by Dagaa Simandèf
A little less than 5 months ago, Cyclone Garance battered Reunion Island, a French colonized island near Madagascar and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Since then, the State and the town hall of Saint-Denis are preparing to implement an old desire to expropriate the inhabitants of the Bas de la Rivière, a particular sector of the capital of the colony. Since Thursday, July 24, after months of distress and uncertainty, a demolition operation concerning three homes has been underway in the Colline district.
Located at the bottom of the Bas de la Rivière, a ravine crossing the southern entrance to Saint-Denis, this district was particularly devastated by the river’s floods, tearing up several houses with the earthworks on which they rested and leaving dozens of families in disarray. In addition to the violence of the climatic event, there are silent administrations, aid funds reluctant to expand their powers, political recuperations at the time of the municipal elections and reports that come out incomplete and are content with miserabilistic portraits.
This article wishes to emphasize certain mechanisms of colonial power and the issues surrounding this first wave of expropriation. This comes at a time when the national media coverage of the cyclone, and therefore the attention of mainland France, has subsided. Inseparable from the crisis crossing the rest of the island, the analysis of the case of La Colline (the Hill in French) should remind us how colonialism tries to sit ever stronger, more viciously necessary and illusorily a savior after each cyclone crisis. Every climatic disaster is a boon to the perpetually land hungry colonial policy.
“The colonial cyclone shows that the ecological crisis does not bring the world back to its feet. On the contrary, it reinforces colonial domination and oppression. Cyclones accelerate the world, contract it, stretch it and reveal its structuring fractures and radicalize its lines of non-division.”
Malcolm Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology. Thinking about ecology from the Caribbean world
And the apparent inevitability with which these events follow one another crystallizes the contradictions of two colonies whose uninhabitability is more apparent every day, as gullies overflow, cane and banana fields blown out, water and electricity supplies cut off, buildings and roads flooded, cars swept away, and the colonized still colonized.
The Inhabitants of La Colline: Between Dignity and Colonial Dispossession
Brushing aside the protests of the inhabitants who have been constantly mobilized since the disaster, the prefect Patrice Latron and the former Minister of Overseas Territories, Ericka Bareigts, continue to hammer home their urgent need for expropriation. A key instrument of settler colonization, expropriation is a simple measure to a fundamental problem for the colony: how to seize the land and get rid of the land that inhabits.
Under the pretext of wanting to preserve lives and protect itself from a guilty conscience in the next cyclone, supported by the colonial expertise of the BRGM (Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières) and the DEAL (Direction de l’Environnement, de l’Aménagement et du Logement) on the illegality of the site, the town hall is busy rehousing the inhabitants of La Colline and is offended when its good will meets their anger. In fact, the town hall cannot understand their attachment to the land; it organizes the uprooting of the land. The history of the so-called “priority” neighborhoods of Saint-Denis is full of evictions, expropriations and forced displacements of the population, when they are not themselves born of these displacements. The evictions from La Colline are to be inscribed in the long history of colonial urbanism and the thrusts of a great builder of the empire, Michel Debré. Far from being an innocent solution, rehousing is part of a repressive arsenal ranging from grenades to subsidized contracts. They allow the fragmentation of families from one district or even from one municipality to another and prevent the political organization of neighborhoods. As soon as they are evicted, they can find themselves tenants even though they were owners. Dependence on assistance (created by social housing), isolation and a break with the modes of socialization that they may have known can then set in.
Their expulsion is also the loss of opportunities to be anchored to the territory and its histories. Cruelly, the waters have also washed away archives on the history of the Lower River, patiently built up by one of the inhabitants of La Colline, to develop a form of indigeneity, despite the contradictions of colonial modernity. More than an uprooting to the land, to the rhythms of the river, to the straw-in-tails that were able to fill the ramparts, to the feet of mangoes and jackfruit trees that were found there in the heights, the inhabitants of La Colline testify to the loss of a way of finding themselves between families and neighbors, of organizing themselves in relative self-sufficiency, to resist collectively in the face of the river’s floods (which are not new) and finally, to inhabit the ravine.
