On March 13, 2009, Comorian artist and writer Soeuf Elbadawi collaborated with his theater troupe, O* Mcezo, to stage a performance based on the traditional form of punishment called gungu. During gungu spectacles, individuals accused of a crime or social transgression were paraded through town streets. In this iteration of the gungu la mcezo, Elbadawi played the role of the accused, smearing his body with chalky white paint to transform himself into an embodiment of France. The performance came at a critical juncture in the more than 150-year-long colonial relationship between France and the Comorian archipelago, as just a few weeks later, the island of Mayotte would be poised to vote for departmentalization, further ensconcing itself within the imperial fold.

In choosing the boisterous and confrontational gungu display, Elbadawi and O* Mcezo counterbalanced the elaborately constructed silences and fictions that have justified France’s retention of Mayotte since the 1974 independence referendum. As the architect of this continued relationship, it has deployed a range of strategies, from leveraging its position on the UN Security Council to stymie a referendum on its occupation of Mayotte, to censuring Elbadawi for his 2009 performance. Simmering beneath the surface of this neocolonial veneer are the histories and afterlives of colonial enslavement, extraction, and immobility that France has papered over with contemporary narratives of benevolent paternalism, xenophobia, and (ever-deferred) prosperity.

Before the intensification of European colonial intervention in the Indian Ocean in the 19th century, the Comorian archipelago, which is situated between East Africa and Madagascar, was a pivotal point of connection for both trade and religious networks. It was also an important source and destination for enslaved labor in the centuries-long Indian Ocean slave trade. Recognizing the strategic importance of these well-placed islands within the broader geographic landscape, Britain and France jockeyed for influence over the Comoros, gradually making inroads with local sultans. The balance would eventually tip in France’s favor with the annexation of Mayotte in 1841, which launched 70 years of conquest that culminated with the colonization of all four islands in 1912.

In the intervening century between France’s colonization of the Comoros and the unprecedented disaster of Cyclone Chido in December 2024, the islands occupied a rather obscure position within the public consciousness in the Global North. However, Chido, which was the most devastating tropical storm to strike Mayotte since the beginning of the 20th century, has begun to unravel French colonial logic on the global stage. And while this long historical thread has started to fray, news outlets in the US and Europe continue to uncritically reproduce gaping contextual lacunae that perpetuate the suppression of Comorian history and perspectives.

The nature of French colonialism in the Indian Ocean is one stone that contemporary mainstream media tends to leave unturned. French colonial activity in the region was propelled in part by the devastating loss of Haiti and Mauritius’s astoundingly productive sugar economies at the beginning of the 19th century at the hands of the Haitian Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. As its rivals Britain and Germany succeeded in conquering East Africa’s islands, coastlines, and hinterlands, France became increasingly determined to secure a foothold in the Comoros—and more importantly Madagascar—to start up new cash crop plantations and conscript indigenous populations into coercive labor regimes. Securing a foothold on these islands also meant maintaining a strategic military and naval presence across the vast oceanic space between Africa and Asia, a positioning that has only become more important to France since the era of decolonization.

Since the three sovereign islands declared their independence in 1975, France has ceaselessly intervened in Comorian attempts at self-determination in a series of hostile, neocolonial acts. These interventions came in the form of the annexation of Mayotte, as well as the numerous coup d’etat that it mounted in the independent Comoros. These actions worked in lockstep to paint the Comorians who chose independence as the irredeemably backward and ungovernable inhabitants of “the coup-coup islands” and those who chose to stay part of France “as French as the Dordogne or the Somme.”

Rémi Carayol, in his 2024 book, Mayotte: département coloniale, demonstrates just how sedimented Mayotte’s colonial status is in the French public memory and imagination. Mayotte, he argues, is attached to the metropole “by an invisible, umbilical cord” that materializes and immortalizes the maritime border between the island and the Comoros. This imposition of colonial time and space leaves us suspended in the reality that France has made and renders us liable to believing the oft-repeated adage that Mayotte was French “before Nice and Savoy.”

