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For Mali Villagers, France Is a Workplace and Lifeline
SOMANKIDI, Mali - This remote village in northwestern Mali does not have the art museums, cafes and trendy shopping of Paris. But it does have a half-dozen public wells, a health clinic and birthing clinic, stately mosques and scores of concrete houses with electricity.
"You see the condition of this village today?" Hamed Diabira asked proudly. "This is all due to our children living in France."
Somankidi and villages like it in Mali's Kaye region send their young to Paris in a tradition that goes back nearly six decades, to when Mali was a French colony and Malians were welcomed in France as laborers.
The long ties between France and its former colonies in Africa are shakier these days, and the mood here is fraught after several fires in crowded Paris apartment buildings and hotels in the last few months killed nearly 50 African immigrants. A majority of the dead were children, and many had come from Mali.
After the fires, the French authorities began evicting Africans from substandard housing units, a move that did not sit well in Somankidi.
"We can't prove it, but everyone here knows the fires were criminal acts," Fodie Tounkara, a village elder, said in early September. "They are putting pressure on us to leave."
In this country of nearly 12.3 million people where more than 70 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, many Somankidi residents are better off than the norm. Every extended family, elders say, has at least one relative sending earnings home from France.
Those remittances, estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, exceed the total amount that the French government gives Mali in aid, Malian officials say. More than 120,000 Malians are estimated to be in France, most of them illegally.
When President Jacques Chirac visited Mali in 2003, it was no surprise that Malians lining the road for a peek at his motorcade cried, "Visa! Visa!" And it was also no surprise that Mr. Chirac's call during the visit for a crackdown on illegal immigration to France was not joined by his Malian counterpart, President Amadou Toumani Touré.
In France, illegal immigrants are widely seen as taking the jobs of French citizens and adding to the crime rate. In Mali, there is a distinctly different view. "Our countrymen contribute decisively to the development of their country," Mr. Touré said during Mr. Chirac's visit.
Somankidi's elders say that contribution is not appreciated and reciprocated in France. They say they may soon call for an end to immigration there and urge the 600 or so villagers already in France to return home. The elders cite mistreatment their people have faced in France, including police harassment and the constant threat of deportation. Already, immigration to other countries, like Spain and Britain, from Somankidi has begun.
Before the first wave of immigration in the early 1950's, villagers say, Somankidi was agricultural, and people lived and died based on the vagaries of the rains. The French government and, after independence in 1960, the Malian government gave Somankidi little support. Before the improvements financed by the migrants, villagers lived in mud houses and used kerosene lamps, residents said. They had no schools and no hospital.
Relatively few in Somankidi get French visas. Most migrants head off by foot to the north, then riding on trucks and buses when they can, go through Mauritania or Algeria to Morocco, across the Mediterranean Sea to Spain and then France.
At least three people from Somankidi have died in recent years on the journey. Warzanka Drame lost her 30-year-old son, Sambala Kebe, in April. "I don't know exactly how he died," she said. He left three daughters and a year-old son, who survive on money sent home by Mr. Kebe's brothers in France.
Somankidi's migration is organized. Village leaders collect money so the most promising young people, mostly men, can go and send their earnings home. In Paris, they are expected to join a village association that helps keep people from Somankidi together there.
Divided families are the norm in Somankidi. "He left right after our wedding," Assa Cisse said of her husband, Checkna Tounkara, who headed for France four years ago.
News of the fires in Paris hit close to home here and across Mali.
"I immediately thought of my relatives in Paris," said Macki Tall, a restaurateur in Bamako who has spent time in Paris.
Habib Sissoko, the president of Mali's Olympic committee who frequently travels to Paris, said he was saddened by the grim conditions in which Malians there live. But he said he understood their wanderlust. "Those who go abroad are the brave ones," he said. "They are like the pioneers in America who headed west. We Malians want to meet the unknown."
But the unknown is often disappointing. Fetching water with a bucket. Living packed in tight. No electricity. Such conditions are not uncommon in Mali, but are far from the romanticized notions of Paris the migrants have before they set out.
In early September, Hamara Cisse, 24, spoke of his time as a migrant. His father had been a laborer in France for 20 years. In 2001, after marrying, Mr. Cisse replicated his father's journey. He lived in a crowded guesthouse in Aubervilliers, a rundown immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris.
"Nothing was easy there," said Mr. Cisse, who described sleeping in a room with 12 other men.
Looking for work was complicated by frequent spot checks by the French police, who arrested him three times because he did not have the proper documents, always releasing him a few days later after he claimed to be someone else, he said. After looking for many months, Mr. Cisse found a job with a Chinese building contractor, who paid him 40 euros, almost $50, for a 10-hour day. In January, the police raided his work site and took him to jail. He was later deported to Mali.
"In France, without documents, you're considered less than a human being," Mr. Cisse said. In a moment, though, he said he would return soon.
These Somankidi leaders once worked in France, sending money home to relatives in a tradition that has endured for more than 50 years in Mali.
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Michael Kamber for The New York Times In Somankidi, a farming village, residents waited out a recent storm. |
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