Chief Justice Earle Edward Seaton
by Julien Durup, a student of history
In 1978 Dr Earle Seaton was a jurist and a diplomat. He arrived in the Seychelles to take the post of Chief Justice in the one-party state government of France Albert René. He became the longest serving Chief Justice of the Seychelles, and was the first black person to do so. However, Homer Vanniasinkam, a Tamil from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) who was Legal Adviser and Crown Prosecutor acted as Chief Justice for a short time in the late 1940s. For the white elites Hormer was too black to be a member of their club known as the “Seychelles Club”.>
Previously, Earle Seaton had spent nearly 20 years in Tanzania. He served during the British colonial era and also after independence. He was very much at ease to serve under the long-time comrade socialist dictator Julius Nyerere, a man who ruined the economy of his country and yet died as a national hero. Nyerere was born in 1922 (the son of Chief Burito of the Zaniki tribe) and was given the African name of Kambarage. Later he became a Roman Catholic and took the name Julius when he was baptised at the age of twenty one years old. He wanted to be a priest but was dissuaded instead by a Priest to opt for politics. It seems that he had preferred throughout his life his new European name rather than his African one. He does not seem to have question Father Mathias Koenen, the priest who baptised him, why his God would not accept African names. I presume that it was wise of him not to do so because otherwise the Church of Rome would not have raised the finance for his scholarship to Edinburgh University in Scotland.
Earle Seaton was the son an émigré’s family from Saint Kitts, (formerly Saint Christopher Island) in the Lesser Antilles. He was born on the 29th of February 1924 in Bermuda, and was brought up in Hamilton in the parish of Pembroke. Hamilton was named after Sir Henry Hamilton the Irish governor of Bermuda from 1788-1794. In 1941, Earle Seaton was a bright student and graduated at the Berkeley Institute. That school was situated on the corner of St. John's and Berkeley Roads in Pembroke West, Bermuda. It was founded in 1897, and moved from the Samaritan's Hall on Court Street to its present site in 1902.
It seems that he came from a modest family and he wanted to be a doctor of medicine. At an early age he loved music and tennis, and became a very good violinist and excelled in tennis. He made money by playing violin for tourists in many Bermuda hotels.
He later obtained a scholarship to Howard University (named after General Oliver Otis Howard for his role in founding the university) Washington, D.C. At Howard he pursued his goal to become a doctor. He studied biology and was well known as a good tennis player. In Washington he became president of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
After completing his four years studies at Howard, his father Dudley persuaded him to study law, a profession that required less study than medicine. He followed his father’s advice and went to London to study law at the London University. During his time in London he befriended many Africans and he started studying the Bantu language of Kiswahili, known also as “coastal language”. Later he graduated at London as a Barrister. In 1948 he married Alberta Jones a qualified biologist from the University of Brussels. She was from Texas and they had met at the Howard University.
In 1949 the newly married couple went to settle in Dar es Salaam the capital of the British colony of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). There he started his legal profession in the town of Moshi. The next year was quite busy for Earle Seaton. He took the important case of the Wa-Meru people to the United Nations.
In 1953 he left Tanganyika with his wife and his two recently born children for Los Angeles. There he was admitted to doctoral studies in International Affairs at the University of Southern California and completed his dissertation in 1961. In that same year he went back to Tanzania and was posted in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1964. In 1965, Julius Nyerere appointed him as a judge and he was based in Arusha up to 1969. In that same year he served as Tanzania’s Legal Counsel to the United Nations up to 1971. In 1972 he went back to his native Bermuda and took up the post of Puisne Judge until 1978 and was the first Black man to occupy the post of a judge in Bermuda.
In 1989, he left the Seychelles for Houston, Texas his wife’s hometown. There he worked as an associate with a firm dealing with reinsurance and travelled regularly between Houston and Bermuda. In 1991 He left Texas for his last post in Kampala, Uganda, to work for the British Commonwealth as an Appellate Judge. Three years later he died in New York while going from Kampala on vacation en route to Texas. He is survived by his widow Alberta, his daughter Elizabeth and two granddaughters.
