Surging virus in French African outpost reveals inequalities

MAMOUDZOU, Mayotte (AP) — Mayotte’s main tourist office stands nearly empty, a lonely tropical outpost overlooking a people-less port. Its only hospital, however, is overwhelmed.

The demand for intensive care beds is more than triple the supply, as medical workers fight to contain the French Indian Ocean territory’s worst coronavirus outbreak yet.

The Mayotte islands are the poorest corner of the European Union, tucked between Madagascar and the mainland coast of Mozambique in southern Africa. They have been the last spot in France to receive any coronavirus vaccines.

Local authorities feel forgotten and say their difficulties in fighting the virus reflect long-standing inequalities between France’s majority-white mainland and its far-flung multiracial former colonies.

The French army is sending in medical workers and a few ICU beds, but the temporary aid will only go so far on the islands where masks are a luxury, where nearly a third of the region's 300,000 people have no running water and where a new lockdown is suffocating livelihoods.

“We used to work at the big market to sell things, to have money to feed our families,” said Ahamada Soulaimana Soilihi, a 40-year-old father of six living in a shantytown in Mayotte’s capital city of Mamoudzou.

Then last week, authorities shut down Mayotte’s economy, ordering people to stay home to combat fast-growing cases of the virus variant dominant in South Africa.

“How can we live without work, without being able to move, without anything?” Soilihi asked.

While ocean waves lap empty beaches and police patrol the quiet streets of Mamoudzou’s business district, many people in Soilihi's Bandrajou neighborhood seem unaware of lockdown rules or social distancing measures. Clusters of children play barefoot...