Operation “Wuambushu”, announced several weeks ago by the French Interior Ministry, began on Monday April 24 in Mayotte. This large-scale action to destroy slums and evict illegal migrants – the vast majority from the Comoros – once again shines the spotlight on the uniqueness of this island, the only one among the colonized archipelago not to have chosen the independence in the 1970s and became a French department in 2011.
Ethnologist Sophie Blanchy, director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), specialist in Comorian and Malagasy societies, recalls the ancient history of migration and its necessity in island territories without resources.
Sophie Blanchy The government chooses to respond with force and destruction to a migratory situation deemed intolerable and incompatible with the development of Mayotte. But he faces one and the same population. Regarding the Comorians in Mayotte, it is difficult for me to speak of foreign migrants. These populations, whether born in Mayotte, Anjouan or Grande Comore, share the same language, practice the same religion, have the same conception of kinship, have often married and continue to marry each other. Nothing distinguishes them except that some find themselves on this territory with French nationality and others do not.
The path of erecting walls, borders, therefore seems untenable to me. In an island space with few resources, migrating has always been a necessity. Mayotte attracts because it is now better endowed, as Madagascar was during the colonial period. The work of Comorians allows a transfer of money to other islands, but it is also an essential cog in the economy of Mayotte where the informal sector remains important.
It is a reality, but it is not the fact of the Comorians alone. 80% of the population is poor in Mayotte. Mahorais are poor, school dropouts, delinquents… Mayotte is the poorest department in France with an endowment per inhabitant three to four times lower than in France. The problem is that of the backward development of this island, whose population is no larger than that of an average city of 350,000 inhabitants, but to which the State does not provide resources in keeping with its status as a department.
Most of them gather in the suburbs of Mutsamudu, the capital of Anjouan. Deportation is experienced as a failure, a shame, which prevents them from returning to their families. Often, they wait to be able to leave to pursue their migratory dream. This migration is that of ordinary people, rural or urban. People who have always been crushed by the economic and political systems in place, including the colonial system. And this is particularly true in Anjouan where the two main colonial societies had appropriated all the land, leaving nothing for the villagers to force them to become agricultural workers.
Yes, the Comoros remain a fragile state. We must not forget that not so long ago [1997] Anjouan and Mohéli wanted to secede with Grande Comore. The centralization of authority and services in Moroni, the capital, remains a source of conflict. The two large islands, Anjouan and Grande Comore, are in rivalry while Mohéli appears to be the loser. At the end of this crisis of secession, power was granted in a rotating manner to a representative from each of the islands, which was a step forward. But President Azali Assoumani put an end to this parenthesis. Democracy is only an appearance.
Mayotte, she chose her solution by remaining in the bosom of France. Some of its elites – political leaders, civil servants – come from populations that came from the Malagasy island of Sainte-Marie at the end of the 19th century. They had no interest in joining the older Comorian elites, against which they were not in a strong position. The Mahorais have always been regarded with a certain contempt by the ruling groups of Grande Comore and Anjouan. The attachment to France gave Mayotte another destiny, but at the cost of a growing break with its environment.
It is an essential political speech for a Comorian leader and it is well founded, given the way Mayotte’s independence was granted. Is it perfunctory? Anyway, everyone is aware that the current situation is an aporia and cannot be final.
Comoros has always been a neglected colony. And France was also not very active in the postcolonial period. Even in the time of Ahmed Abdallah Abdéremane [1978-1989] when she did what she wanted in the Comoros, the help was never enough. Then it almost disappeared and the programs that remain are just a sprinkling.
We would certainly need a real policy of cooperation, but that has a cost. We must also not ignore the difficulties on which the implementation of such actions stumbles when the leaders of the Comoros reason above all according to the interest of their community and not that of the country.