In Mayotte, “deaths that don’t count”: interview with Rémi Carayol
Independent journalist and founder of the site Afrique XXI, Rémi Carayol worked for a long time in Mayotte and recently published the book “Mayotte: département colonie” (La Fabrique, 2024) (La Fabrique, 2024). He has just returned from the French island in the Comoros archipelago, where he witnessed the damage caused by Cyclone Chido. In this interview, he describes the consequences of this natural disaster and the state’s security-focused response, aimed at further restricting the rights of residents in an irregular situation.
INDEX : You have just returned from Mayotte, which was struck by cyclone Chido on 14 December 2024. How would you describe the situation there?
Rémi Carayol: When I arrived on the island on 7 January 2025, all the shanty towns had already been rebuilt. Their appearance was similar to the one I remembered, with a little more colour perhaps, because the inhabitants had recovered new sheet metal and other makeshift materials to rebuild their homes. What struck me most was the state of the vegetation, because a lot of trees had fallen and those that were still standing were completely bare. It’s frightening, it’s like the end of the world. Obviously there is a human tragedy linked to the cyclone, but the environmental tragedy is also very significant, including for humans in the long term. It’s important to remember that there are a lot of people over there who live off the land, whose diet is based upon bananas, breadfruit and mangoes – but there’s nothing left now. This is an explosive situation in the medium term, because a large part of the population might not have enough to eat. As for human life, it has simply resumed. When you talk to people who have lived through the disaster, many of them say “I thought I was going to die”. You can feel that the trauma is significant. Despite everything, life has resumed. People have gone back to work, shops have reopened and, little by little, even nightlife and sporting activities have started to pick up again.
INDEX: We still don’t know the official death toll from the cyclone. Have you been able to get an estimate of these figures?
RC: There is an estimate, but we know it’s not accurate. The official toll is 40 dead, around forty missing and more than 5000 injured. It’s impossible to check the figure for the injured, but it seems to be about right. On the other hand, almost everyone agrees that the death toll is underestimated. We’re probably a long way from the thousands of deaths mentioned by the prefect in the aftermath of the cyclone. By investigating on the ground, by talking to people who have themselves tried to find out, in particular gendarmes and police officers, we can estimate that the range could be between 100 and 200 deaths.
Personally, I’d put the figure closer to 100, because I’ve been to the worst affected areas, the shanty towns, which have been razed to the ground. In each shanty town, we’re talking about a maximum of 2 or 3 deaths, no more. These are not places where the dead are hidden away, contrary to what some people would have us believe. When someone dies, people talk about it, they will say “yes, I know such and such a person” and then introduce me to the family. There’s no such taboo. So the number of deaths is probably not that high. The big question, though, is why is the government sticking to this figure of 39 dead, when we’re pretty sure there were more? And above all, why is the government refusing to be transparent about the number of deaths? A number of us have asked for answers, including a senator, Saïd Omar Oili. The state refuses to give the names of the dead it has counted, refuses to shed light on the circumstances of the deaths, refuses to say where these deaths occurred. This is very surprising. When a disaster like this occurs, this kind of information is usually made public. On the contrary, here there is total opacity, as if they wanted to put a lid of silence over these missing people. My hypothesis is that the government’s refusal to communicate the cyclone’s death toll is due to the fact that most of the dead were inhabitants of the slums. Many of them were illegal immigrants, people who, as far as the government was concerned, didn’t exist anyway. And their only vocation was to be sent back to the Comoro.
It is entirely plausible that the state itself is not certain of the identity of the officially recorded 39 deaths. In the heat of the moment, in the midst of the disaster, it is possible that a detailed census of the victims was not carried out. The state may therefore be embarrassed because it does not have complete control over this information. But in my opinion, there is also something else.
