The NYS: From Seed to Flower

By Olivier Le Brun

Part 1 - The seed of the new society

The National Youth Service (NYS) was a project first envisaged by the Seychelles Peoples United Party, but it was not possible to implement it under a coalition government. Once the regime led by France Albert René was in power, however, notice was given by the first Congress of the Seychelles People's Progressive Front (SPPF) in May-August 1978 that the NYS would serve as “the period during which young people prepare to play their part in building socialism in their country.” (Onward to socialism, 1978). The Government's aim was to transform some of the key structures on which the divisions of society were based (class, gender, age, language, skin colour, education, urban and rural areas), in order to free people from the oppressions of the old class society and help them create new ways of living together and new methods of production. The real challenge for the NYS was to show how these divisions could be overcome in practice and how young people could avoid reproducing the forms of oppression that characterised their parents’ lives.

From August 1979 to May 1980, I undertook a first mission to the Seychelles, as a Unesco consultant, to work with the Government on setting up the NYS. During these 9 months, my Seychellois colleagues and I undertook a practical research study on the concrete problems posed by this project of building the new society, and on the role that the NYS could play in this process. At the end of this mission, the Seychelles Government asked Unesco if I could come back for a two-month period in August and September and reflect in the interim on some challenges involved in the establishment and organisation of the NYS. It was to this process of reflection that I devoted my free time between the two missions.

On my return to Europe, I wrote a first report ,“Le Service National de la Jeunesse: une éducation transformée pour une nouvelle société” [The National Youth Service: a transformed education for a new society], Unesco, Paris, 1980. I soon realised that the issues raised by the project required more than a conventional consultant's report. Light needed to be shed on some fundamental questions that the Government had about socialist transformation: how could socialist education differ in form and content from capitalist schooling? How could the economy and the political system be organised in a socialist society? To what extent and in what way could the principles thus established be put into practice in an educational project that aimed to lay the foundations for social relations in a new society?

I felt it was important to raise these questions in a form that would encourage discussion, so that this process of reflection could become a special moment in the NYS project itself. What resulted was the report, “The National Youth Service of Seychelles: the Seed of a New Society”. Its intention was not to make recommendations, but to open up perspectives to inform the creative debate taking place in the Seychelles. Nevertheless, it contained a series of concrete proposals. The preparation of this paper was informed by meetings with my colleagues from the Brighton Labour Process Group (BLPG) at the University of Sussex, who included Robin Murray. We had been researching the labour process in different sectors of capitalist and socialist societies, including the education sector, for many years. The report also reflected my research on socialist transformation in the Third World, carried out at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University under the leadership of Robin Murray, who had organised an international seminar on socialist development there in the spring of 1979. With this seminar in mind, I had done research at the IDS on education in the socialist countries (USSR, China and Cuba) and in the liberation struggle zones (Angola, Mozambique, Eritrea), in particular in the light of experiments in the transformation of education systems in which I had been able to take part within the framework of Unesco (Algeria, Senegal and Peru).

Robin Murray was therefore the ideal partner to involve in my process of reflection on the NYS project in the Seychelles. The aims of the report that we wrote together, “The Seychelles National Youth Service: the Seed of a New Society,” were:

to reflect on the nature and causes of the divisions that characterised Seychelles society;
to discuss the ways in which the NYS could be organised to allow its members to contribute to overcoming these divisions within the project framework;
to analyse the relationship between the NYS and these divisions in society.

Part 2 - The NYS and the wider society: from the seed to the flower

When the National Youth Service (NYS) was officially introduced, participation in it was mandatory. This was because the Government considered that all young people should go through this experience of living together and discovering new forms of education, training, work and “re-creation”, free from the divisions that characterised the education system and society as a whole.

In October 1979, the students of Seychelles College and Regina Mundi Convent, the two secondary grammar schools (which at that point were attended mainly by children from well-to-do families) led demonstrations in which the vast majority of students from other Seychellois schools took part, protesting against the compulsory nature of the NYS and the agricultural work on the curriculum. In the aftermath, the Government decreed that from then on, membership of the NYS would be voluntary. Once the project was based on persuasion rather than conscription, it took on a whole new dimension.