Illegal Habitability but Legal Uninhabitability
Why live in the ravine? And why fight to stay there now that the risk is proven? Isn’t the containment requested by the inhabitants an ecocidal and very unsustainable measure? Don’t you want to be saved? The town hall is perceptive. But it forgets that the rest of its city is itself built on more than a century of predation of the ravines, their mouths and their surrounding swamps. Indeed, during the 1980s, while the colonial metropolis was trying to implement a preventive approach for its risk areas, via awareness-raising and building bans, the departmentalized colony benefited from a Programme Pluriannuel d’Endiguement des Ravines (PPER) allowing it to build at all costs. A study published in 2006 by the geographer David Lorion shows how Reunion Island, and in particular its capital Saint-Denis, was able to take advantage of the cyclones of the 20th century and the State’s emergency funds to expand its cities and industrial zones. The numerous embankment works have allowed the deliberate extension of business parks within risk areas. Lorion, a figure of the colonial right-wing in Reunion Island and now mayor of the 2nd most urbanized municipality on the island, Saint-Pierre, remarks it himself:
“Major disasters are always excellent catalysts for development projects or at the origin of the publication of a range of risk laws. This was a good time for emergency aid and major plans to combat natural hazards. In 1980, the government was preparing for the presidential elections, and the Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, originally from Reunion, wanted to show that the State was still playing its providential role in the French overseas departments. The vulnerability of the eastern districts of Saint-Denis in 1980 had proved to be particularly important despite the protection of the old dikes. Between 1946 and 1967, the population grew by 150%. […] The damage in 1980 (editor’s note: caused by cyclone Hyacynthe) was immense in the Chaudron, Vauban and all the eastern districts. Of course, it was necessary to protect the first social housing estates that had been established in the area since 1960, but it was also urgent to accelerate the recovery of flood-prone land. The PPER funding was initially granted to address the urgency of social urbanization.”
The reclamation of flood-prone land is precisely what the residents of La Colline think about their evictions. Below, on the banks of the Bas de la Rivière, the factories of the Brasseries de Bourbon and a huge slaughterhouse have already been established. According to several testimonies, La Colline site was even the subject of a project by the French occupation army responsible for maintaining colonial order: the Armed Forces in the Southern Indian Ocean Zone (FASZOI). Above all, downstream, a water catchment, critical for the city centre and which was also lacking during the passage of Garance, was inaugurated in 2018. This crystallizes the greatest contempt for the inhabitants.
Indeed, since 2009, a diking and road development project had already been promised to them to ensure their safety and improve the accessibility of the site. A few million euros missing later and work stopping at the entrance to La Colline, the inhabitants began to question the motivations of the municipality, its design offices and its public works companies. A few years later, the small group returned, supported by a few metropolitan experts, with water catchment in mind. The requests for embankment to protect the Hill but also the technical recommendations of the locals concerning the construction of the catchment were then ignored. The damming of the waters is certainly not a sustainable solution, but that it is part of the demands of the inhabitants is tactically understandable. For years, the municipality has voluntarily abandoned them while offering juicy contracts for public and private infrastructure at the service of another population.
Obviously, we have to build, but not for everyone. While the villas bordering the heights of Saint-Denis remain quietly in their red zones (areas exposed to major natural hazards that are subject to a building ban) without experiencing the risk of expropriation, at the bottom of the ravines it is necessary to clean up. Rather, we must ask: who decides on the habitability of the territory? For whom is the territory uninhabitable?
The State proclaims the management of natural risks, but the inhabitants know that they are promised the management of undesirables. In this respect, the colony could no longer hide its segregationist logic. The state of fungibility that affects the lives of the inhabitants of La Colline is the same as that which governs the populations herded into the working-class housing estates. Mostly black and poor, the many so-called “priority” neighborhoods of Saint-Denis (Sainte-Clothilde, Le Chaudron, La Source, Les Camélias, Primat, Le Moufia, etc.) are often the result of former camps for slaves and indentured laborers that became slums, which were then razed by the multiple “resorption” laws experimented in Reunion Island and in the other French colonies (Debré law 1964, Vivien law 1970, Letchimy law 2011, Elan law 2020). It is these margins of the population that the colony strategically keeps in a state between life and death. When the age-old pains that agitate these bodies do not feed the medical-prison system and its biopolitics, which is particularly developed in Reunion Island, when accusations of uncontrollable fertility are not used to display colonial concrete, to the sordid abortion industry, when their dependence on aid is no longer sufficient to make them a strategic electoral reserve, these populations allow the State to satisfy its constantly renewed needs for domination, bludgeoning and permanent surveillance. And the hypermediatization of the reaction to this state violence, the violence of the colonized, makes it possible to keep palpable the class and racial line where the desires for whiteness compete.
Maoré and LaRényon: Departmentalizations in Gusts
The evictions from La Colline necessarily bring us back to the thousands of Comorians chased out of Maoré by the Place Nette operations, the wuambushus and finally, a dream operation, Chido.