In my book on Mayotte, I refer to “the factory of the living dead”, a concept I took from the researcher Nina Sahraoui, who herself borrowed it from the philosopher Achille Mbembe. It’s a concept that describes the treatment of people living in a territory who could be said to be turned into zombies, into ghosts, by a state that denies their existence and, by doing so, condemns them to an almost certain death. This has been the situation in Mayotte for a long time, with a border [between the Comoro Islands and Mayotte, ed.] that was imposed, with increased surveillance of the sea crossing between the islands that makes it deadly for some, with the criminalization of people imposed by successive laws that push them into illegality. We are dealing with a policy that has been producing living dead for years. It happens that these living dead were the main victims of Cyclone Chido. My analysis is that these people simply did not exist for the French state. Therefore, these are deaths that don’t count.
INDEX: Regarding the state’s treatment of the inhabitants of the slums in Mayotte and those in an irregular situation, you refer to the concept of necropower developed by Achille Mbembe, a mode of exercising power based on administering the conditions of death for a portion of the population. Why did these people become the first victims of the cyclone?
RC: Because they were the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. In fact, very few permanent houses collapsed. Many lost their roofs, so they were flooded, but almost none collapsed. On the other hand, all the shanty towns were literally razed to the ground: blown by winds of such intensity, the makeshift dwellings that were concentrated there collapsed. These are the areas that were literally devastated. And that’s where the greatest number of victims are to be found, because quite simply, these houses collapsed on their inhabitants. Paradoxically, however, these informal structures have managed to limit the damage. According to INSEE, these slums are home to around 100,000 people. If we estimate that there were 100 deaths out of 100,000 people, that means that there were relatively few deaths, considering that these areas were razed to the ground. It may be that the estimate of several thousand deaths issued by the prefect in the aftermath of the cyclone was linked to the general state of these neighbourhoods after the cyclone, where everything seemed to have been destroyed. But in fact, sheet metal doesn’t kill, or very rarely does. That’s why there were so many people injured, some of them seriously, but relatively few deaths.
Having said that, the existence of these shanty towns where around 100,000 people live is a direct consequence of the policy that I describe as a “factory of the living dead.” In these very precarious living conditions, the inhabitants are overexposed to a whole range of risks, including the risk of climatic disasters, which are to be expected on a tropical island like Mayotte.
INDEX: What you say echoes the concerns raised by many environmental movements—that now, adaptation policies to climate change take precedence over policies aimed at limiting climate change itself. As a result, the political issue shifts to determining who will bear the consequences of a change increasingly accepted as inevitable. Regarding the cyclone in Mayotte, on one hand, we see how the island’s poorest residents paid a heavy price. On the other hand, the point you highlight about the relative protection provided by corrugated metal homes is interesting, especially when considering the ongoing shift toward a logic of adapting to climate change.
RC: Daniel Gros, who is the liaison officer for the Ligue des droits de l’homme in Mayotte, has written in a blog post on Mediapart that, in the end, it was the slum dwellings that were rebuilt the fastest. It’s very paradoxical: although they are highly exposed to the damage a cyclone can cause, they are, in a way, better adapted to the constant risk of cyclones than the solid houses, which could also collapse on their inhabitants. Today in Mayotte, the slums have been almost completely rebuilt, while the solid houses that lost their roofs still have tarps covering them. In the slums, the corrugated metal houses are called “bangas”. Originally, bangas were traditional constructions made from plants. These houses couldn’t withstand cyclones but were very easy to rebuild afterward. They were, in a way, adapted to the reality that every rainy season brings one or two storms with strong winds. They come from a logic of local and traditional adaptation, and the corrugated metal houses can be seen as modern versions of the plant-based houses. Of course, it must be remembered that they endanger the people living in them because they are built on very steep slopes, have no solid foundations, and are unsanitary… Nonetheless, in the event of a natural disaster, these are what get rebuilt the quickest. Within 3-4 days, people had already partially rebuilt their homes. Ideally, there would be houses built to seismic and cyclone standards. But that would mean demolishing almost all the houses in Mayotte to rebuild new ones, because nothing has been done to adapt to these risks, and even less so for a population considered undesirable.
