There is growing competition for power and influence in the Indian Ocean which is considered the world's pre-eminent energy and trade interstate seaway at the time when China and India find themselves locked in an "uncomfortable embrace." No one is better qualified to tell this story than Sir James R. Mancham KBE, Founding President of the Republic of Seychelles, the 110 i
There is growing competition for power and influence in the Indian Ocean which is considered the world's pre-eminent energy and trade interstate seaway at the time when China and India find themselves locked in an "uncomfortable embrace." No one is better qualified to tell this story than Sir James R. Mancham KBE, Founding President of the Republic of Seychelles, the 110 idyllic islands archipelago, who was overthrown in a Marxist coup in 1977 while he was in London to celebrate the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Sir James was also the lawyer for Philco-Ford, Pan Am and RCA when the US Air Force decided to build a strategic tracking station in Seychelles to gather military intelligence over the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As Prime Minister of Seychelles, Sir James witnessed very closely the establishment by the USA of its most modern naval, air and military complex on the island of Diego Garcia. But Sir James autobiography Seychelles Global Citizen is more than a political treatise about the conflict for power and influence in the Indian Ocean and about Seychelles internal political intrigue and turmoil, it is also the story of a colorful human being who has been dubbed "The Trudeau of the East" and who has also been called "The Ernest Hemmingway of the Indian Ocean."
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Hardcover
,
350 pages
Published
September 1st 2009
by Paragon House
(first published 2009)
It's got a population of less than 100,000 scattered over a hundred or so islands, and few people have heard of the place, but Seychelles is probably the best nation in Africa. It's peaceful and the government is stable. It has managed to maintain a thriving tourist trade without wrecking its natural beauty. It doesn't have the problems with disease that many other African nations have, and its per capita income is the highest in the continent.
James R. Mancham, their first president, is in large
It's got a population of less than 100,000 scattered over a hundred or so islands, and few people have heard of the place, but Seychelles is probably the best nation in Africa. It's peaceful and the government is stable. It has managed to maintain a thriving tourist trade without wrecking its natural beauty. It doesn't have the problems with disease that many other African nations have, and its per capita income is the highest in the continent.
James R. Mancham, their first president, is in large part responsible for Seychelles's current peace and prosperity, although he served for less than a year before being deposed in a bloodless coup backed by the Communists. I'd never read the autobiography of a politician before, and I thought this was surprisingly modest in tone. I would have given it four stars, but the second half (post-coup) is much weaker than the first half. Mancham held my interest while he talked about his upbringing, education and early political activism, but in the second half it was just "I went to this conference, and here's a list of the people there, and here is a long quote of the speeches..." This got very boring.
Those issues aside, this book was well worth reading and I learned a lot about Seychelles.
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