Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [121]
Strangely enough, the young men who burned Aziz’s car see it almost exactly the same way—as an interruption of their family’s rural-to-urban transition. The rioters of 2005 were overwhelmingly the children and grandchildren of villagers. This point is almost always neglected in analyses of the events of that autumn, but it is a dominant element in the rioters’ own understanding of their actions. When I have interviewed rioters in Les Pyramides, Clichy-sous-Bois, and Cité des 4000 in the weeks and years afterward, the transition from village to urban life—and the barriers that prevent them from making that link—are most often mentioned.
After all, the whole thing got started with the deaths of two French children of African villagers—a point absent from most accounts of their demise. The boys who were electrocuted in Clichy-sous-Bois in October 2005, while hiding from the police in an electrical substation, were both immediate products of the great migration. Zyed Benna, 17, was the son of Amor Benna, who had come from an agricultural village in Djerba, Tunisia, in 1966 to work as a sewer cleaner in Paris. And the family of 15-year-old Bouna Traore had come to France in the 1970s from the desert village of Diaguily, in southern Mauritania.
One of the rioters who responded violently to news of the electrocutions, and may have had a hand in Aziz’s tragedy that night, was Mafoud, a skinny 15-year-old, whose tough comportment is undercut by his languid air of geniality. His parents came from a Malian village near Cayes, which has been rendered infertile by the encroaching desert; they work at night, as a laborer and a cleaner, and he rarely sees them. He is a self-described lost soul, spending his days listening to Tupac Shakur in the laneway, smoking marijuana, and bantering with other teenagers—often about their geographic nullity. “We come from a small village in the middle of nowhere, and it’s like we can’t get out of the village here—my whole family, 10 of us is living in two rooms, and my mother and father can’t make a living like they did in the village, and I can’t make a living like a French man should,” he says. “That’s our problem—we’re not African and we’re not European.” The burning of cars, symbols of mobility and success, has become a poignant gesture for guys like Mafoud.
A few buildings over, often hanging out in the plaza, is Moussa Sambakesse, a muscular 19-year-old, who says he has cut his ties with the street scene and is preparing to leave France for London, where he’s been able to use his trade-school degree to land a job in a big hotel—the sort of entry-level job that youth in the French banlieues simply can’t get in France. According to Brice Mankou, a sociologist who spent time with the rioters of Les Pyramides in 2005, about half of them are dropouts like Mafoud who have left school and relegated themselves to the gray-market underworld, and half are guys like Moussa, with good educations and real skills, but a great frustration about their ability to thrive as Frenchmen.10
Shortly before the riots, Moussa’s mother, Alima Sambakesse, took him and his three brothers to visit her village, a tiny place called Marena, in Mali. She had hoped that the boys would feel attached, as she still believes she will move back there someday, when she has been able to earn enough to buy her family a bigger house. Moussa walked around the perimeter of the village, which took just more than an hour. He was introduced to a great number of relatives, most of whom lived in mud huts, but he could find little to say to them. He visited a classroom but didn’t understand the language and found the customs disquieting. “These are