For weeks, the French Caribbean island of Martinique has been the positioning of at-times violent protests over excessive dwelling prices and worsening financial situations. And Martinique isn’t alone; within the neighboring French island of Guadeloupe, putting staff stormed the management room of an influence station on Oct. 26, 2024, inflicting a blackout that led to a government-imposed curfew.
Media protection of the unrest has usually targeted narrowly on the instant financial causes. However there’s a for much longer backstory to the protests, one which takes under consideration social and political inequality and the lasting legacy of colonialism within the French Caribbean.
Martinicans, who’re French residents, pay considerably increased costs for items than residents on mainland France, together with 40% extra for meals and 13% extra for well being care.
On the identical time, Martinicans earn considerably much less. About 30% of the island inhabitants falls under the poverty line, roughly twice the speed of European France.
With family budgets already tight, the impression of inflation triggered the most recent wave of protests, with one other scheduled for Nov. 1.
However present financial difficulties replicate solely the most recent illustration of Martinican and Guadeloupean anger over what they really feel is an inequitable relationship to mainland France. Comparable protests occurred in 2009 and 2021.
Whereas nearly all of demonstrations have been peaceable, this resentment has boiled over in current weeks into violence and vandalism.
Inequality’s colonial roots
The pressures of inflation and the next value of dwelling are hardly distinctive to the French abroad territories – referred to as “départements” in French. However an extended historical past of French colonialism complicates the difficulty for locations like Martinique and Guadeloupe within the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles, and equally in New Caledonia within the Southwest Pacific, one other website of current protests that targeted on independence and illustration for the indigenous Kanak individuals.
Direct French colonial rule over Martinique and Guadeloupe started within the seventeenth century and structured the native social system and financial system to primarily profit French financial pursuits. Like many Western European nations, France developed plantation economies by way of the enslavement and transplantation of Africans. In abroad territories, enslaved individuals had been exploited to extract commodities – first sugar, and later bananas and rum.
Early French settlers created a minority white ruling class in these colonies. And their descendants, referred to as “békés,” turned the dominant power of a deeply inegalitarian society.
Regardless of France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, these wealth and energy gaps continued for generations, with a lot of Martinique’s property and enterprise pursuits right this moment nonetheless concentrated in a number of fingers – a lot of them linked to the unique béké households. For instance, considered one of France’s wealthiest family-owned companies Groupe Bernard Hayot dominates the native market in a variety of sectors, together with agriculture, vehicles and retail.
From colonialism to claims of neocolonialism
Individuals in Martinique and Guadeloupe are extremely conscious of their colonial previous, and it informs a lot of their current resistance to the excessive value of dwelling on the islands. Martinicans and Guadeloupeans have confronted ongoing social, financial and environmental disparities with their abroad compatriots. That is regardless of the islands transitioning from colonies to départements in 1946, a transfer that gave the individuals of Martinique and Guadeloupe French citizenship and the identical rights as these in mainland France.
A protesters walks by an indication studying ‘Martinique for Martinicans’ at a rally to fight the excessive value of dwelling, in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island on Oct. 19, 2024.
PHILIPPE LOPEZ / Contributor
As we speak, Martinique and Guadeloupe, with populations of round 342,000 and 375,000, respectively, stay essentially depending on France by way of subsidies and imported items, in addition to commerce agreements that promote European imports that makes up greater than 80% of the meals provide. This includes items touring for much longer distances – and thus incurring higher prices than in the event that they got here by way of regional commerce with Caribbean or Latin American nations.
Furthermore, because of the transformation of the islands into monocrop plantations throughout the colonial period, it’s troublesome for native farmers to supply sufficient items for themselves.
The stays of a Carrefour Market set ablaze amid riots over rising costs, in Le Francois, Martinique, on Oct. 17, 2024.
Philippe Lopez/AFP through Getty Photographs
Compounding the difficulties of home manufacturing are recurrent native grievances over the rampant use of pesticides, which has impacted each fishing and agriculture within the French Caribbean, with sure zones now off-limits for fishing.
For a lot of a long time, the pesticide chlordecone, recognized in america as Kepone, was extensively used throughout the globe. Whereas banned within the U.S. within the Nineteen Seventies, the pesticide was not formally banned in France till 1990, with an exemption permitted for its use on Martinique and Guadeloupe by way of 1993. From the Nineteen Seventies to 1993, chlordecone had a very excessive utilization price within the banana plantations of the French Caribbean.
Because of runoff into water sources, roughly 90% of the inhabitants of the 2 islands check optimistic for chlordecone of their blood. Charges of prostate most cancers, that are linked to the carcinogenic pesticide, are the very best on the earth, based on one research.
Consequently, the sentiment for a lot of of those abroad French is that first they had been enslaved, after which they had been poisoned – a scenario that many protesters see as an ongoing instance of neocolonialism.
The decolonial perspective
Given the legacy of colonialism and its penalties on the standard – and equality – of life in French abroad territories, many protesters have embraced a decolonial method. Alongside a rise in discussions round independence, there was a discernible shift within the French Caribbean towards regional collaboration, as seen by Martinique’s govt council president Serge Letchimy’s try to combine with the Group of Japanese Caribbean States. This transfer towards a extra self-sufficient and regional financial mannequin goals to supply higher autonomy from France and, in so doing, assist reduce the wealth hole.
Echoing this attitude, Martinican sociologist Malcom Ferdinand noticed in 2022 that the continued financial struggles within the French Caribbean “are not only linked to the colonial, slave-making, and patriarchal constitution of the modern world … [but] they are, above all else, its consequences.”
A imaginative and prescient of a greater future
As Martinicans and Guadeloupeans proceed to take to the streets, there are indicators that the demonstrations, as they head into their third month, are having an impact.
The French authorities lately established an settlement with personal sector entities concerned in retail in Martinique, aiming to chop the worth of widespread items by 20%.
Whereas many French Caribbean residents will possible view this as a transfer in the correct course, I imagine it’s unlikely to mollify native want for a extra equitable future. Channeling the views of a lot of his fellow abroad French residents, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau lately argued for higher social and environmental reforms to maneuver past the cycle of dependency with Europe.
With out such reform, the French Caribbean, as Chamoiseau writes, can be compelled to keep up the “artificial economy” established by colonialism, and Martinicans will thus proceed to have “no control over food security … or over a future anything other than tragic.”
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