Los Angeles Times Interview : Kofi Yamgnane : Protecting Immigration in a Nation Intent on Limiting It

When Kofi Yamgnane was 7 years old, an old white Frenchman on a bicycle came to his family’s remote, rural village in the then-colony of Togo in Africa and asked permission to take Kofi away to school. Kofi’s father first consulted village elders, who thought it was a good idea. Then he asked the local deity, a crocodile, which took a live chicken from the young boy’s hands to indicate its approval. And so Kofi became the first in his tribe to go to school.

Today, Yamgnane is a 49-year-old Frenchman. He works as a civil engineer for the government, is married to a French woman and father of two French children. He also is mayor of St. Coulitz in Brittany and a member of the Finistere regional council.

Yamgnane was deputy minister for integration in the last Socialist government, working to help foreigners become part and parcel of French society. When the Socialists were turned out of power in 1993, he created the Foundation for Republican Integration to continue that work.

The foundation faces a huge task these days, though. A new set of laws, passed in 1993 by the conservative government, has made it more difficult for immigrants to obtain French citizenship, and right-wing demands that all immigrants be expelled have gained support. Jacques Chirac, the conservative who will take office as the new president of France this week, has said he will keep those laws in place.

But Yamgnane is living proof that immigrants can become fully integrated into French society and add immeasurably to the richness of the country. After attending French school in Togo, he came to France in 1964 to study engineering in Brittany, where he was the only black man on campus.

He later earned a diploma from the prestigious French School of Mines and, in 1983, began his political career as a municipal council member. He was elected mayor in 1989, became a regional councilor in 1992 and crisscrossed the country during the recent presidential campaign, stumping for the Socialist candidate.

He and his wife, Anne-Marie, a math teacher, met in school. They settled in St. Coulitz, which Yamgnane now considers home, and had two children, Amina, now 25, and Kwame, now 19. Yamgnane considers the French village home but, each year, he makes a pilgrimage to the little village in Togo, where his older brothers, who don’t speak a word of French, still farm the family plot.

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Question: Many in France say they welcome integration of foreigners into French society but oppose the trend toward separate communities of foreigners, as exists in the United States. How does the French notion of integration differ from the American melting-pot idea?

Answer: They are two completely different models. You recognize ethnic groups and consider each as a minority to be respected and given the right to live in their own neighborhoods, with a minimum of rules that everyone in the country must respect, of course.

Seen from here, that model seems to pit ethnic communities against each other.

In France, we do not recognize minorities as groups. Our idea of integration is aimed at individuals. When you arrive and want to live in France, we say: “Here is a republic with laws, liberties and duties.” You adhere or you don’t adhere. But we address each person, personally. We don’t recognize the Malians, the Chinese, the Hispanics, the Polish, etc.

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Q: So the French model doesn’t recognize the desire of people with shared ethnic heritages to want to preserve that heritage?

A: Of course, for the freshly arrived foreigners, it is easier to go toward the people they already know. That has already happened, for instance, with the Chinese in Paris. They’ve created their own arrondissement and their own rules. And because they aren’t a nuisance to the French, the French government doesn’t bother them.

But I think it’s wrong to organize foreigners into a sort of hierarchy, to say one is better than another. If we want to change the French model of integration, we should do it after a public debate.

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Q: So would you support a more American view of ethnic communities?

A: No. I favor teaching each individual, in depth, what France is about and showing them the path they need to follow to enter the single, national community of France. We should tell the foreigner what his rights and duties are . . . and that he will be accepted whether he is black, Arab, white, Jew or Muslim. The republic is secular.

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Q: What about people who want to practice their different religions?

A: The secular state should give the right to each of its children to have two spheres of life. The private sphere includes his beliefs, and that is no one else’s business.

Then there is the public sphere, and the churches shouldn’t mix themselves up in the laws of the republic. That would clearly establish that one has the right to be a true republican, whether he is Muslim or Christian.

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Q: But it’s a fact that ethnic communities already exist in France.

A: They exist even if we don’t recognize them. That’s why the debate is necessary, so we can get out of this sort of hypocrisy. What I want is the model that will bring us social peace.

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Q: Do you feel French?

A: Yes, I feel profoundly French, because I have chosen to be French. I even feel Breton (from Brittany), because I have chosen to be Breton. I have chosen to be there, to live there, to live in the style of the Bretons.

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Q: Did you experience racism during your early years in France?

