For more than a decade I have been in love with the islands. I have revelled in their heat and light, and been maddened by their remoteness. In Europe’s dark winters and half-lit summers I have craved their equatorial brightness and wished myself onto their silica-glint shores.
At times my love filled me with joy, occasionally anger, and even led to bouts of bitterness. Like any good love affair it made me obsessive. Years later, I cannot stop myself returning to the islands, though now we are more like old friends than lovers.
My first visit to the south-western Indian Ocean was hard work. The BBC had sent me on what they quaintly termed a ‘duty trip’ gathering interviews and material for radio programmes from the region. It was an eventful journey, a rapid immersion in the politics and culture of islands scattered from the Equator to the Tropic of Capricorn.
In Seychelles I caught Dengue fever, and in Mauritius I broke my ankle. In Madagascar I developed dysentery and by the time I reached the Comoros I also had a bout of pneumonia. It was an unusual concoction of maladies, and yet as I coughed feverishly, and limped agonisingly around the disparate capitals over a five-week period I was deeply contented.
It was an interesting time to visit the region, an area that other English-speaking journalists didn’t bother with, because they considered it too peripheral to world events. Whenever I made repeated visits to the islands, colleagues would sneer slightly at the idea that I was ‘reporting from the beach again’. In fact, the Cold War had not yet ended and the political tensions within the region were as different as the topography of the island states were from one another. Here were slivers of Africa set afloat in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, and surrounded by deep waters in which the super-powers liked to hide their nuclear submarines.
Seychelles was then a one-party state, a closed and internally divided society where people lived by secrets and intrigue. In Mauritius the tourism industry was just gathering pace, and making money took precedence over the Byzantine complexities of a political system dominated by considerations of caste. Madagascar, the great island continent was in the thrall of a dictator, and there were bandits and bubonic plague on the streets of Antananarivo.
My last stop was in the Comoros, then a Federal Islamic Republic and notorious for its tally of coups d’état and mercenary-led invasions. Nineteen coups in less than a quarter of a century is still something of a record, I believe. When I arrived, the President had just been assassinated and the country was in chaos. The civil service was on strike and my passport was soon locked up in the Ministry of the Interior, awaiting an exit visa. For some days it seemed as if I would spend much longer in Moroni than planned. When the strike eventually ended I was free to return to Europe, and late one night I waited at the tiny airport for the aircraft that would take me first to Nairobi, then Marseilles and Paris to catch a final connection to London.
The 747 came down out of the evening sky like a visiting swan and trundled to within yards of where I stood on the tarmac. The scented night air hung close, wrapping everything in a mix of sea-salt and tropical flowers. I have never forgotten the moon that night, a white pearl hanging above the island, casting its shadow over the crouching bulk of the volcano called Karthala.
Ahead of me in the crowd waiting to climb the steps to the plane, there was a tall elegant Comorean woman dressed in colourful cotton robes. Her hand luggage consisted of a rattan basket wrapped inside a large plastic bag. From the holes where the handles opened the long thick tendrils of a green climbing plant seemed to be struggling to escape.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Vanilla”, she whispered, looking around to make sure no-one was watching. “In my apartment in Paris I will keep it very warm, and it will remind me of home.”
Vanilla. A word that fills the mouth and exercises the tip of your tongue. The word meant little to me: a taste, a flavour—something that went into ice cream. I hadn’t ever thought about the plant that might give fruit to the long dark sticks I had seen for sale in supermarkets. Vanilla ‘pods’, that’s what we call them. Or are they ‘beans’?
That night the vine in the rattan basket was leaving the tropics for a captive life in Paris. The plant was returning to the very city from where its ancestor had been brought to the Indian Ocean more than a century and a half before. That first cutting had not travelled in a plastic bag on an aeroplane, but on a wooden ship to nearby Réunion, from where it would eventually move to Madagascar, Mauritius, Comoros, and Seychelles. But like me, that original vine had begun its journey not in France but in London.
