2023-11-25 07:00:06
Fort Teremba, Saturday October 21. There are around twenty of them, gathered in the old, recently restored bakery of this mecca of the penal colony of New Caledonia, located in the great plains of the west coast, on Grande Terre. An important symbol for the archipelago which became French in 1853 and transformed into a settlement colony, like Algeria.
Read the report (2022): Article reserved for our subscribers In New Caledonia, exorcising the colonial past to find a peaceful future
It is the Foundation of Pioneers, an association whose aim is to represent “the descendants of those who built New Caledonia”which brought them together this Saturday around a sensitive issue: “What does it mean to be Caldoche today? » The question remains open, while a new political agreement is being developed on the future of French territory: New Caledonia forms an ethnic mosaic, built in successive waves at the expense, then around the Kanak, the original Melanesian people.
Members of the Darras family, in Moindou, New Caledonia, October 22, 2023: Thierry Darras (60 years old), entrepreneur, political commissioner of the Caledonian Union for the Bourail region; his wife, Marie-Claure Darras (right), civil servant, who considers herself “autonomist”; their daughter, Amandine Darras (left), graduated in sustainable development management and involved in the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front. MORGAN ANGER FOR “THE WORLD”
In the small stone room lost in the countryside, here is Thierry Darras, 60-year-old entrepreneur; his daughter Amandine, 35, graduated in sustainable development management; and his nephew Arnaud, a 38-year-old insurer. All three are part of the Caldoche community, a term which took on a pejorative connotation at the time of the “events”, between 1984 and 1988, the quasi-civil war which saw the Caldoches and the Kanak clash. A stigma that certain members of the community seek to reverse, like what the natives did at the time of the “Kanak awakening” of the 1960s and 1970s. Thierry Darras is one of them. He ” claims “ to be Caldoche without any complexes, as if to mark a difference with the fact of simply being French. “I have been to France a lot and we are not the same, we do not have the same mentality”he believes.
Unusual resilience
Thierry belongs to the fifth generation from his ancestor Benjamin Darras, a Picard who, a weaver by day, exercised other talents at night. After several arrests for burglaries, Benjamin was sentenced to prison, and on July 31, 1874, number 1412 boarded the Was, in Toulon, for a one-way trip to New Caledonia. Released after two years, the convict is obliged to stay there. It is in Bourail, on the 5 hectares of the Pouéo valley granted by the prison administration, that he will dig the furrows of the Darras family.
Fort Teremba, a former penal colony, here on October 21, 2023, is today a museum, located in Moindou, New Caledonia. MORGAN ANGER FOR “THE WORLD”
Far from Nouméa and the comfort of free settlers, the harsh life of those freed from the penal colony was passed on to subsequent generations, forging the Caldoche identity. “We lived with not muchremembers Carl Darras, cousin of Thierry with whom he grew up. It was more than our parents had, more than our grandparents too, but life was still pretty tough. »
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