A few months before Garance in Reunion Island, Cyclone Chido devastated Maoré Island. The disaster was then part of a xenophobic sequence directed against an “immigrant” part of the population of the Comoros archipelago, of which Maoré is the part colonized by France. The slums that welcomed this immigrant population (for the most part, made foreigners on their own soil) were blown away by the event after having been the target of colonial violence for months. The natural disaster allowed the strengthening of the island’s socio-apartheid without surprise for the inhabitants of the island accustomed to the segregationist colonial regime: the foodstuffs distributed by the Centre Communal d’Action Social (CCAS) and other national associations were subject to possession of a French identity document and/or a residence permit. Thus, people living in slums and without papers have benefited little or nothing from the distribution of basic necessities, even though it is these populations who are the most affected. We see here the real objective of state social assistance systems: hunting, capturing, dependency, letting people die.
As a reminder, through Maoré, it is in reality the entire Comoros archipelago that is destabilized. The French presence and the meagre benefits in terms of employment or health that it promises are enough to generate intense migratory flows, to the great displeasure of conservatives and separatists in Mayotte. The latter are part of a spectrum ranging from simple republican assimilation to the invention of a struggle against so-called Comorian colonialism. Colonial divisions and the logic of the great replacement are thus recycled between a Mayotte population to be protected and a Comorian population to be eliminated. One is in the process of being departmentalized (colonialism), the other is under the yoke of neo-colonialism. This construction of a Mayotte identity (which is obviously not national in nature but cultural because of colonialism) sweeps under the carpet the very real ties that unite the families of each island. Located at the entrance to the Mozambique Channel in northern Madagascar, the interplay of ethnic affiliations and village chiefdoms strongly permeates the political narratives on the history of the archipelago. And as always, they serve first and foremost to immobilize the people by stealing from them the main enemy that would otherwise be visible in broad daylight.
In the wake of Chido, the French state hastened to put the recent immigration law to use by promising the end of the right of birth in Mayotte. The “refoundation” program law that is now taking shape will therefore be in part the attempt to concretely apply these new negrophobic anti-migration measures. While the violence of this aspect has already been noted elsewhere, we must insist on the violence of the reconstruction component, which is taking place with billions of euros in investment.
Is the providential state preparing to allow the people of Maoré to enjoy the full privileges of French citizenship? What can the colonized expect from a promise of access to social rights offered by the Republic?
The current sequence in Maoré can only remind us of that of Reunion Island in 1948. As the Department knows very well how to repeat during the anniversaries justifying its existence, Reunion Island was coming out of a particularly difficult period. The famines of the interwar period were followed by terrible cyclones, including that of 1948. This story of circumstantial misery (which presents itself without the ruin caused by 300 years of slavery, indentured labour, colonization) then makes it possible to justify the underdevelopment that will take shape in Reunion Island with a certain welfare colonialism. As today for Maoré, this second half of the 20th century saw the French State deploy a veritable Marshall Plan, providing all kinds of providential infrastructures in health, education, housing and mobility to meet the needs that colonialism is now discovering. To the perpetual (and cleverly organized) rescue of poor Reunion.
“But sooner or later, colonialism realizes that it is not possible for it to carry out a project of economic and social reforms that satisfies the aspirations of the colonized masses. Even on the level of the belly, colonialism is proving its congenital impotence. […] On the contrary, we must be convinced that colonialism is incapable of providing colonized peoples with the material conditions that would make them forget their concern for dignity. Once colonialism has understood where its tactics of social reform would lead it, we see it rediscover its old reflexes, strengthen the police force, send troops and install a regime of terror better suited to its interests and psychology.”
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
We must repeat what the people of Reunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana are now able to see: departmentalization is a failure. Departmentalization was only the reconfiguration of colonial domination in another form. Our lands plundered and poisoned, our young people starved, assimilated, deported, enlisted, our elders silenced, isolated, our knowledge and traditions exterminated, stolen or instrumentalized, our ancestors mocked, reified, our struggles and our desires to put an end to colonial capitalism suffocated, whitewashed, constantly delayed and recuperated. And every kilometre of road on top of that, tons of concrete dumped over and over again, clinics and nursing homes, each of these schools and commercial areas, these industrial zones and these museums must definitively appear as a progress of colonialism marching on the people. We must be told again and again that colonialism is not capable of giving us bread. Garance and Chido are terrible proofs of this.
An Ecological Transition Without Decolonization?
“This is France, it is our pride, our wealth. This is not an empty idea. The scientists and soldiers who are there remind us of this. France is an archipelago country, a world country […] We’re not here to have fun, but to build the future of the planet. What we preserve here will have consequences on the coasts, including in France.”
