FRANCE: Diaspora Trade Strengthens Communities

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Michael Deibert

PARIS, Jun 29 2007 (IPS) - In the northern Paris neighbourhood of Chateau Rouge, a casual visitor could be forgiven for a moment for feeling that one had gotten off the city’s storied metro and ended up in Dakar or Abidjan.

Here, percolating soukous tunes from the Congo pump out of storefronts such as that of Rythmes & Musiques while women attired in weaved damask robes and men in West Africa’s traditionally colourful dashiki vest go about their business in one of the city’s most vibrant open-air markets.

But, say observers, “foreign” as they may seem to some French, it is also as much the face of modern France as any of the postcard images of the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe that tourists usually associate with the country.

France, which once controlled vast swaths of West and Central Africa as part of a colonial empire, and still wields considerable influence in the region, has in recent years been confronted with a vivid re-imagining of itself and concepts of what it means to be French as immigrants from that region make the journey north to find a home here.

There are currently approximately 4.5 million legal immigrants living in France, with up to an additional half million undocumented migrants. An estimated two million immigrants in the country are from north or sub-Saharan Africa.

The increased immigration from Africa to European countries such as France should not be surprising, some observers say, noting both the contraction of such traditional African industries as agriculture, and what many see as biased trade deals with more powerful countries in Europe and North America.

When Africans come to France, they bring many of their tastes with them. The tuna industry in France, for example, is almost entirely drawn from Africa: particularly the Côte d’Ivoire, which provides France with some 35 percent of its overall canned tuna imports.

France also yearly imports an estimated 229,375 metric tonnes of cassava, a root vegetable common to many kinds of African cooking, much of which is imported from Togo and Madagascar.

The Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), France’s leading body for statistics and economics studies, found in a report published in August 2006 that immigration from the region is on the rise.

By mid-2004, the country had a population of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa numbering some 570,000, a 45 percent increase from the numbers found in a similar study in 1999, according to INSEE.

And along with this increase in immigration, the demand for the comforts from home like food, music and hair products will continue to increase.

The population from sub-Saharan Africa is also one of the youngest, the study finds, as a mere 4 percent of those arriving from that region are older than 65 years of age. That’s compared to 54 percent of those over 65 immigrating to France from Italy, for example.

And it is in neighbourhoods such as Chateau Rouge where many West African immigrants, if not necessarily making their homes here, at least come together for a sense of community in what can sometimes feel like a forbidding, unknown place. Ever-steeper Paris rents have pushed more and more new arrivals out to suburbs beyond the Paris outskirts.

“We have not found things very easy,” says Victor Osouno, a 36-year-old barber from Ghana who has been living and working in France for the past 11 years. As he speaks he is skillfully running an electric buzzer over the head of a customer, and his large hair salon is populated by men and women waiting to get their hair done.

Indeed, at nearby shops such as the Maison d’Afrique, which do a brisk business selling customers such traditional African delicacies as eggplants, yams and cassava, the tastes of home seem to hold a strong attraction.

“This is classic migration, there is a concentration of the population in areas where people from the same country already are,” says Jean-Pierre Garson, head of the Non-Member Economies and International Migration Division of the Paris branch of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a grouping of 30 rich nations. “When you arrive you try to connect with people you know who have come before.”

The OECD itself, in its recent Economic Survey of France 2000 said that “the geographic concentration of poverty fosters its persistence, as people living in overwhelmingly poor areas lack access to social networks that might help them to integrate into the economy. The problems in question are made more complex by the fact that people of immigrant origin are over-represented in these areas.”

“The community sticks together,” Osouno says. “Someone goes to an African barber to get their haircut, goes to the food shops that have African food, not out of some kind of racism, but because the things they want they can easily find among the community.”