The hillsides surrounding the harbor 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 last weekend, a few residents sat on the sidewalk in a downpour on Thursday, 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 the 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.
More than a century and a half after France colonized 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 in Mayotte is nearly 80 percent, five times higher than on the mainland, according to official statistics. The unemployment rate is nearly 40 percent, compared with about 7 percent for the rest of France. About 30 percent 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 government has failed to keep up with a rapidly growing population and provide necessary services. Others suggest that the government has largely overlooked the island, which sits some 5,000 miles away from mainland France and a 12-hour flight from Paris.
In the aftermath of the cyclone, Mr. Macron has vowed to support the devastated population.
At the airport and then at the hospital on Thursday, Mr. 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 gas stations — and worries of a terrible toll.
Mr. Macron, who wore a white shirt and a traditional local scarf, was also taken on a helicopter flyover of the devastation. He repeatedly promised that relief was arriving and said that a field hospital would be operational on Friday.
For some people living in Mayotte, all the attention and talk of camaraderie coming from mainland France — and Mr. Macron’s visit — ring hollow after what they see as decades of discrimination and being cast aside like neglected stepchildren.
“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, referring to Mr. Macron’s visit. “What we need is for him to act and to do something,” she added. “Over the last few months he’s sent many ministers to visit Mayotte and nothing ever changes.”
Mr. 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,” Mr. Macron said, referring to the recent reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. “It would be a tragedy if we were unable to rebuild Mayotte.”
Even though Mayotte is a part of France, its inhabitants do not enjoy all the same benefits as mainland residents, and they are subject to some different laws.
In Mayotte, families are not entitled to certain grants for child birth and education that are accessible almost everywhere else in France.
Mayotte is one of only two French departments, the basic administrative units within regions, 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.
The shantytowns that have been the focus of the local government’s demolition efforts have taken the hardest hit from the storm, with many wiped away. Many residents of the shantytowns are believed to be undocumented migrants.
In Passamanty, a shantytown that covered a hill, not a single tree remained intact. The only remnants of the homes that once stood there are a few wooden poles poking up from the ground; the tin sheets that formed the roofs and walls of shacks are lying on meter-high piles of rubble.
Because of a lack of classroom space in Mayotte, some children go to school either for a morning or an afternoon session, not the entire day, according to UNICEF.
There is a growing sense in Mayotte and other French territories “that they are not treated as the rest of the French population,” said Lucile Grosjean, the director of advocacy for the United Nations Children’s Fund in France. “That’s definitely something that the authorities have to deal with to build trust and to ensure that all French citizens have the same level of services.”
The disparities that Mayotte faces are in some ways a legacy of the French colonial era.
Colonized 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.
Mayotte belongs to an archipelago that held a referendum on becoming independent from France in the mid-1970s. Thanks in part to pro-French female activists who used what is known as tickle torture as a way to scare off pro-independence politicians, Mayotte was the only territory in the island chain that voted to remain a part of France. 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, said Ms. Moilimo, the teacher in Mamoudzou.
“It’s like the people of Mayotte have the syndrome of the colonized,” she said. “They’re so happy to be considered French that they’ll settle for anything you give them.”
For all of Mayotte’s problems, French support has helped it to fare better economically than Comoros. Tens of thousands of migrants from Comoros have sought refuge and economic opportunities in Mayotte, where about a third of the population is undocumented, officials say. This has fueled major tensions and even violence in Mayotte, and made the island a focal point for France’s broader debates around immigration.
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.
Mr. Sam-Vah said that his organization had received reports as late as Saturday morning of people attending mosque, after the highest-level warning for the fast-moving storm already had been issued, and just hours before it made landfall.
Bruno Retailleau, France’s departing interior minister, said on Monday that some undocumented residents had not gone to officially designated shelters in time. That has raised questions about whether fears of arrest or deportation hampered the territory’s preparedness efforts.
The center plans to deploy as many as 50 people to Mayotte to help with a response that Mr. Sam-Vah expects to last at least 12 months. The center has already sent 10,000 tarpaulins to help make temporary accommodations. It is also dispatching essentials like solar lamps, buckets and soap to aid the roughly 100,000 people enduring difficult conditions in emergency shelters, he said.
In the Piroi Center’s 25 years in operation, Mr. Sam-Vah said, “This one is probably one of the most complex situations we have faced.”
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