few years later. Curiously enough, one aspect of the short-lived enterprise that many inhabitants seem to remember most is that the factory featured the picture of a frangipani flower on its product and not that of the more logically appropriate Cocos nucifera!
In 1871, as the population reached 11,000, most inhabitants of Seychelles were earning their livelihood from agricultural pursuits. Therefore when sufficient vanilla pods were harvested to justify an export trade in 1877, many estate owners delighted in the prospect of earning a reliable revenue from the new crop, which fetched good prices on the international market. That year, a first export of 60 kilos of vanilla valued at R1,195 went to South Africa.
It was, however, during the last three decades of the 19th century that the economic supremacy of the coconut in the plantation industry became overwhelmingly evident as many factories were being established in Great Britain to make margarine, the blessed substitute for butter that a French chemist named Mége-Mourières had invented as recently as the early 1860s.
As coconut plantations expanded, more copra kilns were built to produce the oil that was then one of the main ingredients in the manufacture of magarine.
In early 1874, a French mariner named Léopold Auguste Charles Pallu decided to come to Seychelles to make use of all the tons of coconut husks that were accumulating on coconut estates on Mahe.
He installed a coir fibre mill on the tract of land – later called Gordon Square and now known as Freedom Square – that had been created by the avalanche of 1862. His modest but modern enterprise, which supplied the local market with ropes and cordage, was unfortunately short-lived, and l’usine Pallu closed in 1880.
Apparently, the site was already being considered as the “industrial zone” because in 1883 another Frenchman named Paul-Louis Guérard set up the first soap factory on the same site. In 1891 Eduoard de Saint-Jorre bought the business, which prospered well into the early years of the 20th century.
In 1901, as Seychelles stood on the threshold of becoming a separate colony, the 
Between 1890 and 1903, Seychelles exported more vanilla than all the other British colonies put together.
The first decade of the 20th century saw the creation of various factories to exploit the commercial potential of essential oils and agricultural products that the European market was hankering for, and to make coir products for the local market.
Thus, by 1913 with the population at 23,777 there were 3 distilleries at Sans Soucis and one on Silhouette, a rum distillery at Pointe Larue, a soap factory, 2 factories for processing plantains, one at Pointe Aux Sel and one on La Digue, and the ‘Cayole’ coir factory established by Mr.
T.Cayole in 1910 at Cascade at the actual site of the present District Administration building. Its main feature was a water-wheel operated by water brought down by an aquaduct from the mountains. The factory made bristle fibre, coir yarn, rope, twine, mats and upholstery stuffing.
On the local market, coconuts sold for Rs.50 per thousand. A total of 12,000 acres of land throughout the colony were under coconut cultivation. And this would more than double a mere three decades later….
In 1908 the first cinnamon export of 740,123 kilos, with a value of R50,166, created a tremendous impetus to establish an export trade. And indeed it was lucrative to such an extent that it eventually became the second most important export crop after copra and was considered a fundamental mainstay of the economy.
By the early 1940s, 2,000 labourers were employed in the cinnamon industry with around 14,000 acres of land allocated for cinnamon cultivation.
However, though for most of the 20th century the cinnamon industry experienced an exceptional period of prosperity, it also had an adverse impact on Seychelles’ vanilla industry – a most stupefying irony, indeed!
It transpired that Seychelles’ cinnamon oil, which was mostly exported to the USA, was during the 1920s used almost exclusively in the manufacture of vanillin – synthetic vanilla – and consequently the outcome was a cheaper source of the product. One can imagine the consternation of vanilla plantation owners in Seychelles when the demand for and price of their vanilla pods suddenly dropped.
But salvation was in the copra industry. Just look at the figures: between 1913 and 1919 a 
In the late 1940s, it was estimated that of the total land area of 157 sq miles, more than one quarter was planted with coconuts as the main crop – 22,000 acres on the granitic islands and 7,000 acres on the coral islands, a total of 29,000 acres.
Every island made its own contribution. In 1949, nuts collected on St Anne amounted to 501,916, all converted into copra.
These figures invoke a retrospective awareness and appreciation of our colonial plantation economy, the livelihood that it gave to our grandparents and the sheer wealth that it generated for our country. It is also a powerful indication of the toil and sweat that were needed to make our erstwhile agricultural industry a thriving national business.
To get a more definitive idea of what is being stated here, let’s shuffle the cards and pick a year from our history: so here we are in 1932. The population is just above 27,000, and the foreign trade of the colony amounts to R2,355,44. The national budget, as declared by Governor De Symons Honey is R652,652. Throughout the colony there are in operation 50 copra kilns, 56 distilleries for essential oils and 55 bullock–powered coconut oil mills.
So, that was in the past. Nowadays, coconut palms are no longer in such abundance. Cinnamon, yes. It is widespread and grows as rampantly as ever. Vanilla is cultivated on such a small scale that its scent has become almost a memory in our minds. Today, we buy and consume Moir’s synthetic vanilla essence. We are also tempted to buy imported coconut milk – in powder form. We still put, if we can and if we want, a few cinnamon leaves in our curry.
As for those ruins, they are dilapidated souvenirs of a bygone era. A hundred years ago they served their purpose eminently well. In 100 years’ time they will have crumbled and disintegrated. This is history.