Emmanuel Macron in the Scattered Islands, 2019.
The ecological transition, touted as a horizon of universal emancipation, is revealed, for the Global South and particularly for Africa, as a new apparatus of domination. Under the guise of “saving the planet”, imperialism is reorganizing its chains of predation: the electrification of transport, the extension of wind turbines, the multiplication of batteries are shifting violence from coal to copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earths. However, this displacement does not reduce the intensity of the violence in any way; it reconfigures it. In Central Africa, the cobalt and copper mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are transforming populations into a workforce that can be (over)exploited for the energy transition of the North: displaced villages, children working in mines exposed to toxic levels of metals, overexposure to sexual violence, imperialist predation, permanent militarization of mining basins. The DRC occupies a central place in the restructuring of capitalism that follows technological developments: the rise of the automobile industry led to the exploitation of rubber in the nineteenth century, the advent of the nuclear industry led to the exploitation of uranium in the twentieth century, renewable energies and digitization now generate the exploitation of lithium and cobalt, copper, manganese, neodymium and other rare earths. The “cleanliness” praised elsewhere is based on a regime of overexposure to capture, death, and the indignity of the wretched of the earth. The green transition, the ecological transition, digitalization and other empty shells are nothing but a reconfiguration of imperialism.
The island of Maoré is the subject of a vast plan of “territorial reconfiguration” where ecological rhetoric, the fight against substandard housing, adaptation to climate change, the development of resilient infrastructure, serves as a screen for operations to destroy working-class neighborhoods and militarize space. The slums are razed in the name of hygiene and sustainability; the precarious inhabitants, often of Comorian origin, are expelled and hunted down by the repressive forces in charge of the negrophobic colonial order. This ecological violence is part of a continuity: that of the balkanization of the Comoros orchestrated by France at the time of independence in 1975, when Paris arrogated sovereignty over Maoré despite the desire for unity expressed by the Comorian people. Since then, the archipelago has been fractured, and Maoré has been transformed into a military-police and administrative outpost of the French colonial presence in the Indian Ocean. The so-called “ecological” management of the island is combined with negrophobic migratory management. The Balladur visa introduced in 1995 institutionalized separation: it prohibits free movement between Mayotte and the other islands of the Comoros, tearing apart entire families, transforming the sea into a cemetery where thousands of Comorians considered to be supernumerary and expendable perish in the kwasa-kwasa. This device racializes the border and prepares the ground for the current militarization: the same logics that hunt, expel and turn back Comorians serve to justify the “reconfiguration” of the island in the name of sustainable development and resilience. Ecology is used here to justify the counter-revolution: to clean, discipline, control, sterilize, drown, incarcerate a population considered surplus. In this context, “green” projects take the form of standardized housing estates Haute Qualité Environnementale (HQE), administrative buildings, urban planning zones planned by metropolitan firms, while the inhabitants live in extreme poverty, and are particularly vulnerable to climate change.
In Reunion Island, the “energy transition” takes the form of major technocratic plans such as the GHERRI plan, which set up the archipelago as an experimental laboratory for mainland France. The bioclimatic fantasy finds a perfect showcase: in La Possession, the “heart of the city” eco-district awarded at COP24 illustrates this staging of a “green” and “sustainable” modernity, orchestrated by architectural firms navigating between Paris, Brussels, Reunion Island and Maoré. The proliferation of “green technopoles” and business incubators focused on renewable energies, such as the Reunion Island Technopole or Synergîles, often financed by the European Union, the Reunion Region and ADEME, does not benefit the Reunionese population, but above all serves to enhance the image of the island as a “pole of excellence” at international trade fairs such as the Indian Ocean Renewable Energy Forum. Coastal development projects, such as the sustainable tourism zones promoted by the IRT (Reunion Island Tourism) and metropolitan hotel groups, are presented as responses to climate change, while they accelerate the concretization of the island, reinforce dependence on capital from Paris or Brussels and reinforce the socio-apartheid characteristic of the colony. Even biodiversity conservation programmes, such as the sanctuarisation of the Reunion Island National Park (listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010), are part of this logic: they protect “nature” as an international showcase, but by supervising, restricting and sometimes criminalising traditional peasant and popular practices (gathering, grazing, hunting), for the benefit of environmental NGOs or agencies such as the French Office for Biodiversity and the ONF (National Forestry Office), direct relays of the French State in the management of territories. Here, colonial ecology can be read not only in the extractivism of distant lands, but in the manufacture of urban models that are supposed to demonstrate the viability of a tropicalized green capitalism, at the cost of dispossession of local populations.