INDEX: In its determination to prevent the reconstruction of the slum towns, the prefecture has gone so far as to restrict the sale of sheet metal to certain categories of the island’s population. How did the authorities react to such rapid reconstruction?
RC: In these slums, emergency aid didn’t arrive until a week after the cyclone. No government representatives went to these neighborhoods for seven days. But after one week, these neighborhoods were already rebuilt. In fact, the state was powerless in the face of this. When Prime Minister François Bayrou arrived in Mayotte two weeks after the cyclone passed, he declared that rebuilding slums would be banned. But when he gave that statement, the slums had already been largely rebuilt. Then there was a prefectural order aiming to ban the sale of corrugated metal sheets to people without papers. It’s a discriminatory measure. One could easily extrapolate and imagine that one day, selling food to undocumented people might be banned. This measure also had no effect. In reality, those who rebuilt their homes in the slums didn’t have money to buy metal sheets anyway. They did so by salvaging what they could find.
INDEX : Do you think the Prefecture’s order restricting the sale of sheet metal is representative of the way the State treats illegal immigrants in Mayotte?
RC: This is more than representative. It’s yet another expression of the idea that these people must be prevented by all means from living in Mayotte—an idea supported by the state and some local elected officials. It reflects an official desire for these undocumented people to disappear from Mayotte, to be driven out. The same mindset governed Operation Wuambushu [a large-scale police operation launched in 2023 by then Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin aimed at expelling undocumented foreigners and destroying slums, ed.]. We are witnessing a reckless escalation of this mindset. After Cyclone Chido, some local officials proposed abolishing birthright citizenship altogether. Such a proposal would have been shocking not so long ago, but it was approved on February 6 by the Assemblée Nationale. Other officials proposed ending schooling for children of undocumented people and ending free access to certain public services. This goes very far: birthright citizenship and schooling for all are foundational to French society—they are part of the Republic’s core principles. To get rid of these people, these officials are willing to attack those foundations. What makes this even more tragic is that the people targeted by these mass expulsion campaigns are labeled as “migrants” or “foreigners,” whereas very often they are people who have lived their entire lives in Mayotte. They were born in Mayotte or arrived there very young, and they were educated in Mayotte. So, the plan is to expel people who have always lived here, simply because their parents were undocumented.
INDEX : Let’s take a closer look at the notion of “undocumented“. In the case of Mayotte, how is it defined?
RC: It is an irregular situation according to French law, but this can be questioned since, according to international law, Mayotte is Comoro territory. The problem is that French law regarding Mayotte keeps changing. Immigrants’ rights there are under a completely exceptional frame of law—a much weakened version compared to what is applied elsewhere in the country. Not only is the law very harsh on “foreign” people, but the prefecture itself does not respect it. On top of all that, there are citizen groups doing everything they can to prevent people from regularizing their status. I wrote an article in Mediapart explaining that since October, before the cyclone, a citizens’ collective had been blocking the prefecture’s immigration office. This meant that all people wanting to regularize their status—those who had residence permits for 5, 6, or 7 years—were prevented from doing so and consequently fell into illegality since they no longer had valid permits. Thus, people who, even with a weakened legal framework, could claim residence permits or even citizenship, were blocked by collective actions carried out outside any legal framework, with the complicity of the prefecture—which did nothing to remove these collectives in front of its own offices.
More generally, the very notion of “foreigner” is problematic in Mayotte. Those labeled as foreigners are Comorians from other islands who live exactly like the Mahorais [inhabitants of Mayotte, ed.], speak the same language, pray the same way, and share the same social markers. When they arrive in a village, they are not foreigners as such. They are much less foreign than the metropolitan French who come there, who don’t speak the language and know nothing about that society.
INDEX: The use of the concept of “foreigner” allows the State to mobilise considerable resources to expel thousands of people a year from Mayotte. How does this deportation machine work?
