The cabin is built from rough concrete blocks and bears the traces of the sea splashing as waves crash beneath it. The rooms are small, poorly furnished and the decor is basic. The garden is home to a few banana trees and semi-free goats that Antoinette – who prefers not to give her surname – watches from her plastic chair, a little crushed by the strong heat of this May day that heralds the beginning of the hurricane season. “It is a very quiet place, we slept well there, I am happy to have returned home after so many years away”This 80-year-old woman, who has lived in Pointe-à-Pitre for a long time, smiles.
He currently lives in Capesterre-Belle-Eau, in the Doyon district, where he grew up, where he occupies the house of his mother, who died sixteen years ago. When we talk to him about “fifty geometric steps”, he agrees. “Yes, we live here, but now we have a title deed.” One day, the inhabitants of this neighbourhood received a note in their mailbox explaining that the families, some of whom had lived there for over a hundred years, were not the owners of the land they occupied. And that their situation had to be regularised.
“They came, we had to pay the surveyor and then they sent a price proposal, I think it was around 5,000 euros”says Antonieta, who left the complex financial and administrative aspect of this extraordinary regularization, outside of common law and specific to the Antilles, to her younger sister.
“In Guadeloupe, it is estimated that there are eight thousand buildings affected by these illegal occupations of the public domain of the coastal zone”“This is the case,” says Rony Saint-Charles, director of the Agency des 50 Pas Geometrisches. The state agency was created in 1996 to unravel this Guadeloupean coastal strip, where legal complexities, human and family histories and a general attitude of expectation on the part of the authorities organising these territories are intertwined. The situation is still unresolved twenty-eight years later, but the transfer of powers from the agency to the region for urbanised areas, and to the Conservatoire de la Côte for so-called “natural” areas, is scheduled for 2025.
The essence of problems abroad.
“I do not know, Monseigneur, whether anyone has ever explained to you why the fifty steps of the King were reserved in the French islands of America, that is to say why the concessions of the first floors were not granted only to the inhabitants, on condition that they begin fifty steps from the sea-shore.“Wrote Jean-Charles de Baas, Governor General of the Islands and the American Continent, in 1674 in a report to Colbert, then General Auditor of Finance and Secretary of State for the Navy of the Kingdom of France. He recalled the law enacted by the Edict of Moulins (1566) which regulated this coastal strip, once known as “the King’s Fifty Paces”, now called the “Geometrical Fifty Paces” strip. It is 81.20 metres alone that contain the essence of overseas affairs; 81.20 metres whose terrestrial history is specific to certain overseas territories.
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