Cheyroux and his two sisters were among more than 2,000 children removed from the tropical island between 1963 and 1982 as part of a French government programme to repopulate increasingly deserted areas of rural postwar France. Cheyroux now believes he was forcibly taken from his mother, Marie-Thérese Abrousse, who had three children out of wedlock and was trying to raise them alone in the impoverished neighbourhood of Coeur-Saignnat. [...]
The people of Réunion are descendants of slaves brought there by French colonisers to work on sugar plantations. The island is a departement, essentially an overseas territory of France. In the 1960s, the MP for Réunion, Michel Debré, set up a scheme to move children from the island to mainland France. His government promised islanders that their children would be sent to the best schools and be adopted by loving, rich French parents who could provide for them in a way that most creole people could not. Residents of Réunion spoke of the red government trucks that would roam the streets after school picking up children; and parents being forced to initial or fingerprint papers that they couldn’t read. [...]
Children like Cheyroux were taken to France in batches of 30. First, they were kept in a temporary home in Réunion where they were taught French and to stop speaking in their native creole.
From there, they were taken to various parts of France where adoptive parents could come to take them home. Cheyroux and his sisters were chosen by a couple from Auch, a commune in the south-west of the country. They were the only children with dark skin in their neighbourhood, and were teased and picked on by their friends. “They’d call me chocolat or negro or noireau,” he says.
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