Below is the second half of a post from Alibekov’s blog, as translated from the French by Robert Marchenoir. Part 3 will feature the translator’s commentary.
On the twelfth floor, we are faced with a choice: one door is adorned with Koranic verses, the other with photographs of Mecca and the Kaaba. We run into a couple of retired French blue-collar workers of exquisite kindness. Just the type of people the System would describe as loathsome racists and fascists. Does Konaré live nearby? Well, they say, his third wife actually lives just opposite to them on the tenth floor; however, Konaré himself lives in the Western building with his second wife.
Staircase C is already chock-full with twenty-odd people waiting their turn to pay their respects — or to get a free meal. Seventy individuals altogether have gathered at the place, coming from three families only. Some of them learn on the spot that they are relatives, because their father had children with his own cousin, or because some half-brother married his sister before wedding wife number four.
I elbow my way through to the strategic centre of the house, and I sit on the floor. Next to me are two bearded men, wearing boubous and keffiyehs. One is browsing an interactive Koran on his iPhone. The other keeps peppering the crowd with non-stop blessings. The assembly responds in kind every ten seconds.
Women bring in plastic basins full of greasy rice, soaked in mutton juice. We assemble around them by groups of five, and help ourselves with our right hand, chanting “hamdoullah” roughly every minute and a half. Each time a girl comes out of the kitchen to tend the mourners, at least one guy asks whom she is married to. I feel I am in the middle of a group of shepherds anxious to buy a few more goats.
I am informed that each member of this happy crowd lives off the child benefits granted by the state to their multiple wives. Each man owns ten to twelve children. Each wife has her own flat assigned to her, courtesy of the city council. Most Frenchmen think polygamous Africans share their lodgings with their different wives. This is absolutely wrong. The whole point is for each wife to benefit from a certain degree of material autonomy. This, in turn, shows the financial power of the husband. Welfare benefits, of course, pervert this principle, since the husband does not need to work anymore. But the wives still get the money. Let me say this once again: France hands out a city council flat to each wife of a polygamous African living in the country. It is the man, however, who collects the state benefits, of which he gives back a tiny amount to his women.
The goal is to save enough money for a new wedding, which may well involve a bride plucked directly out of Africa — usually a younger one.
People mingle and chatter. Abdallah tells his neighbour that, with the money from the child benefits, he is currently building a house in Bamako for his fourth wife, who is twenty years old.
Moussa is worried. He made the mistake of telling the Préfecture that his wife’s sister was, well, also his wife. Therefore, the police warned Abibatou that she would have to leave the country within a month. She refuses. “What will my folks think of me, back in Africa, if they see me return? They believe I have a good situation in France. If I go back with my hands empty, they will make a fool of me. No way. I’m staying here.” So Abibatou moved to a cousin’s place, and is trying to evade the authorities.
An endless string of such stories is exchanged. Malek, Oumar, Tariq… Their worries about women, money, jealousy between wives, weddings among cousins, children born handicapped due to inbreeding… (they believe it is because of sorcery).
I feel nauseous. This is not France. I cannot believe it. Some of those guys have been settled here since the 1960’s, and they still live within their own closed community, totally impervious to their host country — except when welfare benefits are concerned — ruled by Islamic superstition and by the tribal mores of the remotest African villages.
And I do not mean Africa under the French colonial rule, which was much more liveable. Schools and hospitals, at least, were functional and free. One has to infer that they immigrate in France in order to find Africa as it was before the French empire, which is depicted in horrible terms by corrupt Third-World leaders and by immigrant lobbies such as Indigènes de la République. [An Islamo-Marxist outfit, whose leader, Houria Bouteldja, made an infamous pun on television: she forged the word “Souchiens” as a replacement to “Français de souche”, which is the way the anti-immigrant crowd describe themselves, meaning “the aboriginal French”. However, Bouteldja said “French” Muslims used to call the French “souchiens”, obviously trying to convey the real meaning of “sous-chiens”, underdogs. We know the unclean status the dog holds in Islam.]
I am trying hard to figure out what opportunity these immigrants might represent for our country. But faced with reality, I am at a loss to make something out of all that sweet talk about multiculturalism. Theories about “a French breed of Islam” are wishful thinking. Facts are facts, and it is the burden of die-hard immigration lobbyists to explain to us why it would be legitimate to impose such a presence to the French people, without, at the same time, imposing on African immigrants, as their part of the deal, a requirement to abandon upon arrival at the airport their boubous dyed in the worst of what the underdeveloped world has to offer.
Part 3: Robert Marchenoir’s commentary.
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