Commune Primat is a small district of Saint-Denis, in Reunion Island. Here, even in 1970’s, a shantytown stretched on a strip of savannah stuck between a river bed and a ravine. At the end of this dry strip rose the fumaroles of an open-air dump where garbage piled up from the largest town in the French overseas departments. Hemmed in on one side by the ocean, on the other by a four lane road, Primat is today a town that is cut off from the world. 1,700 people live in buildings and semi-detached houses built over the course of RHI's operations – for Resorption of Unsanitary Homes. The landfill has disappeared, replaced by typical urban outskirts infrastructures : football stadium, shopping center, car parks, cemetery and funeral center widening the gap of emptiness around the small concrete village, which has become an island in the island.
At the end of 2015, a study published in a local daily newspaper indicated Commune Primat as the poorest district of Reunion, knowing that this French department is already abnormal on the social plan, where one in two lives below the poverty line. This did not please inhabitants, who are proud of their neighborhood, and are often nostalgic about the time before the rehabilitation. Between them, they call themselves the Primatorians, and enjoy the false airs of Roman aristocracy in the fancy title. Urban rumor has long lent them the reputation of being the best brawlers of the island. This hot neighborhood image is, for some, at the origin of the name under which many know the place: « Commune Do Fé » (The city of fire).