50 years on: Guadeloupeans remember French brutality
June 2, 2017
Guadeloupeans who survived the deadly crackdown of May 1967 describe the legacy of distrust of the French state.
Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe – “Without warning, they shot me. I fell to the ground and played dead.”
It was May 26, 1967. Solange Coudrieux, a Guadeloupean teacher, was on his way home when he got caught up in a protest in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe’s capital. Coudrieux was one of the many Guadeloupeans to be shot by French police that day.
“There was no curfew in place, no warning before they pulled the trigger,” he says now, 50 years later, sitting on his terrace just outside Pointe-a-Pitre.
“They shot me from behind. In the right leg. I say the right leg because it was intentional. They took my right leg, like they cut the right leg from our enslaved ancestors who tried to run away.”
The protest began on May 24, when construction workers in Point-a-Pitre went on strike asking for a wage increase of two percent. By the morning of the 26th, their boss, Georges Brizard, agreed to meet union leaders, and Guadeloupe’s governor, Pierre Bolotte, to discuss the pay rise.