A long process of reflection was then undertaken, mainly within the NYS Advisory Board, which comprised the ministers and principal secretaries of the ministerial departments directly concerned with the project (Youth and Community Development, Education and Information, Health, and Foreign Affairs) under the chairmanship of France Albert René, President of the Republic. In the course of this preparatory work it became clear that, because of the age group targeted and the place it occupied in the national education system, the NYS could not refer to any existing model. Moreover, the specific conditions of the country and a marked desire for political independence spoke for the development of an original system.

First of all, a twofold choice had to be made. What sort of education should be adopted, and in what form should the young people's lives be organised? Given the political struggles and social forces at play, the discussions were not free of controversy, but it was eventually decided:

to reject the current school system, which had, moreover, failed in the Seychelles, and devise a new form of education that would ensure the all-round development of young people;
to reject the para-military formula, since it aimed to control young people rather than emancipating them, and to seek a form of organisation that fostered initiative and responsibility among all participants.

These choices were in line with the Government's strategy of dismantling the old colonial society and building a new socialist one. It was in this spirit that, as a Unesco consultant, I collaborated with my colleague Robin Murray, of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University, on the reports:

These documents, produced a year apart, formed part of the NYS implementation process, the main stages of which were:

(a) The choice of the site of “La Plaine Estate” on the Port Launay peninsula in March 1980 for the construction of the first Youth Village. This was an exceptional 300-hectare site, bought from a private company, with several beaches, a coconut grove and agricultural facilities.

(b) Architectural design and work on a building to accommodate 810 young volunteers. The architecture took into account the project’s overall vision: the integration of the 3 spheres of daily life, namely production, domestic life and “re-creational” activities. The buildings comprised 18 clusters that could each accommodate 48 young people, houses for the facilitators, sports facilities, and a study centre with 16 classrooms, 3 laboratories and a clinic. Work was completed in February 1981, ready for the launch of the NYS.

(c) Experimental holiday camp (17 August to 7 September 1980), whose aim was to give the chance of a week's holiday that was both educational and recreational to any school leaver (Year 9) who was interested. Nearly 500 students, of whom 45% were girls, took part in this camp, which was organised in three periods of one week each. For the young people, this camp was a self-organising experience which allowed them to discover their own powers of initiative and imagination. The camp was a spectacular major “happening”. A line of photographers were to be seen pointing their cameras at comrades who were filming a group staging a play about pollution control, egged on by an orchestra which was also accompanying a folk group that performed dancing games in which nearly everyone joined ...before plunging into the sea, which was thronged with young explorers on yachts.... All of this was reported by the Vilaz Lazenes newspaper, produced on the spot under the leadership of Frances Murray, on the model of Brighton's “QueenSpark” neighbourhood newspaper. Throughout, Robin played the role of an informal facilitator. This experimental camp planted the roots of the democratic organising spirit on which the NYS prided itself.

(d) The setting up of the NYS farm, begun during the experimental camp and continued by a parastatal company. Thus, by February 1981, the NYS had a 1.75-acre vegetable plot and a farm with about 30 cattle, 250 pigs and 500 chickens to start off the young people's farming activities.

(e) The publication of a booklet entitled “The Seychelles National Youth Service: What it aims to do and how it will be run” (September 1980). In its introduction, the President wrote, “The aim is to encourage the full development of the students' individual personalities so that they may best serve the society in which they live and so that not one member of that society will feel inferior or superior in the performance of his responsibilities to society.”

To the question, “What is meant by “Service?” the booklet's answer is: “Above all the young will be developing a new type of person and creating new ways of doing things, which will serve as models for the country as a whole. They will be the seed of the new society. It is for this reason that we call it a service and not just a school.”

