‘The Door to the Coast of Africa’ is an original piece of research that was conducted as a PhD and supported by a scholarship from the UK Research Council from 2014 – 2018. It’s the first study devoted to exploring the Seychelles within the European trade in enslaved people in the Indian Ocean, showing how the changing routes of slave ships in the 18th century influenced the settlement/early history of the islands as a mid-way servicing/recovery station on crossings to the main Mascarene Islands (Mauritius & Reunion) and also the Caribbean. The research also tries to uncover something of what might have been experienced during ‘recovery stops’ that lasted weeks or months in the Seychelles.

To me, now, this piece of work represents the limits of trying to understand my heritage through colonial documentation and academic pursuits alone. It was after feeling the parameters of this kind of study that I began to develop the current way I work, exploring ways of knowing developed within my Creole heritage and combining knowledge and imaginings from creative and community-centred approaches to holding the past with what can gleaned from colonial documents. The title of the work comes from the writings of the Franco-Mauritian entrepreneur who established the first colony in the Seychelles. When appealing to the French government to support the colonisation, he promised that the islands would become an important ‘depot’ and recovery station that would expand the trade of much desired enslaved people from East Africa to Mauritius, Réunion and the Caribbean. He wrote that in the Seychelles, one is practically ‘at the door to the coast of Africa’.

This project opened the way to my thinking on how a large portion of the earliest population in the Seychelles included those who were left behind or abandoned at this tiny island depot in the middle of the ocean – as a unique living parallel to those who usually would have been thrown to the ocean for being too sick, difficult, pregnant or otherwise unprofitable – and what it means to hold this as a point of Creole origin. It was also while researching the slave ship routes between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean for this project that I came across records of the first slave ship I learned had sunk near to my hometown of Margate in the Thames Estuary.

The language and layout of my PhD conforms to the academic requirements of the University it was submitted to, which isn’t what you’ll be used to seeing from me if you’ve read my later work in my own style, but it was part of my journey to the path I’m on now.