For weeks, the French Caribbean island of Martinique has been the positioning of at-times violent protests over excessive residing prices and worsening financial circumstances. And Martinique isn’t alone; within the neighboring French island of Guadeloupe, hanging employees 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 typically centered narrowly on the rapid 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 larger costs for items than residents on mainland France, together with 40% extra for meals and 13% extra for well being care.
On the similar 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 newest wave of protests, with one other scheduled for Nov. 1.
However present financial difficulties mirror solely the newest illustration of Martinican and Guadeloupean anger over what they really feel is an inequitable relationship to mainland France. Related protests occurred in 2009 and 2021.
Whereas the vast majority 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 residing are hardly distinctive to the French abroad territories – referred to as “départements” in French. However a protracted 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 centered on independence and illustration for the indigenous Kanak folks.
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 international locations, France developed plantation economies via the enslavement and transplantation of Africans. In abroad territories, enslaved folks 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, often called “békés,” turned the dominant pressure of a deeply inegalitarian society.
Regardless of France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, these wealth and energy gaps persevered for generations, with a lot of Martinique’s property and enterprise pursuits as we speak nonetheless concentrated in a couple of palms – lots of them related to the unique béké households. For instance, one among France’s wealthiest family-owned companies Groupe Bernard Hayot dominates the native market in a variety of sectors, together with agriculture, cars and retail.
From colonialism to claims of neocolonialism
Folks 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 residing 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 folks 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 residing, in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island on Oct. 19, 2024.
PHILIPPE LOPEZ / Contributor
In the present day, Martinique and Guadeloupe, with populations of round 342,000 and 375,000, respectively, stay basically depending on France via 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 better prices than in the event that they got here via regional commerce with Caribbean or Latin American international locations.
Furthermore, as a result of transformation of the islands into monocrop plantations in the course of the colonial period, it’s tough for native farmers to provide 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, identified in america as Kepone, was extensively used throughout the globe. Whereas banned within the U.S. within the Seventies, the pesticide was not formally banned in France till 1990, with an exemption permitted for its use on Martinique and Guadeloupe via 1993. From the Seventies to 1993, chlordecone had a very excessive utilization charge within the banana plantations of the French Caribbean.
Attributable to runoff into water sources, roughly 90% of the inhabitants of the 2 islands take a look at constructive for chlordecone of their blood. Charges of prostate most cancers, that are linked to the carcinogenic pesticide, are the very best on this planet, in response to one examine.
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 state of affairs 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 government council president Serge Letchimy’s try and combine with the Group of Japanese Caribbean States. This transfer towards a extra self-sufficient and regional financial mannequin goals to supply better autonomy from France and, in so doing, assist reduce the wealth hole.
Echoing this attitude, Martinican sociologist Malcom Ferdinand noticed in 2022 that the continuing 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 non-public sector entities concerned in retail in Martinique, aiming to chop the worth of widespread items by 20%.
Whereas many French Caribbean residents will doubtless view this as a transfer in the proper path, I imagine it’s unlikely to mollify native want for a extra equitable future. Channeling the views of lots of his fellow abroad French residents, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau lately argued for better social and environmental reforms to maneuver past the cycle of dependency with Europe.
With out such reform, the French Caribbean, as Chamoiseau writes, will probably 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.”