“Ou pi maron” – Deconstructing racism in Seychellois society |07 February 2026
Elia Damasy Savy
By Elia Damasy Savy
“Ou pi maron” is a Seychellois expression used to crudely tell someone that they stink. It is not widely used, but I heard it on various occasions, the first time being when I was a child. During recess, a classmate refused to play because she was scared that others would tell her “ou pi maron”. At the time, the phrase registered as a playground insult rather than as a historical marker. I never questioned why these words, strung together in this sentence, meant what they did. Paradoxically, I’ve always known what a “maron” (Maroon in English) is: an enslaved person who escaped from his or her master’s property, therefore practicing marronage. Only after reading ‘Maroons of the Seychelles, Escape from Slavery 1768-1877’ by P.A. Nicholls in 2023 did I have an epiphany: a sentence that once left me indifferent, now made me feel uneasy. Uneasy not because I assume inherent racist intent in those who use it, but because the expression can be read as emerging from a racialised social order produced by slavery and later perpetuated through colonisation.
Has it since been stripped of all these connotations, or does it still carry traces of the social order that produced it?
I first started to think about this subject when I saw the celebrations of Fèt Kaf, the Reunionese commemoration of the abolition of slavery, which takes place on December 20. “Kaf” is a scornful term used to designate Black people, and it comes from the French word “Caffre”, a version of “Kaffir”, “infidel” or non-believer in Arabic. The use of the word “Kaf” has since evolved to an amicable and affectionate connotation in Reunionese creole.
The contemporary celebration of this date stems from socialist and communist political will of French and Reunionese political landscapes in the 1980s. It was institutionalised in 1983 in conjunction with local cultural activism, seeking to reclaim formerly stigmatised identities. Before this date, Fèt Kaf occurred in private, if it was celebrated at all.
On February 1, 2026, Seychelles officially commemorated the abolition of slavery.
As an ex-slave society, Seychelles acts differently from some of its counterparts. We do not unbolt statues; we inaugurate replicas of the stone of possession. We do not change the street names that honour slave owners and settlers; we continue to name streets after settlers and never question “Seychelles”, “Mahé”, “Sainte Anne”, “Poivre”, “Desroches” (this list could go on and on).
Why? What have we named after Pompée or after other enslaved people who were contemporaries of these settlers? What else have we unconsciously inherited or actively transmitted from the racial hierarchisation that legitimised the slave trade, slavery and colonialism?
Identifying racism and Negrophobia in Seychelles is not banal, as the idea of Seychelles we have been fed is one of a seemingly perfect melting pot of cultures, where everyone has been put on an equal footing thanks to political action. This is not uncommon for post-colonial societies and societies that have been through a creolisation process, where an identity arises from a mixture of populations.
As Dr Penda Choppy puts it, “In spite of having fought for and gained independence, […] the idea that Western culture is superior to any other lingers”. She explains that racism in Seychelles is very much present but is not addressed due to a myth that slavery and colonialism have been firmly put in the past. This affects how we view and define our own creolised identity, and particularly our Africanness and blackness. We do not see it as something that belongs to us, and when we do celebrate Africa or form a desire to reclaim our Africanness, we do it by using other African identities, often borrowed from the mainland. Her work shows how folklore and oral traditions in Seychellois society contain racist vocabulary and expressions that reflect the effects of slavery and how colour prejudices can be perpetuated.
“Anmenn lalimyer dan lakour”, “Ou zoli pour en fiy nwanr”, “Pa tou dimoun ki annan seve pour fer natural”, “Pour en blan ou sovaz”.
These expressions and sayings encode value judgements associated with skin colour, hair texture and proximity to whiteness. They harbour the internalised hierarchies of what we attribute to blackness in our identity. Materialising in the ways we individually see ourselves and how our personal beliefs might affect our interactions with others, they display internalised and intrapersonal racism. Borrowing Dr Choppy’s words, this shows how as Seychellois, we’ve absorbed the colonial mentality enough to colonise ourselves and replicate the relationship between the colonised and colonisers.
Other forms of racism are manifested in our institutions and systems: policies, laws and more generally the organisation of the world.
Schools, once used as tools by the colonial metropoles to assure elite servility and popular subalternation, continue to perpetuate racist imaginaries of what being and looking “smart” means, both figuratively and literally.
Laws put in place to criminalise African spirituality in the name of the White “civilising mission” through Christianity are still being used in the 21st century as grounds for prosecution, 50 years post-independence and 191 years postabolition.
