Introduction
Following a meeting of the National Security Council on February 21, 2023, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied issued what became an infamous communiqué. In it, he claimed sub-Saharan African migrants were building a presence in Tunisia as result of a criminal scheme aimed at modifying the “demographic composition” of Tunisian society. Thereafter, life for sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia, hardly great to begin with[1], worsened considerably. Hundreds were evicted from their homes, hundreds others were subjected to job terminations, physical and verbal violence, and punitive deportations. Social media videos documented buses dropping migrants based in Sfax near remote areas close to the Libyan border. There, they faced extreme conditions, including temperatures soaring to 50 degrees, without assistance or anything in the way of food, water, and shelter. The National Guard and Tunisian military were also revealed to have forcibly relocated up to 1,200 individuals in multiple groups to border regions, environs equally devoid of shade, vegetation, water, electricity, and communication services. These cruel acts resulted in the disappearance and deaths of many, including a migrant named Fatie and her daughter Marie. A photograph taken of mother and child, prostrate and lifeless in under the unforgiving sun, wound up shared widely on the Tunisian internet.[2]
If extreme, Saied’s interventions against sub-Saharan African migrants are in keeping with a policy trend evinced across the southern Mediterranean region. This trend must be understood in view of changes to the European Union’s migration policies towards the Global South. Despite Europe’s service sectors retaining a need for imported labor (care industries especially)—and despite ageing populations imperiling Europe’s growth prospects—the past decade has seen aggressive attempts at curtailing immigrant flows. This policy pivot is broadly attributable to the rise of rightwing political forces, both in Brussels and across the EU’s member states. Europe’s rightwing has weaponized discontent over the continent’s economic stagnation by redirecting popular anxiety and fear against vulnerable populations, migrants most of all. Having successfully swayed many center-right and center-left parties into adopting its agenda, Europe’s rightwing has set the course for the EU’s anti-immigrant turn. Amongst other things, these dynamics have led the EU and its member states to incentivize and/or pressure North African countries into becoming agents of “border externalization policies”. In effect, Europe is enlisting governments of the Maghreb as sub-contractors, tasking them with intercepting Europe-bound migrants before they can cross the Mediterranean.
Such arrangements speak to the endurance of postcolonial bargains. For the leaders that won independence across the Maghreb last century, victory was hardly total: Sovereignty was limited not only by economic dependence, but by demands that they ensure the geo-racialized security of the Global North. Then as now, this demand has reinforced the racially-charged violence of borders. Then as now, subordination to Europe has also left societies in the Maghreb dealing with deeply corrosive social effects.
Postcolonial and Geo-Racialized Security
Migration and Postcolonial States as Security Providers for the Global North[3]
Before turning to the specifics of present day Tunisia, it is appropriate to begin with the role attributed to postcolonial ruling elites by colonial interests during the long twentieth century. As discerned by Palestinian political scientist Tamim al-Barghouti, the establishment of formal independence often required postcolonial rulers to respect and secure the material interests of the former colonial overseer.[4] In al-Barghouti’s estimations, this vested post-colonial states with fundamental contradictions.[5] On the one hand, the postcolonial leader’s rule—and the prosperity of the ruler’s social coalition—hinged on their acting as comprador for the departed colonial power. On the other, it hinged on the postcolonial leader convincing the native population that they were agents of national emancipation. Servicing both imperatives fomented irreconcilable tensions. In attempting to resolve them, al-Barghouti asserts that rulers frequently leaned into the following playbook:
“To the native population, it offers the promise of liberation, symbolized by legal independence, formal, or sometimes only nominal, sovereignty as well as the end of military occupation; to the colonial power, it offers to secure the vital colonial interests, such as the safety of international trade routes, the safety of colonial enterprises, the safety of European residents, and all other regional geo-strategic interests of the colonial power. All of these functions require the keeping of law and order by a state apparatus.”[6]
While evolving over time, the partial sovereignty of the postcolonial state has endured across the Maghreb. And though not the only variable at work, this partial sovereignty animates the migration policies of Tunisian governors since the introduction of the Schengen system in 1985.
To appreciate partial sovereignty’s salience, it is worth recalling that absent external compensation, Tunisia itself derives little benefit in preventing either nationals or non-nationals from departing from its shores for Europe. After all, in doing so, the country loses out on remittance flows while the state, rendered complicit in the deaths of thousands in the sea, sheds legitimacy. In view of the consequence, that successive Tunisian governments would take on the role of Europe’s gatekeeper suggests policy choice is not wholly volitional. The example of Kais Saied’s government indicates that financial needs heavily mediate the policymaking process.
The weight that liquidity problems exert on Tunisia’s contemporary migration policies are observable in the terms of the country’s most recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Union, signed on July 16, 2023. De jure and de facto, the MoU offered Tunisia a pay-off for policing the border more intensively: For a relatively small amount of money (€900 million in macroeconomic support and €150 million in direct budgetary support), the EU purchased a proxy force for its distal southern frontier.[7]
The efficacy of this proxy force is apparent in the data. In July 2023, prior to the MoU going into effect, Tunisia’s Coast Guard intercepted 848 migrants. In August, after the MoU, the figure surged to 4,427. In September, the number in question hit 8,781. As the calendar turned to 2024, moreover, Tunisia’s patrolmen stayed just as active. Between January and April 2024, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) reported approximately 21,200 migrants being intercepted along the country’s shores. By the end of May 2024, statistics from the National Guard indicated that around 30,300 individuals had been intercepted through both land and sea operations, nearly 9,000 more than 2023’s corresponding total. Meanwhile, Italy reported a 60.8% year-on-year decrease in irregular arrivals on its shores from January to May 2024.
