Once upon a time… Our morning coffee... |31 August 2023

Mr Andre Pool standing proudly besides one of his coffee plants (Photo: Contributed)  

Today, the National Museum of History is hosting the ‘Valorisation of Coffee’ activity. On behalf of the Seychelles National Institute for Culture, Heritage and the Arts, Tony Mathiot takes a nostalgic look at the taste of our homegrown coffee.

Those like me who crave for a mug of coffee first thing in the morning would know just how invigorating it is. It arouses you from that stupor of sleepiness, and makes you lucid, mentally active.

 After that first mug, you can memorise a line or even two from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Of course, I’m talking about Nescafé. Pure soluble coffee. Instant coffee. Aromatic. Stimulating.

Yet somehow much different from the coffee our great-grand parents drunk at the first cries of the rooster, so many decades ago.

I can almost smell that pungent pervasive aroma. I can almost hear the pounding of that giant mortar as roasted coffee beans are being ground in the late afternoon in preparation for next morning’s energising beverage. Grinding coffee was virtually a quotidian task for most households and it was done by the domestic servant in general.

The story of coffee in Seychelles goes back to almost 1770 when it was grown on Ste Anne by the first settlers from Ile de France (Mauritius). They must have brought sackloads of coffee beans to roast and coffee seeds to grow. It must then have been Coffea arabica. This was the first species of coffee to be cultivated 1,000 BC in the highlands of Ethiopia. In the 7th century, Arab traders crossed the Red Sea from Ethiopia to Yemen and lower Arabia with cargoes of coffee seeds.

In 1715, coffee from Moka was planted at Ile Bourbon (Reunion) and in the early 1720s it was introduced to Ile de France. In the 1780s coffee from Ile Bourbon was one of the principal products of exportation for Ile de France. By then, coffee was being grown at L’Etablissement du Roi for the consumption of the small population. By the year 1804, ‘… déja existaient une cantine ou café et une salle de billiard.’ In 1811, when the British took possession of the Seychelles there was no shortage of coffee. No doubt, it must have the slaves who pulverised coffee for their masters.

Today, our octogenarian grandparents will tell you that it was quite an elaborate process to have a mug of coffee. Ripe coffee beans were placed on gunny sacks to dry in the shade or in mild sunlight. These were then roasted in a large cast-iron pot on an open fire.

Now, you will be perplexed by this. Reglisse seeds were added to the coffee beans as flavorant.  Reglisse, known as Indian liquorice is known to be highly toxic! It contains a poison called arbrin.

Killer Bead Shock

I recall way back when I was in primary school reading on the front page of the Seychelles Bulletin of Thursday June 13, 1972 the bold headline Killer Bead Shock!  It alerted the public to the fact that Reglisse seeds are poisonous. Apparently, an English visitor to our islands had bought a couple of bracelets made from reglisse beads from a local artisan. Back home in UK, his three-year old girl had somehow got hold of the bracelets and as it commonly happened with toddlers, she had put the beads in her mouth, swallowed a few and died soon after of necrosis of the liver and kidneys. Kaspyant seeds known as stinking weed is also known to be toxic. In Jamaica, it is even used as a substitute for coffee. Mindboggling isn’t it? Well, these two poisons were used to actually ‘flavour’ coffee! Well, one can then assume that when roasted, the poison in the Reglisse and Kaspyant seeds were nullified.

After roasting, the coffee beans and adulterants were ground which was quite an exercise in itself, working that heavy pestle.

The coffeemaker was called lagreg, the etymology can indicate that the utensil may be of Greek origin. Anyhow, our lagreg was a two-level utensil. Coffee grinds were placed in the upper compartment which had a perforated bottom. Boiling water was poured in it, seeping through the ground coffee and then draining through the perforated bottom into the second compartment below. Coffee was then dispensed through a spout from the side of the lagreg. Obviously, this was a drip-brewing process. This process could be repeated a couple of times more if more coffee was needed, but of course with each brew the coffee liquid would get clearer and the taste would get milder. I’m told that children always had the second or third brew. Most inhabitants drank their coffee black but with a generous amount of sugar. Most of them had coffee only in the morning whilst for the ‘upper class’ post-prandial coffee was de riguer.    

Our grandparents inherited knowledge from their forefathers of the medicinal properties of coffee. A decoction of coffee leaves eased urinal flow. It also improved blood circulation and alleviated hemorrhagic conjunctivitis.

In the early 1880s Liberian coffee was introduced in Seychelles. At the beginning of the 20th century, many estate owners had coffee plantations for their own consumption. Today, a place on the east of Mahe known as Café Arnold bears testimony to one and makes reference to its owner. Indeed, from the 1930s to the 1960s, this place must have provided hundreds of inhabitants with their addictive morning tonic.

At Pti Barbarons, Anse Boileau, 64-year-old Andre Pool is the proud owner a large property that once produced coffee for the local market. It was his father, Eugene Pool who managed the family estate. Besides coffee, the estate also produced a variety of vegetables and fruits. Andre worked as chauffeur to the French Ambassador for 23 years before retiring to the family property where he hopes to revive the estate’s agricultural produce including coffee.

In his Annual Agricultural Report for 1901, the curator of the Botanic Station wrote that ‘There are many localities in Seychelles most suitable for the cultivation of Arabian coffee, especially those valleys situated at about 1,000 feet above sea level where the effects of the leaf disease are never serious. These valleys are sometimes planted with coconut trees, although on such sites this palm will never prove as remunerative as coffee. Liberian coffee is found also on many estates thriving abundantly. Its product is more or less unsold’. 

However, local production of coffee was insufficient to meet local demand. Thus, as from early 1920s coffee was among our main items of principal imports. In 1925, for example, Seychelles imported coffee for an amount of R61,839. In 1953, coffee beans cost R1.85cts per pound. At that time the basic salary of a male labourer was R22 and that of a female labourer R11. The average labourer probably consumed four lbs of coffee per month which must have had quite a debilitating effect on the household budget.

The traditional lagreg which was quite a quaint-looking object was made by the village blacksmith using or shall I say, re-cycling biscuit tins or milk cans. The mortar was made from Takamaka or Casuarina wood by dugging out the inside of a log. The lagreg would need repairing every now and then or it would be discarded for a new one whilst the large solid mortar and pestle would be handed down across generations, like family heirloom.

Now our morning beverage does not come from the forest of La Misère or the wooded hillslopes of Mare aux Cochons. It comes from supermarkets. It’s instant coffee. It’s Nescafé. It’s Maxwell House or even Starbucks. I’m certain that our great-grandparents would have appreciated it.