(f) Recruitment of young NYS volunteers, which included individual interviews with each volunteer, in the presence of one of their parents (nearly always the mother). In the course of these interviews, the project leaders learned a lot about the parents’ concerns — for example, about religion — and about the aspirations of the young people, most of whom expressed their wish to learn a manual trade. Around a dozen parents refused to sign the formal agreement that allowed their child to commit to a 2-year period under the NYS’s authority, believing that they absolutely needed their child for domestic work or to contribute to the household income. In the end, however, the number of volunteers rose to 810, including 400 girls.

(g) The training course for facilitators was designed above all as an awareness-raising process. Facilitators were put on the spot, spending 3 months in the village leading the life that the young people were being asked to lead. Thanks to this method, their level of awareness was raised very fast. At the heart of the training was the practical experience of self-organisation in a cluster:

the organisation of domestic groups (kitchen, cleaning) and their rotation,
the setting up of specialised teams for culture, information, production, finance, stores and sport...
socio-political organisation: the election of coordinators and discussions of differences of opinion...

The number of facilitators rose gradually to 22. This was clearly too small a cohort to accompany more than 800 young people, but the facilitators were keen to take up the challenge. The group comprised school teachers and production workers, who derived mutual benefit from the way their experience and knowledge complemented each other. A deep-sea fishing expedition to the remote island of Coétivy on a tuna boat played a decisive role in bringing the group together.

(h) Formation of the NYS coordination team, which was in effect the project management team. Given the great difficulty in finding managers in the Seychelles, the team could only be put together at the last minute, but a high quality management team was nevertheless created, consisting of: Florence Benstrong, Coordinator, and 6 Assistant Coordinators: Olsen Vidot, Production; Bernard Shamlaye, Education; Eric Arnephy, Entertainment; Noella Antat, Interior and Exterior Relations; Julita César, Health; Benjamine Socrate, Administration. This team was strengthened by the presence of two foreigners hired under local contracts: Simon Murray (Henderson) and myself.

(i) The recruitment of staff was spread over several months. When the NYS was launched on 1 March 1981, the staff numbered 137 (of whom 43 were women) including 22 facilitators (of whom 9 were women) and 39 teachers (of whom 12 were women): 8 from the Seychelles, 6 Guineans, 3 Mauritians, 6 Britons, 12 Canadians, 3 Sri Lankans and one Belgian.

(j) The NYS opened up at the beginning of March 1981 to 810 young volunteers, who very soon showed how much they enjoyed being together. During the 3-week welcome phase, the students were mainly taken up with practical arrangements in their cluster and with the extension of the village farm (by clearing and planting). Domestic matters took up a lot of their time: both boys and girls immediately began to organise their little community with great seriousness. Young people were apportioned to units of 16 and clusters of 48 (with 3 units forming a cluster) in such a way as to mix school levels and geographical origins. This apportioning process worked very well.

(k) Planning of education and training in the NYS. The booklet, “The Seychelles National Youth Service, What it aims to do and how it will be run” (September 1980) made two key points about the New Education:

“It aims to develop the all-round personality of the students and not just academic ability. The NYS will give to the young people the opportunity to acquire an education that is not only general and technological but also social, cultural, political and physical.

The NYS will reunite work, daily life and education...they will be involved in the planning of the village economy, the running of the village shop, the production of much of their own food and other necessities, the maintenance of their transport fleet, the operation of an NYS radio station and newspaper and the care of the guests who come to the village. All these activities aim to develop education through work... ”

It was unfortunately not possible to mobilise the whole coordination team to take part in the wider planning process, because each member was snowed under with work, preparing their department’s activities and getting ready to welcome the young people. However, the Assistant Coordinator for Education was able to form a small core group that included teachers. This group was ably assisted by Colin Lacey, Professor of Education at the University of Sussex, who was called in for a 3-week mission to give his support.

It was in order to contribute to this planning work that I, as a Unesco consultant, continued my collaboration with Robin Murray, pursuing the reflection we had begun in “The seed of a new society”. We asked ourselves the following questions: what is the relationship between the NYS and the social and economic divisions described in the first chapter of this text? Will external pressures not prevent the NYS from achieving its goals? What can be done to ensure that the New Education Project is not sooner or later taken over by the mechanisms of the labour market? It is to these questions that the document “The Seychelles National Youth Service: Part II From Seed to the Flower” (July 1981) attempts to provide answers. It consists of 4 parts:

The relationship between a project prefiguring a new society and the society around it.
The question of examinations and the method of evaluating students.
Production cooperatives.
The relationship between the NYS and daily life in the Seychelles.