The Comorean woman with her plant was one of a hundred images from the islands that I would keep with me from that journey. As I stepped onto the plane that night I had a very strong premonition that I would return to the region, a conviction which frightened me in its certitude.
The next time I saw the vanilla vine was in Seychelles, where I made my home for a time, captivated by the islands’ beauty and enticed by the intimacy of a country with just seventy thousand inhabitants. I originally wanted to live in Seychelles because I had developed an obsession with scuba diving, a passion that became a lifeline for my sanity when island fever set in. Underwater, I could always escape the claustrophobia of living in a society where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Subsequently, I have made a career from writing about the underwater world, and it is a happy coincidence that vanilla grows in a band around the world which stretches roughly twenty-three degrees north and south of the equator. These are the same latitudes where most of the world’s coral reefs are found.
At the southern end of Mahé island, there is a twisting road named Les Cannelles. Following it inland away from the glimmering bays of the sinuous coast I climbed a rough track barely wide enough for one car at a time. The track rose steeply and the forest pressed in around me, blocking the view of the slopes of a hidden valley. Native hardwood species, bois rouge and bois blanc, grow here, mingling with exotic neighbours, thick-trunked breadfruit and broad-leaved jamalac trees hung with their light green water-apples. Eventually the road petered out and I came to a dead end, a small plateau in the shadow of a massive granite outcrop which the locals call Roche Gratte Fesse. It is a beautiful place, though in Kreol the name means ‘Scratch Your Arse Rock’.
The valley slopes have been planted with cinnamon trees, pineapples, patchouli and cloves, and the owners of the plantation call it the Jardin du Roi. They trace their descent from a mysterious character who arrived on the island shortly after the French Revolution. For more than fifty years he worked as a planter on Mahé, while intermittently writing letters to the Archduke of Austria whom he claimed as an uncle. The planter called himself Pierre-Louis Poiret and the letters asserted his claim to be the lost Dauphin, the child of Louis XVII and Marie-Antoinette. He was one of several claimants to the title, a dynastic mystery which to this day is still not satisfactorily resolved, in spite of DNA evidence that the Dauphin died in prison.
Poiret maintained his story even on his deathbed, swearing to the priest who gave him absolution that he had been robbed of his birth right by relatives who wanted the leadership of the Bourbon dynasty for themselves. In staunchly catholic Seychelles, such in extremis utterances acquired further credibility. Poiret sired seven children, calling all four boys Louis and the three girls ‘Marie’, the firstborn being Marie-Antoinette. After Poiret’s death his children found pieces of silverware decorated with the Royal crest among his private possessions and a letter stating that he had adopted the name ‘Poiret’ after the man who had smuggled him out of the Temple prison on the eve of his mother’s execution.
The plantation house is an old wooden building, one of the few to survive in Seychelles. It is a simple, elegant structure raised up on stilts to protect the timber from the termites. The old wood is painted white and there is a pitched roof made of corrugated iron. Neat rows of small trees stand like a platoon of guards in front of the house and the ground slopes away sharply down the valley, draining the soil of the heavy monsoon rains. The trees have been kept closer to the house than any other plant, and they are in clear view of the balcony and the bedroom windows where they can always be seen. The trees themselves are simply props, for around their trunks and low branches precious vanilla vines curl and drape themselves for support.
On Mahé they grow only a little vanilla now, and there are a few small plantations on the nearby island of La Digue. The local tea is often flavoured with vanilla but no-one exports the pods which once contributed a large part of the islands’ wealth.
Walking in the forests of Mahé I found untended vines clinging to tall straight trees, green shoots heading for the heights, untethered from the supports they would have been tied to by men. These vanilla plants would never bear fruit, for they had escaped from abandoned plantations and would have no-one to fertilise their flowers. Like the people of Seychelles, islands totally uninhabited until the eighteenth century, the vanilla vine is a visitor, transplanted and taking root where it can.