The facile perpetuation of these narratives sublimates the true intention of French imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean, which was not animated by a well-meaning desire to extend the benefits of French citizenship to Africans. Moreover, colonial subjects were far from oblivious to France’s exploitative ambitions. Although present-day rhetoric attempts to justify France’s presence in Mayotte by repeatedly citing Mahorais public opinion, many of the island’s 19th-century inhabitants did not gratefully accept the new colonial order that had arrived on their shores, suggesting that Mahorais’ contemporary allegiance to France—and consequent embrace of far-right politics—does not reflect a stable tradition over time. Rather, the colonial archive is rife with numerous examples of Comorian resistance to French rule and the labor abuses that it engendered. In 1856, laborers in Mayotte deserted Grand Terre’s sugar plantations in a month-long revolt that ended with France’s execution of the rebel leaders. In the ensuing decades, protests against the violence of engagisme, or indenture, on Grande Comore also threw the colony into disarray, as administrators struggled to contain workers’ agitations.

The specter of colonial violence continued to loom over the course of the 20th century when anticolonial activists in Mayotte were forced to flee the island by a campaign that laid the groundwork for the eventual rejection of the 1974 referendum. The threat and reality of corporeal harm has stretched into the present day, as Comorian migrants continue to make the dangerous journey by boat across the Mozambique Channel. The militarized enforcement of this maritime border attempts to naturalize notions of ethnic and cultural differences between Comorians and Mahorais, who share undeniable linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage. It also weaponizes the sea, which was a site of connectivity in the centuries before European colonialism, facilitating the sustenance of economic, social, and familial ties throughout the western Indian Ocean.

By severing these historical truths from the public consciousness, France engages in a process of racialized disengagement that Martinican theorist Frantz Fanon described in his monumental text, Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon describes this phenomenon on the scale of the individual, writing that the construction of the self is an intrinsically relational process, in which the “elaboration of the body schema” occurs “in a spatial and temporal world” wherein the self reaches outward, enacting a process of actualization that is mediated through quotidian interactions with people and objects. For black subjects, this process is interceded by whiteness and coloniality, which “fixes” them in space and time as a “Negro” and arrests their development into full personhood.

Each act of French neocolonial meddling echoes the process by which whiteness “[cuts] sections of…reality” and scaffolds the discursive conditions in which a pervasive colonial aporia can thrive. Fanonian thought also provides speculative insights into the underexamined psychology of the Mahorais who advocate so vociferously for French rule and make no secret of their racist disdain for their Comorian counterparts. While Euro-American media outlets tend to liken Mayotte’s migration crisis to those unfolding in the Global North, doing so belies how the colonial encounter on the Comorian archipelago “disrupted the psychological horizon and mechanisms,” re-working the extant racial order such that “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” The strange alchemy of this new racial hierarchy and the promise of belonging under the banner of French republicanism has produced a convoluted and counterintuitive logic: freedom means tightening the ties that bind Mayotte to France and equality means that the Mahorais—who are already treated as second-class citizens—are more deserving than Comorian migrants of the socioeconomic benefits of imperial belonging.

Elbadawi and O* Mcezo take an axe to this reality and its attendant fictions by staging an imagined relationality with France, gesturing subtly to Fanon. Performance and play become a potent means of prefiguring a world in which Comorians, and other victims of colonial incursions, can take imperial powers to task. Conceptions of selfhood also come to the fore over the course of this performance, which O* Mcezo tinkered with and brought to multiple towns in the Comoros. As a form of extralegal justice, gungu is inextricable from the rigid social boundaries of the slaving society in which it was practiced. The custom of binding the accused bears clear visual allusions to enslavement. And while slavery casts shame and social death onto its victims, it also forces proximity and relationality, thrusting freedom into direct relief with unfreedom. Like a cyclone, dissident art practices on the archipelago contain the potential energy to unsettle that which appears stable, to turn reality on its head, and to push the truth into the field of view of those who refuse to bear witness.