Part 3 - One year later

I spent the period from August 1979 to December 1981 working for the National Youth Service (NYS), either as a consultant for Unesco or on a local contract. During these two and a half years, I made three visits to Europe, in the course of which Robin Murray and I engaged in a process of reflection which resulted in this synthesis of the NYS project’s progress: ‘One year later’, namely, one year after the experimental camp of August-September 1980.

As soon as he took power in 1977, President France Albert René set about implementing the socialist programme of the Seychelles Peoples United Front. He began by putting into practice what could be called a radical social democracy[1] by tackling inequalities in the labour market and the social services (education, health and social security). As early as 1981, free pre-school education was available for all children aged 4 to 6, and for children under 4, a network of crèches was in place. The two elitist high schools, Seychelles College and Regina Mundi, were in the process of closing down, and the National Youth Service was open to all for two years, following the nine years of State education. The Seychelles thus offered free education for 13 years (from ages 4 to 17). Pre-university secondary education and vocational training was to be grouped together in a Polytechnic Institute, due to open in 1983, which was able to accommodate half the 17-year-old population.

The desire to transform social relations was crystallised in the Youth Village of Port Launay, the first NYS village, which from 1983 was to replace completely the last two years of secondary education. Eight hundred teenagers, all volunteers, of whom half were girls, founded a small, self-sufficient community that produced its own fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, energy, newspaper and radio programmes, while managing its own cultural activities, security, health, justice and forms of economic and political organisation. With conventional education reduced to a minimum, teachers were attached to various sectors of activity in which projects were being carried out. The acquisition of knowledge and skills was linked to production. Thus, for example, in physics, optics was taught from photography, and acoustics in the context of the radio station; in biology, theoretical knowledge was built up through the volunteers’ experience of agricultural activities (including animal husbandry and fishing) and of cooking and healthcare practice. Intellectual work and manual labour were intertwined, and education was directly integrated into production and domestic life. This was a daring project, which, despite a certain amount of resistance and some practical difficulties, got off to a good start in its first year.

The domestic sphere

The Port Launay Youth Village consisted of 18 clusters (9 for girls and 9 for boys). The 810 young people, ranging in age from 15 to 17, were divided into 16-member units. Three units based at separate points around a common hall formed a cluster of 48 young people. Each unit had a dormitory divided into two-person compartments. The cluster was designed as an intermediate stage between family and society. Activities that normally took place in the family were organised, democratised and enriched at this level, as were new activities. An intense social, cultural and political life took place in the cluster, and strong bonds of solidarity were established there.

One facilitator, or sometimes two, took care of each cluster. The facilitators slept in small houses located close to the clusters. For the young people, they were at once protective adults, educators, elders and companions. Some boys were sorry that their cluster had no female facilitator. As a group, the facilitators constituted a real pillar of the village, playing a key role in the project’s success. After one year, they were on the verge of burnout.

In each cluster, the young people, with the help of their facilitator, voluntarily split themselves into “specialised teams” in the following areas: production, information, health, finance, culture, sport, and shops. They carried out these activities on a rotational basis, as they did domestic tasks: laundry, collective hygiene and the preparation of breakfast and dinner. Lunch was a centralised meal.

