When the Comoro Islands got their independence in 1975, one of them, Mayotte, chose to remain French for economic and historical reasons. The juridical controversy provoked by this separation as well as Mayotte’s cultural specificities prevented the French State to give the island the status of a French department that it claimed, but the law voted by the parliament in 2001 planed a ten-year program of legislative assimilation. This raises however the question of Mayotte’s cultural identity. It is analyzed through the study of social practices and underlying representations.