Pan-African Perspective on Statutory Evolution
The expropriation of the inhabitants of La Colline is shattering lives and families and is in the process of redesigning the city of St Denis. We have shown above how this expropriation is part of the colonial history of Reunion Island. Nonetheless La Colline is only a microcosm. Throughout Lafroséani (southwest of the Indian Ocean), memories are superimposed: slavery, indentured labour, colonization and racial hierarchies have left their mark on bodies and territories. Land is being grabbed, traditional knowledge erased, people locked into economic and political arrangements that reproduce the captivity inherited from slavery.
The political response to this system of domination that pours extreme violence on our bodies cannot be formulated with the French state. It should be remembered that the promise of departmentalization has not been kept and will never be kept. The question of status nevertheless takes an important place at a time of imperialist reconfigurations. And the colonial state itself recognizes that it cannot continue to administer its colonies in this way and has begun a reconfiguration of its hold for several years. The Fort-de-France Appeal of 2022 and, in particular, the recent Bougival Agreements acknowledge the colonial state’s desire to outsource the governance of colonized territories to the colonized under the pretext of being “as close as possible to the territories”. In this context, the local bourgeoisies of the French colonies, whether in Reunion Island (embodied by figures such as Huguette Bello or Ericka Bareigts), in Martinique or in French Guiana, demanded a statutory evolution towards more autonomy. But this demand is not driven by a desire for the emancipation of peoples: it reflects above all a thirst for power and the awareness of an institutional straitjacket that curbs their political ascent. This demand for autonomy, although it is part of a dynamic of apparent rupture, remains locked in the colonial framework and reproduces logics of domination. In this respect, the petty bourgeoisie in the department, despite the absence of independence, is reminiscent of the petty bourgeoisie who betrayed their people and allowed the neo-colonization of African countries.
The political response of the colonies could therefore not be thought of with the colonial state by asking for “more state”. The urgent need is to emancipate ourselves from it, to break with the colonial pact, to refuse the institutional illusions that only rearrange the chains.
The emancipation of French colonies cannot be conceived without a process of reparations for Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora. Reparations are not a moral or symbolic supplement: they constitute the basis of true decolonization. Liberal attempts to dilute reparations under a veneer of memory are not to be taken seriously: reparations will be material or they will not be. Putting one more chapter on colonization in middle school history textbooks, replacing the name of a negrophobic genocidal of a street with a maroon warrior do not repair centuries of dispossession, capture, stalking and killing of our colonized bodies. In this sense, we are part of the struggles started by our ancestors who fought for their dignity.
Repairing land dispossession: the land issue is central. In many territories, the descendants of slavers and settlers still own the majority of fertile land, thus consolidating a relationship of economic domination inherited directly from the slave mode of production. Reparations necessarily involve ambitious land and agrarian reforms: expropriation of land owned by the bourgeoisie and colonists, recognition of commons, support for small-scale farming and food sovereignty. It is not just a question of redistributing plots of land, but of restoring a fair relationship between peoples and their territories.
Repairing bodies: centuries of capitalist exploitation and colonial violence have left tangible traces on the health of colonized populations: chronic diseases linked to imposed diet, exposure to pollutants (such as chlordecone in Martinique and Guadeloupe, or glyphosate in Reunion Island), psychological vulnerabilities from racial domination. Reparations must allow the exploration of a new relationship with the land which is the challenge of a properly decolonial ecology: rehabilitation of ancestral non-market and non-extractivist practices, renewing a spiritual link with the land, cutting down the monoculture of sugar cane heir to the slave mode of production, etc.
Repairing transgenerational trauma: slavery, indentured labour and colonization have produced deep psychological wounds, passed down from generation to generation. These traumas cannot be resolved by a simple official apology. They call for a policy of active recognition, the integration of this memory into teaching, culturally situated care systems, and investment in forms of community health that take into account colonial violence as a structuring fact.
All these measures in favour of reparation necessarily imply the independence of the French colonies from France. These reparations, which cannot be a favor conceded by the colonial state, are part of the black radical tradition: a tradition of struggle that has always linked the history of slavery, colonization, and capitalism to the need for revolutionary justice. Obtaining full reparation depends on the level of our organization, our unity and our level of consciousness of the subject to overturn the balance of power between imperialism and the peoples under its domination.
Beyond a struggle for sovereignty, independence is a question of survival that the peoples of Africa and the Global South face at the crossroads of climate disasters and imperialist wars.
An dalonaz,
Ravinèr