A Case-Study of Seychelles' Slave Routes Through its Folktales

Seychelles’ most popular folktale character is Soungoula, a trickster hero that can be traced back to the Nyanja people of Malawi, but the story is also known among other Bantu peoples in the Swahili region. This is a testimony to the tradition bearers who brought these stories to these island shores along the routes of slavery. In a study which included the origins of the diasporas that formed the Seychelles’ creolized population and which used Creole folktales as data, it was possible to identify a majority of the story types belonging to various tribes and regions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. The trajectories of these different people across the slave routes of mainland Africa, through the satellite islands of the Southeast Indian Ocean, to the plantation islands of the Mascarenes and Seychelles, became evident as their folktale characters and story-types began to interact and merge. This has resulted in a common stock of stories in the Southeast Indian Ocean that characterize the creativity and resilience of the tradition bearers who remembered their homelands through these stories. This paper focuses on the characters, symbols and transformations of African folktales that were brought to Seychelles through the Indian Ocean slave trade.