The hillsides surrounding the harbour of the tiny French territory of Mayotte have been transformed into barren mounds of leafless, uprooted trees. Sailboats lie on their sides, consumed by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
Piles of twisted metal, bricks, insulation and other debris line the steep, narrow streets of Mamoudzou, the capital of this archipelago along the east coast of Africa. Amid all this destruction caused by cyclone Chido, which struck on December 14th, a few residents sat on the sidewalk in a downpour days later, setting out buckets to capture water, which has become a valuable commodity with taps dry since the storm.
“Tell Macron that God gave us water,” said a shirtless man, raising his arms, referring to French President Emmanuel Macron, who had just arrived to tour the devastation.
As residents pick through the wreckage where dozens have been confirmed dead and thousands may be missing, the deeply impoverished territory of Mayotte is attracting rare global attention and generating renewed debate over its treatment as part of France.
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More than a century and a half after the French colonised Mayotte, which mainly comprises two larger islands and a series of smaller ones with about 320,000 people, it is the poorest place in France and faces some of the greatest social challenges.
The poverty rate is nearly 80 per cent, five times higher than in metropolitan France, according to official statistics. The unemployment rate is nearly 40 per cent, compared with about 7 per cent for the rest of France. Some people work in fishing and agriculture, or in an informal economy of small shops and businesses; others are employed by the state.
About 30 per cent of residents do not have access to running water at home, a problem made worse by a drought last year.
Some aid workers and analysts have said the French government has failed to keep up with a rapidly growing population and provide necessary services. Others suggest it has largely overlooked the territory, 5,000 miles from mainland France and a 12-hour flight from Paris.
In the aftermath of the cyclone, Macron has vowed to support the devastated population.
At the airport and then at the hospital on Thursday, Macron was greeted by scores of worried residents and exhausted doctors who told him about destroyed homes, power blackouts, low food and medicine stocks, empty petrol stations – and worries of a terrible toll.
He was also taken on a helicopter flyover of the devastation. The president said relief was arriving and a field hospital would be operational on Friday.
However, for some in Mayotte, the attention and talk of support from mainland France – and Macron’s visit – ring hollow after what they see as decades of discrimination and neglect.
“It’s not going to do anything for us,” said Sarah Moilimo (35), a teacher who is now accommodating about 25 people who lost their homes in her house in Mamoudzou, of Macron’s visit. “What we need is for him to act and to do something. Over the last few months he’s sent many ministers to visit Mayotte and nothing ever changes.”
Macron rejected suggestions that the French state had abandoned Mayotte and made sweeping promises of recovery during his visit. “We were able to rebuild our cathedral in five years,” he said, referring to the recent reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. “It would be a tragedy if we were unable to rebuild Mayotte.”
Mayotte’s inhabitants do not enjoy all the same benefits as those of metropolitan France, and they are subject to some different laws.
For instance, families are not entitled to certain grants for childbirth and education that are accessible almost everywhere else in France.
Mayotte is also one of only two French departments where state representatives can remove residents and destroy illegal housing without a court order. Although the law requires the government to provide suitable alternative accommodation, that often does not happen, according to aid groups.
Shantytowns that have been the focus of the local administration’s demolition efforts have been hard by the storm, with many destroyed. Many residents of the shantytowns are believed to be undocumented migrants.
At a shantytown on a hill in the Passamaïnty neighbourhood, not a single tree remained intact, the ones still standing all ravaged by the storm. The muddy slope was littered with a castaway car door, soaked mattresses and a dented headboard.
The banging of hammers echoed from the detritus, as displaced residents were already trying to move forward. One of them, a 38-year-old immigrant from Comoros named Abdouswali, stood on a long sheet of red corrugated iron that was once the roof of a nearby hotel, hammering out the kinks to build a new shack after the cyclone destroyed his old one.
The unemployed father of four, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is undocumented, migrated from the neighbouring nation of Comoros in 2014 to find work. The best he could do was the occasional construction job, he said. Without money to move into a more stable situation, he forged ahead on a new home, undeterred by the rubble all around him.
“We have no other choice,” he shrugged. “There is no space to build.”
The disparities that Mayotte faces are in some ways a legacy of the French colonial era.
Colonised in 1843, Mayotte only became a French department – which establishes a local authority to administer social services and infrastructure – in 2011. It’s the youngest department in the country, and some civil-society activists say government officials are still struggling to catch the island up on services and infrastructure amid rapid population growth.
Moilimo, the teacher in Mamoudzou, said she moved to Mayotte about a year and a half ago after living in Marseilles her entire life because she wanted to connect with her roots in Africa. She figured Mayotte would be a good landing spot because she could still have the salary and quality of life she had in France.
“It’s not like France at all,” she said, saying the disparities between Mayotte and the mainland were startling.
Even though salaries are much lower in Mayotte, prices are much higher, she said. The education system in Mayotte is so overwhelmed that many pupils perform far below their grade level, she added; some students only have the opportunity to go to school for half of the day because of a shortage of teachers.
Thanks in part to pro-French woman activists who used what is known as tickle torture as a way to scare off pro-independence politicians, Mayotte was the only territory in its island chain that voted to remain a part of France during a referendum in the mid-1970s. That led to its separation from what is today the independent nation of Comoros.
Today, many Mayotte residents continue to hold a strong allegiance to France, even when they feel the government has failed them, Moilimo said.
“It’s like the people of Mayotte have the syndrome of the colonised,” she said. “They’re so happy to be considered French that they’ll settle for anything you give them.”
Part of the reason that Mayotte may have lost so many lives is that cyclones are so rare there that residents often are not aware of the proper precautions to take, said Eric Sam-Vah, the deputy head of the Piroi Center, a disaster management agency of the French Red Cross.
Even though French authorities warned of a high death toll, residents have complained that government rescue and recovery efforts have been sluggish, and in some cases nonexistent. There was no sign of a government rescue effort during a walk through many stricken areas of the capital on Thursday.
During his visit, Macron acknowledged that in many shantytowns there had not yet been searches to find victims but said officials were ramping up their efforts.
In many cases, Mayotte residents have had to turn to each other to survive.
After the roof of his two-story, detached villa was torn off by the cyclone, Mickael Damour (47) was forced to squeeze into a bathroom cupboard to stay safe. He emerged to roads so clogged with debris that he and his neighbours could not leave and were forced to shelter in a school. Damour, a dialysis nurse, said he put his professional skills to work, treating neighbours who could not get to the hospital.
“I bandaged wounds for two days, nonstop,” he said. “We don’t see a lot of aid from the French state.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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