Forty years already. And, to hear it, nothing has changed or very little. “Even the concrete has not aged, says Youcef Sekimi. I know what I’m talking about, I grew up in an ensemble designed by Le Corbusier. » This 63-year-old man, event manager at the town hall of Firminy (Loire), has incredible eloquence and a beautiful face: square, as if cut with a scalpel, expressive like that of an actor from the 1930s. “I was a handsome kid, forty years ago. They took me for a Polynesian, he remembers. Well, sometimes, some people recognized that I looked like an Algerian. »
That October morning, in the shadow of an impressive building he lived in for a few years, the Grand H, located in the Firminy-Vert district, Youcef Sekimi dipped into his coffee. Sitting on the terrace of a charming bar, he unwinds. For several weeks, he has been carrying out interviews, debates and cigarettes, all over France, to evoke an event that he himself had never publicly recounted until now: the March for equality and against racism in 1983.
He remembers his companions, those he calls his brothers and sisters, of a fight without blows that seems to go back light years. Together, over more than 1,200 kilometers, they used their Stan Smiths to denounce police violence and the fear of foreigners, of young people from the suburbs – not to say Arabs –, taking the national roads linking Marseille on foot. in Paris, via Strasbourg. Together, they arrived on December 3, 1983 in the capital, welcomed by more than one hundred thousand people, then at the Elysée by François Mitterrand.
Sense of commitment
“It’s funny,” he said with a smile.. Wouldn’t young people today who look like me denounce the same things? » The question is falsely naive. He has already heard the answer from one of his four children. In fact, the eldest of his sons arrives with his 6-year-old little boy. Abdelmalek, a 33-year-old welder, rather reserved, reluctantly takes part in the discussion. Memories of the walk rocked his childhood like a tender nursery rhyme.
“I’m proud of him,” says the young man, pointing at his father. He always saw him devour The chained Duck, politics infused his education, as did a sense of commitment. And that’s normal. His family history is married to a national tragedy: his father is the son of harki – Algerian fighters enlisted in the French army during the Algerian war (1954-1962) –, born in Aïn Bessem, in the depths of Kabylia, and arrived in France at the age of 4. “From my history, I have always been French, I did not have to integrate”, explains Youcef Sekimi. But, nevertheless, on a daily basis, “I was sent back to my origins and I suffered the same humiliations as my friends who had a resident card, he wants to clarify. This is the reason that pushed me to join the march.”
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