The global political and economic centre remains the West and our role in the world is defined by the relationships cultivated with Western countries and Western value systems. The Seychellois economy, fuelled by its tourism industry, is dependent on the Western currencies and perceptions of visitors who, too often, experience Seychelles completely disconnected from Seychellois, in their walled and gated hotels.
If racism operates simultaneously at the linguistic, cultural and institutional levels, remembrance alone is insufficient unless it is accompanied by critical engagement.
What can we do to never forget?
Some of you might believe, and in some instances rightly so, that top-down policies and government actions are needed to properly exercise a devoir de mémoire (a political and moral obligation to remember history): integration into curriculums, national commemorations and more generally a certain political correctness attributed to any actions valuing what previously wasn’t.
A formal stamp from the government telling us what to remember and how to never forget it.
The way humanity perceives history is, and has always been, political. Nationstates since the Treaty of Westphalia have sought to curate, sometimes forcibly so, a shared narrative. One uniting everyone composing a nation. This shared narrative is not set in stone. As political leaders come and go and the demands from the electorate fluctuate, it is adapted to this new perception of history.
Sometimes it is just, sometimes it is not.
Marie-Christine Parent, Doctor of ethnomusicology has led various studies on Seychellois music and culture and specifically on Moutya. Her work explains how, after the independence of Seychelles, Moutya was folklorised during the construction of a new nation, based on the concept of “créolité”. The recognition of Seychellois musical traditions and their official documentation also meant that Moutya and its characteristics were government-controlled. With government involvement, Moutya therefore lost its cornerstone: authenticity, and was subsequently folklorised, becoming music played for tourists.
I am not suggesting that government implication is inherently bad, or that political will cannot contribute to dispelling racist perceptions we might have towards aspects of our own identity. Nevertheless, her work on Moutya perfectly exemplifies how deconstructing racist stigma imposed by slavery and colonisation cannot only rely on top-down mechanisms.
Then, what can we really do to never forget?
Unfortunately, I do not have a perfect answer. The best one I can come up with is to have hard and informed conversations with ourselves, with the people around us and with those leading us. Conversations that imply perpetually questioning our thoughts and actions as individuals, as social groups and as a country.
And since remembering something we’ve never known seems like the 13th labour of Hercules, research, precisely academic research and the women and men behind it, is important.
Here are some readings that I can only recommend and that have greatly contributed to this essay:
- ‘Attitudes to slavery and race in Seychellois Creole oral literature’ by Penda Theresia Choppy.
- ‘Legal métissage in a micro-jurisdiction: the mixing of common law and civil law in Seychelles’ by Mathilda Twomey (née Butler-Payette).
• ‘Maroons of the Seychelles, Escape from Slavery 1768-1877’ by P.A. Nicholls.
- ‘Music of the slaves’ in the Indian Ocean Creole islands: a perspective from the Seychelles’ by Marie-Christine Parent.
• ‘Peau noir, masques blancs’ by Frantz Fanon.
Reading these, and other sources, reminded me that I am not alone in the reflections I have. Some have already explored the beginning of the thought you’re having and have gone to the end of it. Some, as I am, might be eager to learn from those who already know.
Every academic paper I read opened Pandora’s box containing more, seemingly very interesting readings, here are the ones that I cannot wait to learn from:
- ‘Éloge de la créolité’ by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant.
- ‘Créolisations india-océanes’ by Françoise Vergès and Carpanin Marimoutou.
- ‘The Seychelles’ by Guy Lionnet.
- ‘Slavery and family in the Seychelles’ by French Chang Him.
- ‘Colour and class inequality in Seychelles’ by Kathleen Low-Hang.
- ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ by Basil Davidson.
The picture I used as the cover of this essay is the property of the National Archives of the Seychelles, Archives départementales de La Réunion, and L'Iconothèque Historique de l'Océan Indien.
It is a portrait of Emanuel, an eleven-year-old child, who was “liberated” at Port Victoria on October 7, 1871. While this act of liberation did not signify the end of servitude, I deliberately refuse to aestheticise instruments of oppression or to monumentalise suffering as an end in itself. Emanuel’s life mirrors Seychellois society, in which Abolition was not synonymous with emancipation, and where the work of deconstruction remains unfinished.
Staging and performing black pain for public consumption in the name of commemoration neither honours the enslaved nor contributes to historical understanding. It detaches the lived violence from the structural systems that produced it.
Thank you!