RC: Every year in Mayotte, about 25,000 people are expelled to the other Comorian islands. To put this into perspective, that’s 25,000 people out of a population of 320,000—almost 10% of the population expelled each year. That’s 70 expulsions per day, every day of the year. It’s absolutely enormous. For comparison, in mainland France in 2024, there were 21,000 people deported at the border. Among those 21,000, about half were assisted returns—voluntary departures. That means just over 10,000 people were actually forcibly expelled. In Mayotte, there are 2.7 times more expulsions than in the entirety of mainland France. This doesn’t happen anywhere else in French territory, including other overseas territories. I even wonder, on a global scale, if there are equivalent figures—I’m not sure there are. It’s a real expulsion industry. Every day, you see trucks and police officers checking people, putting them into trucks, and sending them to detention centers. This happens very quickly, because according to the NGO La Cimade, the average time between when a person is arrested and when they are put on a boat and expelled is 7 to 8 hours. That’s extremely short. In France, an expulsion procedure takes several days because the people targeted have the right to a period to defend their rights and appeal. In Mayotte, that’s not the case. People have very few opportunities to appeal or assert their rights: they are arrested and then expelled. That’s it. This is what explains these completely absurd figures.
INDEX: What impact has Cyclone Chido had on these deportations?
RC: The wheels have completely come off. For some time, there were no expulsions, because everyone in Mayotte was affected. Gendarmes and police officers also lost their homes. The forces of law and order were then mobilised to clear the roads and carry out other law enforcement operations. Expulsions began to resume at the end of December, but on a much more limited scale than before. Border police and navy radars and boats were also damaged by the cyclone. With the entire surveillance infrastructure damaged, there are fewer resources available to stop illegal boats arriving on Mayotte.
INDEX: The current Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, has taken advantage of the debate surrounding the restriction of birthright citizenship in Mayotte to propose opening “a public debate on jus soli in our country”. As is often the case in history, colonial and post-colonial territories are used as laboratories for experimenting with policies that, once tested in these territories, are then imported into metropolitan France. In your opinion, is Mayotte being used as a laboratory for xenophobic policies of border closures and mass expulsions?
RC: About twenty years ago, Gisti, an NGO that assists foreigners in France, titled an issue of Plein Droit, its journal, “the Overseas Laboratory,” precisely regarding the dismantling of foreigners’ rights in France. Mayotte was the emblem of this laboratory, but it’s not the only one. French Guiana is another laboratory. That was twenty years ago, and already it was clear that some overseas territories were seen by the right and far-right as places to test legislation and ideas, to see if they would be accepted by French society. Twenty years ago, few could imagine that we would start questioning whether birthright citizenship could be ended. Well, today, here we are. The far-right has always wanted to end birthright citizenship, but for ministers to openly champion this idea is very recent. And it’s not just Darmanin: almost all members of the Bayrou government have expressed themselves in this way. The law recently passed, supposedly to tighten birthright citizenship in Mayotte, in reality completely dismantles it. We can now say that birthright citizenship no longer exists in Mayotte. Behind the argument of the “overseas laboratory” or “Mahoran specificity,” which requires special measures, there are national considerations: namely, to see if these measures could also be applied to the rest of French territory.
INDEX : Why is the state’s response to the damage caused by Cyclone Chido tied to an escalation of racist and security-focused measures?
RC: For two reasons. First, for years in Mayotte’s public discourse, foreigners have been blamed for all the island’s problems, especially by political leaders. Whenever there’s an issue—whether it’s insecurity, water shortages, or lack of school places—it’s always the foreigners’ fault. The responsibility of local elected officials or the state is never questioned. The second point is that in mainland France, there is also a rapid political drift toward the far right, where the blame for any problem is pinned on foreigners. So, in the face of a humanitarian disaster of this scale, when one might expect solidarity, the opposite happens—because these two local and national trends come together and reinforce each other. The result is a terrible situation. Solidarity did exist for a few days, that’s true—human lives were at stake, and we saw some mutual aid. But very quickly, the previous logic returned: the stigmatization of foreigners, with even greater violence.