“You enter my mother’s soul”, warns Anne-Marie Ygout, pushing the glass door of her Norman farmhouse located in Clères, a village of a thousand inhabitants in Seine-Maritime. The 71-year-old dance teacher inherited this old house when her mother died in January 2019. In all the rooms of this half-timbered house, on the walls, above the fireplace, on the wooden consoles found, photos of Anne-Marie and Sékou.
Arriving illegally from Guinea in 2019, Sékou Bangoura-Ygout, 20, was supposed to stay only two days, but “something happened between us” assures his adoptive mother, sitting in front of the fireplace. Not only did Sékou never leave, but Anne-Marie adopted him in May 2022. “Before, my only perspective was death, now Sékou is my future,” she confides. A future threatened since December 24, 2022, by the arrival of a letter from the prefecture informing Sékou of the obligation to leave French territory (OQTF).
Upon receiving the letter, a silence engulfed the house. “People believe that those who have OQTF are killers or rapists. They think I’m a dangerous person.” deplores Sékou. Anne-Marie promised him that they would fight together. She filed an appeal with the Rouen administrative court. To support her case, she asked villagers and acquaintances to write down all the good things they thought of her son.
But, in October 2023, the judgment rendered is implacable: the court considers that simple adoption is not enough, that Sékou still has family in Guinea, that he does not justify old, intense and stable personal and family ties in France nor a lasting profession. On January 24, the duo launched a petition which collected more than 33,000 signatures, including that of Nathalie Thierry, the mayor of Clères. Mother and son are now awaiting a hearing date before the Douai Court of Appeal (North).
The omnipresent death
About his journey to Normandy, Sékou Bangoura does not say much for fear of crying and, at home, “men don’t cry, otherwise it means they are weak.” Until he was 15, the boy lived in Tabounde, a rural town in the west of Guinea, with his mother, his sister, his cousins and aunts in a thatched and clay brick hut, at the shade of mango trees. In the village, where there is no college, Sékou helps his uncle in the peanut fields, dreams of becoming a soldier or a truck driver. Europe is not part of his plans, he maintains.
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