A: When I went to college in Brest in the 1960s, I was the only black in the university. The only one. And I was a most absolute curiosity.

Imagine what that represented for this girl who became my wife. She agreed to go out with a black, and everyone looked at us with a sort of unbelievable curiosity. People would turn around to look.

People don’t have to push me into the Seine for me to know they are racist. Sometimes, one look is enough. I knew what was going on in some of their heads. They were thinking, “This one is just a whore who could find nothing but a nigger.”

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Q: And when you took her to visit your family in Togo?

A: It was also true in Togo. When we passed people, they turned around. Here they turned around because I was black, and there they turned around because she was white. So I’ve lived this completely symmetrically.

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Q: You have chosen to be French, but can you understand the people who want to live in France and remain, for example, Togolese?

A: Why, yes, of course. They have the right to live in France and be a foreigner, just as long as they respect the rules of life of the people of France.

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Q: The rules but not the culture?

A: Well, one cannot decide to live in France and say that one wants to be polygamous. This is not possible. One cannot decide to live in France and say that one is going to have female circumcision for young girls. This is not normal.

There are things that will not be tolerated; there are things that cannot be accepted. One cannot want to live in France and say, at the same time, that the law of the Koran is superior to the law of the republic.

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Q: But isn’t that the same argument made by the current conservative government?

A: Yes, but this government has gone too far. Until 1993, and since the Revolution in 1789, France was considered the country of welcome for foreigners. Then these conservatives instituted laws that did not conform to the constitution, and they had to change the constitution to pass them. These are hooligan methods.

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Q: One of the new laws forces children born to foreign parents to wait until they are 16 years old to apply for citizenship. What is the problem with that law?

A: I say, fine, make them wait. But they should make everyone wait, not just foreigners.

Take the case of a foreigner whose children are born in a French village with other children whose parents are French. The government is forcing one group of children to wait and then beg to become French. It doesn’t ask anything of their friends. That is intolerable.

There is no reason why some children, under the pretext that they are born to French parents, are better than the others. That is a sort of civil segregation and it’s extremely serious.

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Q: Is it the most severe of all the anti-immigrant laws?

A: Yes, and it’s the most unjust. The “law of the soil” has, since the 16th Century, made citizens of children born on French territory. It dates back to the kings, who needed more boys to fight their wars.

And now, just because France no longer needs to draft those boys, they think they can abolish this law. It makes no sense. It flies in the face of the French tradition of welcome.

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Q: Why are the French now so opposed to immigrants?

A: First, the French didn’t realize right away that this would affect everyone.

Take my case, for example. I am a first-generation immigrant; I have two children. These children have grandparents who are French, who live in Brittany. After a single generation, we already are extremely mixed. So if someone tells my children they are not French, can you imagine the number of people that this would affect?

So the French are no longer all in agreement about this law. But, at the beginning, they did not see the problems it would create.

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Q: So with a conservative, Jacques Chirac, soon to be in the presidency, do you expect a backlash against these laws?

A: There are already many men and women, many associations and movements that are fighting against these laws. But Chirac has said he would not touch these new laws, and I fear that means we are heading for difficult times.

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Q: Do you personally have the impression that the French are more racist than before?

A: I don’t know if they are more racist. But they are living in a society that is in crisis. Competition for jobs, lodging, training, education and hospital care is getting worse everywhere.

And, as a result, people believe the simplistic ideas of the far right, which claims that it is foreigners who have caused their economic difficulties.

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Q: You mean that people believe Jean-Marie Le Pen, the right-wing leader, when he says the problem of 3.2 million unemployed can be solved by sending back the 3.5 million immigrants?

A: Exactly. People say, “Well, yes, of course.” It’s simplistic and people think that’s the solution.

Even people in my village at Saint Coulitz have told me this. But I have to explain to them that if Le Pen sends back all these immigrants, then, on the return flights, you will have 3 million French people coming home from Africa. Africa will expel the French.

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Q: And what do the people in your village say to that?

A: They don’t see it. They don’t understand that those French people are going to return home and be looking for houses and jobs, the same houses and jobs the immigrants left behind.

You know, the day this government asks me to leave, I will go, of course. But where will my children go? Where will their grandparents go? The French don’t yet see the implications. There are blood ties that already have been woven, and they are very strong.

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Q: Does the image of France as the welcoming country still exist?

A: That image is finished. It is dead. France is no longer the country that can welcome people from the whole world and, as it was able to do for so long, promise them social ascension. It’s no longer true.