Weekend dinner and lunches were comprehensive social, cultural, health, economic, ecological and political events, in which the three spheres of daily life — domestic activities, production and “re-creation” — were interlinked in an educational way. Each meal was one moment in a chain of activities carefully planned by the members of the group: producing vegetables on the cluster plot, going fishing and bringing back zurites (octopus) from the sea, or cutting meat from a pig carcass kept in the cluster's freezer; picking coconuts and preparing spices such as cinnamon and vanilla; stocking up on provisions from the central shop; trading with other clusters; improving kitchen equipment; setting up the shop for food storage; accounting for expenses and costing different menus; organising the rotation of different household tasks; looking for wood, chopping and stacking it and investigating other sources of fuel; discussing menus in the light of individual tastes, culinary skills and health, energy and cultural requirements, with an emphasis on traditional Seychelles dishes such as fish with coconut curry or giromon stew; analysing the meal’s nutritional value; writing and displaying the menu, if possible in an artistic way; keeping a recipe book and inventing new recipes; training those who did not know how to cook and maybe getting help with the preparation of a new dish, for example from a brother or sister cluster; sharing the meal, perhaps with guests; discussing the quality of the cooking, washing the dishes in the most economical way and cleaning up; stopping flies getting in; preserving leftovers and taking the waste to the pigs; correcting things that had gone wrong in the cooking; sharing the provisions given by families; celebrating a birthday with a huge cake and a bouquet of flowers picked from the cluster’s garden; raising questions about the way meals were prepared and eaten — especially the issues of participation and waste — at the cluster assembly; exulting in the ability to make such good food; several clusters did not hesitate to lay claim to being “the best in the village”...

To reduce the artificial separation between boys and girls, each cluster of girls was paired with a cluster of boys. This brother and sister cluster system helped to transform the traditional relationships between boys and girls. The girls enjoyed teaching the boys how to iron their clothes, sew and cook. At first, many boys tried to uphold patterns of sexual division of labour belonging to the traditional family, through barter relationships along the lines of, “We’ll fetch your wood for cooking while you wash our clothes”. However, it was possible to counter these practices through debates organised by the young people and their respective facilitators. The girls in particular became very engaged in these discussions. They complained that the boys only made contact with them in order to chat them up. The facilitators sometimes tended to overprotect the girls in their care, making the boys inhibited and causing mistrust among the girls. But it did not take long for real camaraderie and cooperation to develop between boys and girls, cemented by joint orientation walks or hikes, debates, film screenings and dances, etc.

For parents, sexuality in the camps was a major preoccupation. At that time, indeed, nearly 10% of teenage girls gave birth to a child every year. The measures taken by the project in this area were particularly effective: during this first year, only one pregnancy resulted from a relationship between two young people from the NYS. This issue is discussed in our paper. Here I will point to the quality of the sex education course developed and delivered by some 20 NYS volunteer teachers under the leadership of Dr Conrad Shamlaye and Rubi Pardiwalla. These sessions were organised periodically in the evenings at the sibling cluster level, in small groups comprising half a unit of girls and half a unit of boys: a quasi-family setting much appreciated by the young people.

Production

Primary production (agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing) developed impressively in the project’s first year, as did the processing sector (food products, textiles, carpentry, basketry and electronics), the energy sector (electricity, biogas, solar and wind power and micro-hydraulics) and the construction sector (roads and many buildings). Production served a triple purpose:

educational: it took place in real life, taking into account real constraints;
economic: it had to satisfy the young people’s needs, thus contributing to achieving the national objective of self-sufficiency;
political. As the NYS brochure stated: “Students will learn to overcome the divisions between intellectual and manual work.” It was therefore incumbent on the students to create new relationships of production (See “The seed of a new society”).

As the present document, “One year later”, shows, the organisation of agricultural production was one of the major pedagogical and political undertakings of this first year. Within a few months, we moved in stages from a centralised system of the state-farm type to a highly decentralised system vested in the brother and sister cluster cooperatives. This “agrarian reform” considerably improved the educational process as well as that of production, by giving young people the freedom to self-manage their plots of land and allowing agricultural workers to play a training role. At Board level, President René had been very insistent on this point.

Coordination of production and education

In May 1981, a block system was set up to coordinate production and education. A “block” was a sector of activity in which a group of students achieved a series of objectives that brought together production, research and the acquisition of knowledge and skills[2].

