ESSENCE: FROM THE HOMELAND TO THE MOTHERLAND: A BEAUTY PILGRIMAGE WITH THE COCO DE MER

By Shelby Stewart · Updated October 22, 2025 

Reprinted from ESSENCE Magazine

It’s easy to create preconceived notions about the continent of Africa and what we may assume it to be. But you have to abandon those ideas when you make a visit. The next destination Black women who love to travel should add to their list isn’t Zanzibar or the Maldives—it’s Seychelles, the greatest place many don’t know exists.

Floating in the Indian Ocean just east of Kenya, the Seychelles archipelago feels both ancient and futuristic. There are no overwater bungalows here, no party yachts crowding the reefs. Instead, the country has pioneered a Blue Economy—an ocean-first approach that puts conservation before consumption, sustainability before spectacle. You sense immediately that Seychelles is not a place that wants to be seen. It wants to be felt. And for Black women seeking refuge from the constant noise of performance, it might just be the perfect place to disappear and rediscover themselves.

What struck me most was how much the island already felt like home. Not home in the physical sense, but in the ancestral one — that instinctive recognition that lives in the bones. The laughter of Seychellois women reminded me of my aunties back in New Orleans, how their joy fills the air before they even speak. The music that played during sunset dinners carried the same polyrhythms as the drum circles at homecoming. You realize, standing there between sea and sky, that the distance between the Homeland and the Motherland isn’t as vast as a map makes it seem. The same salt that lives in the Atlantic lives here too.

READ on ESSENCE