The “Vikings”, the “Eiye”, the “Maphites”, the “Jurists”, so many names of Nigerian gangs whose clashes in France regularly feed the chronicle of a Nigerian mafia. In a book published Wednesday by Flammarion, Mafia Africa, the journalists Célia Lebur and Joan Tilouine deliver a survey of several years on these “cults”, which notably led them to Marseille. Célia Lebur answered questions from 20 minutes.
Your dive into the Nigerian mafia begins in the heart of summer 2021 in a cemetery in Marseille, to follow the burial of two young Nigerians who died in the fire of a housing estate in the northern districts. Why Marseilles?
We started working on the subject between Italy and Nigeria, when I was still a correspondent there. Very quickly, Marseille became obvious. After Italy, where they have been present for fifteen years, the “cults” have come to Marseille. The city is really a high place of cultism in France. At the moment, at least five of his gangs are present there, well established, and there are probably more. At first marginal, their presence became more visible from the end of the 2000s. Our feeling is that French investigators became aware of the phenomenon well after their Italian counterparts.
You write that “the shortcuts between migrants and criminals, cults and mafia, are easy and deceptive”, what does this term “cult” mean?
Initially, the “cults” were completely harmless student confraternities, founded in the middle of the 20th century by brilliant intellectuals on the Anglo-Saxon model. The Nobel Prize for Literature Wole Soyinka is very unhappy to see what they have become today. They will go astray in the years 1980-1990, when Nigeria is under the thumb of the military dictatorship. The soldiers will understand that it is necessary to use cults to create conflicts within the youth and to weaken the student leaders. The following decade, there is an explosion in the number of recruits within the “cults”, and a real criminal drift. There are powerful people in Nigeria behind these organizations, who use these diaspora networks, the money from trafficking, to prosper and boost their political or business careers. The common base of these “cults” is the reference to traditional religions and the application of many rites, not to mention omerta.
When do the “cults » arrive in Marseilles?
At the end of the 2000s. It is a phenomenon which is initially essentially intra-community. In these pimping networks, the victims are Nigerian women and the violence is exercised against Nigerian asylum seekers. A lot is happening internally, within marginalized communities, left to fend for themselves. Things begin to change when some women dare to break the silence of the cults in Marseille. Odion, who found the courage to file a complaint in February 2017, was the symbol of this. Until this testimony and the legal inquiry that followed, the phenomenon was only approached from the angle of the “Madames”, never from the angle of the cultist networks.
From 2018, the “cults” are gaining in importance in Marseille write…
There is also the fact that the gang wars are starting to boil over and make noise. We saw scenes of pitched battles in the middle of the street a stone’s throw from the Old Port, asylum seekers slashed. Social workers started seeing women who were threatened when they came to their homes. It is interesting to see the geographical recomposition of cultism. Present first in Noailles, in the city center, they mingled with the good fathers and mothers of traditional Nigerian immigration. Then they are moved to the dilapidated condominiums of the northern districts, in the squats of the Kalliste park, at the Flamants, at the Petit Séminaire, at the Corot park…
Involved in cases of pimping, are the “cults” also in drug trafficking?
In Italy, the involvement of cults in drug trafficking is well documented. The “cults” are no longer just small hands, there are proven links with the Cosa Nostra or the Camorra. In Marseille, cohabitation with local traffickers is going very badly. Cultists often have a very violent and difficult experience in their youth in Nigeria, to which is added the violence they experienced when crossing Libya and then the Mediterranean. These are people who often say to themselves: “We have nothing more to lose”. Unlike other communities, they are not afraid of the Marseille caïds, except that they come up against much better organized groups. There were very strong tensions, calls for the raid against Wakanda, which led to the burning of the Flamingos and other murderous dramas. Afterwards, the cultists do not really weigh much compared to the Marseille trafficker networks. They cannot claim to compete with them on their own territory. They don’t have the weight, but they can sow chaos. Still, there is an attempt to take market share of the drug, clearly.