Seven blocks were set up (Crops, Animal Husbandry, Fishing, Construction and Technology, Health, Information and Culture), with each student spending 4 weeks in each block. With a two-year cycle in view, the number of blocks was set at four per year for each student, so that over two years students spent 8 weeks each in 8 blocks:

The 1st year: 1) Animal and Fish; 2) Construction and Technology; 3) Crops; 4) Health, Food and Sport.
The 2nd year: 1) Animal and Fish; 2) Construction and Technology; 3) Energy; 4) Information and Culture

Agricultural production continued to be at the heart of the sister and brother cluster cooperatives.

The teaching of languages (English, French and mathematics) was provided within the framework of a “core curriculum”, whose objective was not only the mastery of languages but also the development of communication skills through language study. The group of French teachers developed an experimental method based on games. In the production activities of the blocks, teachers worked on developing functional language learning. The second-year curriculum integrated into the blocks a new activity, “Arts and social sciences”, that brought together the learning of English, French, Creole and social sciences. In this way, language teaching was directly linked to the activities of the blocks. Mathematics continued to be taught outside the blocks, but it was used as an essential tool in production activities.

History was taught in such a way as to develop the young people’s historical perspective. For example, the reluctance of many of them to consume locally produced cassava instead of imported rice was countered through a historical analysis of the political, economic and social determinants of eating habits. The first story that young people were called on to understand was that of the transformation process in which they themselves were engaged. One history teacher began his class in Port Launay by asking, “What is history ?” “It’s the study of the facts of the past,” one boy said. To which a girl replied, “Not just the past, but the present, too. For example, the NYS is historic. The opening of the NYS is a great event in the history of the Seychelles.” Many young volunteers were aware that they were making history by taking part in the creation of the Youth Village. The students were proud to show the village not only to their parents but also to illustrious guests such as the Tanzanian President, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and the Indian President Indira Gandhi.

Re-creation

Cluster life overflowed with activities: there were board games, orchestras, theatre groups, dance groups, sports events and excursions in the mountains. The “Culture Block” projects, for example, were very fruitful: they included a ballet about slavery based on research in the archives; a collection of oral traditions; a survey of traditional Seychellois architecture; the making of musical instruments…

Every Saturday afternoon, a 2-hour “period of recollection” was set aside for meditation and reflection. Young people who wished to do so went to Mass in the neighbouring village church or took part in worship with their own religious group outside the village. The others were invited to spend time in reflection, either individually or collectively. Some clusters organised debates during the recollection period.

Democratic planning

In the clusters, the young people acquired a sense of community that was based on cooperative rather than family relationships. A system of democratic organisation was set up, with periodic elections of coordinators and representatives to the Village Committee. Generally speaking, when a student was nominated for election, all members of the cluster came together to discuss his or her strengths and weaknesses, so that the vote represented a collective choice and not the sum of individual considerations. Those proposing a candidate explained concretely why they were nominating him or her.

The cluster was an appropriate framework for democratic planning. The tasks apportioned to the different “specialised teams” were discussed seriously. Responsibility was rotated and there was an incentive for initiative and experimentation. It was striking to see the general willingness to help each person to carry out his or her tasks and to face up to any difficulties that arose. Initially, several clusters tended to lay down overly rigid rules, which they later relaxed. The connection between production and consumption made planning and implementation much easier. Indeed, the bulk of what was produced in the cluster (vegetables and prepared food...) was closely linked to its consumption. Vision and execution were intertwined: those who planned were the direct producers. The decentralisation of the agricultural production system was to make it possible to democratise the production planning process of the village as a whole.

At any one time, the village boasted nearly 100 delegates from various committees and working groups. In the clusters, these delegates enjoyed a more or less ongoing relationship with those they represented, which gave them greater accountability. At the Village Committee level, cluster delegates needed to be not only representatives, but above all spokespeople for the members who elected them. In the first year, the size of the village meant that this objective of socialist democracy was achieved to only a limited extent.

