The Indian Ocean Archipelago of Mayotte is France’s Poorest Area. It Wasn’t Ready For the Cyclone.

Mayotte sits off the northwest coast of Madagascar. Though it is part of France, it is the poorest part: fully one third of its 320,000 residents are undocumented immigrants, and many of them live in what some officials describe as “precarious” housing. These are essentially shantytowns: something like 40 percent of homes in Mayotte are built with metal sheeting, and around one third have no running water.

This is a recipe for catastrophe when a cyclone hits. In one town of those metal sheeting houses, Kawéni, reportedly only 5,000 of the 20,000 inhabitants had time to make it to a shelter before the worst of the storm arrived. The destruction across the islands is supposedly widespread, if not universal.

French president Emmanuel Macron held an emergency meeting on Monday, and will travel to Mayotte soon. The country is sending hundreds of firefighters and other aid workers, with nearby French territory Réunion used as a sort of staging area.

Mayotte was in the news in 2023, when Macron and the French government began an operation to fight “gangs, substandard housing and irregular immigration.” On the ground, this meant police officers using live rounds on residents, and literal bulldozers knocking down entire shantytowns. There are now questions whether undocumented immigrants there were scared to retreat to officially designated shelter areas as the storm approached; if there really are hundreds or even thousands dead, the government’s hands are not clean.