ROMAIN PHILIPPON / INLAND FOR “M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE”
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ReportageFor nearly six years, this post has remained vacant at the University of La Réunion. The appointment of a Nantes woman has been contested on the grounds that she is not a native of the island. A cultural war that reveals how thorny the question of identity is in this department.
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Sudel Fuma’s legacy will wait. He was the most popular historian in Reunion, to the point that he is entitled to his statue at Sainte-Suzanne and his jovial Native American-looking face was recently spread on a mural behind the cathedral. of Saint-Denis. He had explored the painful past: slavery, which enslaved thousands of men and women. And the commitment that, after the abolition, provides to the plantations of “employees” under barely less servile contracts from India, China and Africa, the crucible of the island’s population.
The professor at the University of Saint-Denis, who headed a Unesco chair, symbolized Reunion’s access to excellence. The descendant of slaves had worked until he could write its history, he had campaigned to make one “Memory therapy” at the service of Creole identity. But, for six years that he died drowned during a fishing trip at sea, no one has followed him at the University of Saint-Denis.
From “regional preference” to “neocolonialism”
The political leaders and the associative activists who started a storm to refuse that a historian come from metropolis to take her continuation are accommodated in the vacuum. Sad outcome for an interminable soap opera. Or how a quarrel between mandarins was thrown into the pasture of public opinion to oppose “zorèys” (metropolitan) and Creoles, against a background of “regional preference” then “defense of Reunion’s identity” against “neocolonialism”.
However, in 2014, when, the day after his death at 62, Sudel Fuma’s colleagues were considering his replacement, it was medieval history more than that of slavery that they first favored in order to choose a local medievalist. The president of the university prefers a post of lecturer on “Slavery, labor and the economy in the colonies of the south-west of the Indian Ocean in the XVIIIe and in the XIXe centuries ” : “It was necessary position the university on research for which we were essential. On the Middle Ages, what would have been our added value? “, explains Mohamed Rochdi, now scientific and university cooperation attaché at the French embassy in Greece.
His choice should have satisfied the Representative Council of French Overseas (Crefom), a very active lobby on the island, which demanded that the “Job theme”. With one detail: he also wanted the recruit to be “From the territory”. However, the title of the post seems made for Virginie Chaillou-Atrous and her research on the engagement of Indians, but also of East Africans, that she comes out of silence. Only, she comes from the University of Nantes. His candidacy displeases Professors Prosper Eve and Yvan Combeau, one head of the history department, the other of a research center on the Indian Ocean (both refused to answer us).
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