Specific interventions of professional volunteers

During its first year, the NYS benefited from the cooperation of the International Federation of CEMEA [Centres d'entraînement aux méthodes d'éducation active, Training Centres for Active Education Methods], which enriched the educational content of training, production and leisure activities. The project also profited from the support of several professionals who were hosted in the village and gave their time for free:

Frances Murray, prime mover of the Brighton Friends’ Centre and the community newspaper QueenSpark. Contributions: facilitating the information project at the experimental camp in August-September 1980 and training facilitators and young people in the production of the trilingual newspaper “Vilaz Lazenes”.
Nguyen Huu Dong, a sociologist and economist who taught at the universities of Nanterre, Hanoi and Algiers. Contributions: the socio-political training of facilitators; an analysis of the socio-political aims of the project.
Colin Lacey: Professor of Education Science, University of Sussex, Brighton. Contributions, in cooperation with the Assistant Education Coordinator, Bernard Shamlaye: (1) design of a transitional regime between the school system and the new NYS education programme and preparation of teachers for this transition period; (2) practical administration: teacher allocation, timetable preparation, planning the use of space; (3) preparation of a curriculum development and evaluation method; (4) study of the problem of selection-orientation and search for an alternative to the Cambridge exams (O and A levels); (5) support for the recruitment of foreign teachers.
Hubert Murray, architect from an architectural practice in Nairobi. Contributions: (1) the inspiration behind the architectural project of the experimental camp; (2) a survey of the young people and staff on the architectural design and construction of the village; (3) the design and development of a resource centre, inaugurated in November 1981, for which he won the Seychelles Architecture Prize; (4) proposals for the integration of appropriate technologies in the construction of the village: local materials, solar energy, biogas, rainwater collection; (5) design of a construction plan for the second village; (6) practical proposals of ways to involve young people in the completion of the first village and the construction of the second village.
Kamoji Wachira, Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Kenyatta University College, set up an educational project that involved growing vegetable crops on poor quality land with controlled irrigation and nutrients delivered in a hydroponic system. This very successful project was carried on by the students involved.
Jean-Michel Carré, film director from “Grain de Sable Films”, with several films on education to his name. He presented screenings of 8 “Grain de Sable” films for the young people and staff, including “La dernière tombe à Dimbaza” (The last tomb at Dimbaza) which inspired clusters to boycott South African products and to produce an alternative jam. He also led work sessions with teachers on the methodology of educational projects.

A second youth village was opened in February 1982 at Cape Ternay, also on the island of Mahé, and a third on the island of Sainte Anne. The three villages were to bring together almost all young people aged 15 to 17. Together with the staff, they represented 10% of the country's working-age population between 15 and 64. The NYS ended in 1998 after 17 years of operation.

June 2020

Translation: Abigail Graham 2020

References

[1] Olivier Le Brun, “Seychelles, De l'esclavage au socialisme” (From slavery to socialism) Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1982.

[2] See also the report “The NYS: planning the second year” by Aboo Aumeerudy (April 1982) and several other documents I have written on the progress of the NYS:

“NYS, Genèse, Réalisations, Perspectives” (NYS, Genesis, Achievements and Perspectives), June 1981
“Théorie et pratique de la vie quotidienne dans le village de la jeunesse” (Theory and practice of daily life in the youth village), June 1981
“The new education in the NYS: an analysis of the first year and prospects for the second year”, Unesco, 1982

Postscript

After the death of President France Albert René in Victoria on 27 February 2019, I was invited to the Seychelles Embassy in Paris, where I wrote the following text in the Book of Condolences:

“President France Albert René is — I use the present tense because everything he did for the Seychelles is a living reality — a visionary who fought with intelligence, creativity, courage and firmness against the inequalities of Seychellois society: inequalities of class, gender and colour. It was a privilege for me to be able to work under his leadership for two and a half years at the National Youth Service, a project that profoundly democratised society. He was able to put radical social democracy into practice by tackling inequalities in work, health and education, notably by putting in place free education for children aged 4 to 17.

I share the emotion and sadness of the people of the Seychelles, especially those close to him and all those who were fortunate enough to have supported his personal commitment through their actions. At this sad time, let us remember that the seeds he sowed continue to germinate and flourish.”