Imagine waking up to horrifying images of a region of France reduced to ruins after an extreme overnight weather event. We don’t have to imagine it, because it happened in December. Tropical cyclones don’t usually strike in Europe, but this one levelled a French département. France’s colonial history made that possible.
Mayotte, situated in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar, is part of the former French colonial empire. It has been a French overseas collectivity since the 1970s and was made a department of France in 2011. As such it is an integral part of the EU, too.
Cyclone Chido ravaged the island on 14 December, exposing socioeconomic conditions that should be utterly unacceptable for the seventh-richest country in the world. The worst natural catastrophe experienced in France for almost a century was devastating, but it was the longstanding neglect of France’s poorest region that made its impact a great deal worse.
About 77% of Mayotte’s population live below the national poverty line, compared with 14% in metropolitan France, which would be unacceptable in any region on the European mainland. At least 37% of Mahoran women and 25% of men aged 15 and above have never attended school. About 60% of the population live without basic sanitary facilities, often in overcrowded bidonvilles: informal settlements built from salvaged materials such as corrugated metal sheets, wood and plastic. Severe droughts have left people facing unprecedented water shortages. Given these precarious living conditions, it’s not hard to imagine the cyclone’s catastrophic impact.
In Mamoudzou, the main city, most of the buildings were destroyed. As for human casualties, there were 39 deaths reported and thousands of people were injured. However, the death toll could still reach thousands, because many people remain unaccounted for as a result of the extensive destruction of informal settlements.
Two months after the disaster, Mayotte has faded from the international headlines. But the devastation has not, with the human misery exacerbated by treacherous mudslides.
Against this calamity, the entire political class in France might have been expected to articulate national support and solemnity, but the most visible face of the French republic failed to show basic respect. A couple of days after the tragedy, France’s new prime minister, François Bayrou, opted to skip an emergency meeting on Mayotte in Paris so he could chair a meeting of the city council in the south-western French city of Pau, where he also serves as mayor.
Like Bayrou, Emmanuel Macron made a flying visit to Mayotte, where he came face to face with the understandable frustration of traumatised people who felt abandoned. But the president did not seem in listening mode. He shouted and used foul language, before patronising a woman who heckled him, reminding her how lucky the people of Mayotte were to be in France. “Because if this weren’t France, you’d be 10,000 times more in deep shit!” As clips of this insulting exchange circulated, many islanders expressed shock at the tone of Macron’s outburst.
The contemptuous response of France’s most senior officials was not an aberration. Rather, it reflects France’s attitude to its former colonies, now overseas territories, whose people are expected to feel only gratitude. Much was made in the French media of Bayrou’s “ambitious” pledge to rebuild Mayotte, but Saïd Omar Oili an elected representative for Mayotte quit Macron’s group in the senate in protest at the timidity of the response. Why should Mahorans, whose territory has been French since 1841, be more grateful than people from Nice and Savoie – who only became French in 1860? Would any politician treat a department on the mainland as if France were a gift to them?
In fact, France has a strong interest in maintaining its presence globally. Despite its modest size, France boasts the world’s second-largest maritime domain thanks to its overseas territories. Mayotte plays a crucial role because of the rich biodiversity of its ecosystem. More significantly, its strategic geographic position between Africa and Asia, in a region where major powers compete for influence, serves as a key military base for French armed forces. The island provides a specialised training ground for military exercises tailored to tropical and island-based interventions.
Yet Mayotte is still a disputed territory. In a 1974 referendum, the archipelago of islands that make up Comoros voted strongly in favour of independence from France (95%). But on the island of Mayotte, 63% of voters chose to remain under French control. France then split off Mayotte and organised a separate referendum there in 1976, in which the island voted again to remain part of the French republic. The UN general assembly condemned these referendums, declaring them null and void. The African Union has labelled France’s conduct an “unlawful occupation”.
France insists that it is giving Mahorans what they want. But what is the point of making Mayotte a department, and therefore an integral part of France, if it is not accorded the same standards as the rest of the country?
Legislation is supposed to align with national norms, yet numerous exemptions remain. The minimum wage in Mayotte is 24% lower than the national rate, and a solidarity income for those without earnings is half the national rate. To deter migrants from neighbouring, even poorer, Comoros, immigration laws in Mayotte are far stricter than in mainland France. According to the League of Human Rights (Ligue des Droits de l’Homme), these measures amount to “serious violations of fundamental rights”.
This is the neglectful context in which the cyclone struck meaning that many of its calamitous consequences could have been avoided. Countless official documents, statements from NGOs and social movements had previously sounded the alarm. Last year, the French national assembly released a report on the unique vulnerabilities of French territories, including Mayotte, to climate breakdown. Highlighting climate vulnerability, water scarcity, socioeconomic disparities and infrastructure deficiencies, the report’s alarming tone should have urged the authorities to act, especially because the healthcare system is deficient. In 2022, a French senate document described Mayotte’s healthcare system as “at breaking point”.
As the effects of the climate emergency hit harder and more unpredictably in the future, will France do anything differently for its citizens in the overseas departments? The continuing neglect suggests not. Manuel Valls, the recently appointed minister of the overseas, has no specific expertise. A former prime minister, he once mistakenly placed Réunion Island in the Pacific Ocean instead of the Indian Ocean. His past comments on deporting the Roma community from France don’t inspire confidence in the government’s consideration of its overseas citizens.
And Macron, apparently on the hunt for scapegoats, thinks a crackdown on undocumented migrants should be a priority in the disaster response. With strong backing from Bayrou, a new law, restricting birthright citizenship and tightening routes to French nationality for children born in Mayotte, was adopted by the French national assembly last week.
France derives clear benefits from its overseas territories. Failing to address their needs with the same commitment that it offers to people in its European territory is worse than a failure to honour the state’s responsibilities: it is a form of abandonment.
Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe columnist
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