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. ( )