2023-05-02 18:49:00
DFrom prison to prevention, Adama Camara made his fight against deadly rivalries between neighborhoods of working-class housing estates, after losing his brother in a brawl and trying to avenge him.
In a classroom, the 34-year-old delivery driver is firmly planted in front of around forty 4th graders from the Léopold Sédar Senghor college in Corbeil-Essonnes.
The presentations made, he creates a fictional confusion and invites the schoolchildren to enrich the scenario. The teenagers willingly lend themselves to the game, detailing the blows they could bring to the victim: “head crushing”, “kicking”, “schlass” (knife).
Adama Camara takes over. “Forty-eight hours later, you learn that the person you attacked is dead. What is your first reaction?”
Awkward silence in the room.
The ex-convict then unfolds his personal story. The death of his little brother Sada, killed at the age of 18 with several stab wounds during a brawl in Val-d’Oise in 2011. The desire for revenge he tried to fight. Then that day in August 2014 when he shot and wounded the murderer’s older brother and two other people. Finally his sentence to eight years in prison for attempted murder.
Facing him, the 4th grade students, captivated, do not lose a beat.
“Street cred”
For these young inhabitants of the city of Tarterêts, his story echoes the regular fights in their district, rival of that of Montconseil for decades.
“It shocks, it makes you think”, reacts after the two-hour session Gérard, 13 years old. “When I was little, I saw the adults doing it, I said to myself + I’m going to do the same +, but I saw that it was useless”, confides the schoolboy with the chubby face.
Upon his release from detention, Adama intended to “take a job and disappear from circulation” but the prevention, as he says, “fallen on him”. One of his Facebook posts written impulsively against yet another fight goes viral, he is then asked to intervene at events.
With his story, he enjoys a certain “street cred” (reputation in the street) with the youth.
With each new drama, he takes out his smartphone and films his rants in selfie mode from his car, “NY” cap on his zero ball and discreet goatee.
On TikTok, his videos have accumulated millions of views.
Child of Garges-lès-Gonesse, regularly bereaved by brawls, where he still lives, Adama turned to writing to exteriorize his feelings and decipher the phenomenon, which he attributes to “ego stories” of the part of young people in search of valorization.
Rap first, then a book.
“Path of Peace”
In “N ° 55.852” (his prison number), published by JC Lattès, he tells the story of the “cemetery of the living”: the prison, the violence, the isolation, the time spent away from his little girl.
The trigger, to make him go from hatred “to the path of peace”, was the death of his father from a devastating cancer. Behind bars, he couldn’t say goodbye to him, he was just able to go see him in the morgue.
Tall, athletic, Adama Camara sees his mission as a worker as “a fight” for which “one must be in good mental and physical health”, at the risk of being taken by weariness.
“There are young people, I spoke to them and two months later I see them in prison for murder”, he relates, “we cannot save everyone”.
Almost everywhere in France, even overseas, it multiplies its interventions in schools, associations or prisons.
To reach even more people, he created the Rixes series, produced by the Streetpress media. In each ten-minute episode, Adama Camara goes to meet victims or their relatives.
Season 2 will be broadcast from May 3, with one episode every Wednesday. New: an episode on girl victims and another with inmates.
Next year, he will start raising awareness with CM2, before they enter college, “in the big leagues”.
02/05/2023 18:48:15 – Corbeil-Essonnes (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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