Posted
on June 5, 2015
I
think it's nice to space out holidays and celebrations, don't you?
Like, it's a bit of a problem to have a family birthday on December
23, if you celebrate Christmas, because that particular birthday can
get sort of swallowed up in the Christmas bustle.
But
the island nation of the Seychelles have three important patriotic
holidays in June:- June 5 – Liberation Day
- June 18 – National Day
- June 29 – Independence Day
Wow!
Today
celebrates the anniversary of this date in 1977, when the country was
“liberated” from the government installed by Great Britain the
year before.
And
what we mean by “liberated” was a coup
d'etat.
There were two legal leaders in the country, the President and a
Prime Minister. The President left the nation to visit the U.K., and
the Prime Minister just swooped in and took over. And then he just
ran the country as a one-party communist state for 17 years!
But
many people in Seychelles are happy that the coup occurred; they are
sure that it saved their lovely island nation from continued
exploitation.
All
of this just goes to show you that one guy's illegal action is
another guy's heroic deed.
She
sells sea shells...
The
name Seychelles
seems to me to be a perfect name for a nation made up of 115 islands,
because it is pronounced a lot like “sea shell” (in French, “sea
shells” in English). Still, all of those islands don't add up to a
lot of land – less land than the one island of Guam, a U.S.
Territory. And Seychelles is the smallest nation in Africa by way of
population.
The
Seychelles was uninhabited throughout most of recorded history.
Apparently, although we can assume that plenty of seafarers spotted
and maybe landed on the larger islands, the first recorded landing
was in 1609, by an English East India Company ship.
Still,
they remained uninhabited for another century and a half. Finally,
the French began to take control of the islands – which means that
some French sea captain laid down a “Stone of Possession,” and
then of course the British stepped up and said, basically, “no
fair, no fair!”
Most
people who now live in the Seychelles are creole – a mix of East
African and Malagasy, Indian, Chinese, French, and British.
Check
out the beauties of the Seychelles:
As
you can imagine, there are many beautiful beaches.
On
Bird Island, there are about 1,500,000 sooty terns during the
breeding season, plus many other species of birds.
The
Seychelles has a nature reserve that is said to have the greatest
density of lizards of any place on earth.
Other
creatures seen there include giant tortoises and dugongs (sea cows).
One of the islands that has a population of giant tortoises has
200,000 of them! That's five times as many as the Galapagos!
Also
on this date:
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Plan
ahead:
Check out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
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