History has marked Earle Seaton for one of his greatest achievements in Tanganyika when he took the Meru (waMeru) people’s case to the United Nations. It was indeed the first time for an indigenous people to plead before the United Nation Trusteeship Commission. This famous case was known as “The Meru Land Case”, because of the book that Earle Seaton and Kirilo Japhet wrote was called “The Meru Land Case”. The eviction case on the Meru in Engare Nanyuki started during the German occupation. It became intolerable when the British destroyed their village by burning in an effort to move them and replaced them by Afrikaners and Europeans. During the massacre most of the Meru were driven into the bush and many died, they lost over 2 000 cattle, and also chicken, goats and donkeys and most of their personal belongings.
Before their forced eviction, the Meru had petitioned the United Nations; the UN representatives visited the place and subsequently tried to persuade the British to delay the evictions until the full Trusteeship Council had an opportunity to hear the case. The British refused their request and carried on with the force evacuation in September 1951. They created obstacles for the Meru, but this did not deter the Meru’s appeal. They started collecting money to send a representative to New York.
On 9th June 1952, the Meru were finally granted a hearing before the Trusteeship Council provided they arrived before the end of that month. With little time available the Meru selected Earle Seaton and Kirilo Japhet, the secretary of the Citizen Union to represent them. Having no passport Kirilo Japhet had to hurriedly submit his application, the British authorities delayed his application and advised him not to go as the Council had already decided their case. Meanwhile, Earle Seaton had to go on his own and he arrived just in time for the Council to hear him on the 30 June. Alone, Earle Seaton presented the case until the arrival of Kirilo Japhet on 17 July.
In reading the case, you can see that Earle Seaton brilliantly presented the controversial issue to the delegates and Kirilo Japhet followed with an impassioned and detailed plea for justice. That case was perhaps unique because after his submission Earle Seaton had to act as interpreted for Kirilo Japhet during the latter’s presentation in Kiswahili.
After leaving New York, Earle Seaton and Kirilo Japhet returned home via London. During the stopover they met with members of the Fabian Society who tried but failed for them to arrange an interview for them with the Colonial Office.
In general, the Council Members voiced their support to the British Authorities and surprisingly New Zealand presented a draft resolution before Kirilo Japhet took the stand. The document was adopted soon after he finished. More counter resolutions were table, one was submitted by Indonesia condemning the move and calling for Britain to return the land they had seized to the Meru. Astonishingly, the other resolution was from Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. They condemned the moves but did not require Britain to return the land. However, the Indonesian resolution was passed overwhelmingly and was sent to the General Assembly for action.
In July 1953, Kirilo Japhet visited New York made his last plea to the Trusteeship Council. The Meru lost their case because the resolutions were not binding on Britain. However, it was that case that motivated the Tanzanian campaign against the British colonialism and imperialism.
In the Seychelles, one of Earle Seaton main controversial cases was that of the failed mercenary attacked on 25 November 1981 from South Africa, in which he tried six arrested men in June-July 1982. Four of them were sentenced to death and the remaining two were given long prison sentences. In mid-1983 they were freed after secret negotiations in which the South African Government paid 3 million dollars to the Seychelles Government for their released. One can legitimately ask if that sum went in the country exchequer and what was it allocated for. If the death penalty was confirmed then he himself would have been forced to be executioner because at that time the Seychelles Government was against capital punishment! In another case regarding a small group of peaceful demonstrators at Victoria, Mahé, against the one party state in sentencing them, Earle Seaton said that there was another way of protest. However, he did not tell them the right way to do so.
Ref:
- Kirilo Japhet et Earle Seaton: The Meru Land Case, 1867: 91pp.
- Anton Nelson: The Freemen of Meru: 1967, 227pp.
- Thomas T Spear: Mountains Farmers: Moral economics of land and agricultural development in Arusha and Meru.
- Earle E Seaton; Wikipedia.
- Julien Durup et Antonio Marie: List of Chief Justices of the Seychelles