The Fading Dream to Liberate Africa’s Last Colony

Although it once was the case, it is incorrect to refer to Mayotte and Reunion as colonies. They are French departments. Their inhabitants are not "allowed to work in France", they are French, if they move to metropolitan France, they're just changing department. Saying they're a colony would be like saying Alaska or New Mexico are colonies. Moreover Mayotte did not vote to "stay" in France, the referendum was about switching from one status to another (essentially, from Oversea Department to 'normal' department) and they chose the most convenient one (shocking, I know).

It is true that they receive some extra subsidies, mostly because of their isolated location (which makes the cost of life higher). Due to the high level of unemployment, they also receive social subsidies, but that's just like any other department in France (but of course you won't hear a lot of complaints about how the North-Eastern regions are costing the rest of the country a ton of money...). Moreover they also receive less government investment when it comes to infrastuctures, i.e. schools or hospitals (even though they have to contend with tropical diseases and hurricanes).

The trope about "lazy black people under the tropics" (as opposed to Fench citizens who happen to live in regions where the economy is bad) is a common dog whistle in France. Much like with American nativists, there is this thing with implying who is a 'real' French and who isn't, and it seems to upset a number of white French that there are also black French who have been part of France for longer than they themselves may have been, so depicting them as remote people who are only in it to take money is quite convenient.

To get back to the main topic, it's true that "last colony" is a bit weird. There are other more-or-less similar conflicts in Africa (Casamance, Cabinda, Chagos) where the locals could refer to themselves as colonized.

That sounds like they were pushed out by the marching Moroccans during a few day, not that they calmly decided it was time to move to Spain.

As this war simply isn't going to happen, the only sane way forward to get these people and their future generations out of this misery is to get them out of there and send them to places where they will be recognized as human beings instead of as an obnoxious political problem. In the current state of the world this is, for better or worse, much more practical when they are capable of supporting themselves and prospering in an urban environment. That takes education, and broadly speaking education in English is probably the choice that gives them the best options right now, unless somewhere non-English-speaking is specifically offering to give them a break (which would be smashing, doubly so if the Somewhere is Morocco itself, but I've not heard of it).

And getting just one of those people out of there and into an English-speaking nation has already contributed substantially to international recognition of their plight through this article.

As far as I'm aware, the indigenously-developed Icelandic curriculum also teaches native Icelanders to speak English to a good standard, which they rely on heavily when interacting with the outside world without consider having to do so a terrible colonialist imposition.