For its part, the Tunisian government has also introduced legal measures to formalize and expand its activist posture when it comes to controlling people movement. On April 5, 2024, the President issued Order No. 181. Framed as a regulation for maritime search and rescue operations, human rights advocates have expressed concern the Order creates conditions which may lead to humanitarian violations in the Mediterranean, including heightened confrontations between fragile migrant vessels and the National Guard. Making matters worse, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) recently revised Tunisia’s Search and Rescue Area map. Specifically, the IMO extended Tunisian authorities’ jurisdiction in the Mediterranean thereby facilitating more frequent interceptions and returns. Critics have voiced significant concerns about the lack of safeguards in the IMO’s decisions. SOS Humanity and Alarm-Phone, for instance, have denounced the absence of any human rights conditions, consequent monitoring tools, or mechanisms of suspension in case of violations.[8]
The Problems with Security at a Lower Cost
The small sums allocated to a main migration hub like Tunisia by the EU can be understood as a partial function of neoliberalism. At a basic level, Brussels’ MoU with Tunis, like past and current IMF lending arrangements, represents an attempt to buy stability on the cheap. Rather than seek to address root causes of migration—or, in the case of the IMF, root causes of macroinstability—Europe and the global North deploys tools for short-term crisis management.
The strategy of the EU pushes its southern partners into a political bind. This is clearly observed in Tunisia. Since issuing his communique in February 2023, Kais Saied has waffled incoherently. Attempting to preserve his postcolonial bona fides while servicing Europe’s needs (and thereby securing the cash he sorely needs), the President is forced to hedge and conditionalize all his claims: In his analysis of President Saied’s media statements post-February 2023, Tabbabi records Saied saying “yes…but” at least thirteen times: the fruit of the clash between sovereigntist pretensions and (European) security needs.[9] A clearer example of al-Barghouti’s could nowhere be found. On the one hand, Saied has no choice but to protect the European “garden”, as EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell called it.[10] On the other, he must try position himself as independent and no one’s lackey.
Providing Security, (Re)Activating Historical Antiblackness: Provenance of the Internal Enemy Trope in Tunisia
The intensity, institutional framing, and straightforwardness of the racism today displayed against sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia are unprecedented. However, the roots of anti-black racism in the country run deep. They can be traced back to disjunctions inherited from slavery and shaped by colonialism.
Much has been said about Tunisia’s position and role within trans-Saharan, or Islamic, slavery and its racialized legacy. In broad terms, black slaves in Ottoman Tunisia were primarily employed in domestic roles, serving wealthier households in urban areas, as Mrad Dali has documented. Some were involved in both domestic and agricultural labor in rural regions.[11] The in-home servitude of many should not imply that Tunisian slavery was especially gentle, however. Indeed, Montana highlights the harsh treatment of black slaves in the Regency of Tunis. Detailing their suffering during transportation, he reveals how long marches and exposure to diseases left many slaves frail and unfit by the time they reached Tunis. Once in the market, slaves were displayed in degrading ways, and the separation of families drew attention to their plight.[12] Despite the argument that domestic labor was less brutal than its plantation counterpart, the harsh treatment of domestic slaves played a significant role in Ahmad bey’s successful abolition of slavery.[13]
Contrary to the cases of Europe and the Americas, racial categories in North African slavery were fluid and relational. Beyond phenotype and skin color, they were shaped by factors such as religion, social rank, and kinship, as scholars like Elouafi[14] and Davis[15] establish. With Islam often the variable mediating an individual’s standing as a free person or slave, binaries between blackness and whiteness never fully calcified. Mazrui argues the Arab patrilineal society also allowed for significant racial integration, as mixed-race children with an Arab father were fully accepted into higher social echelons.[16] All this being the case, racial divisions were comparatively porous and dynamic in Tunisia prior to the incursion of French colonialism.
Alas, Europe’s arrival in the region did change things. As anthropologist Abdelmajid Hannoum contends, the Maghreb as we understand it today is fundamentally a cartographic construct, with the divisions between North, West, and East Africa reflecting not so much the region’s anthropological realities as the competing interests of colonial powers. Eighteenth-century European cartographers drew a region called Barbary, sometimes divided into separate units from which Egypt and “Black Africa” (formerly called Nigritie) were excluded. Although the Maghreb had been mapped prior to this, European efforts vastly shifted the social and political consequence of cartography. France’s colonization of Algeria represented a turning point in these regards. As the conquest progressed, France used it stronghold in Algeria to expand into Tunisia at the expense of Italy, and to Morocco at the expense of Spain.[17] Thereafter, new denominations appeared to attach northern Africa to Europe, and by extension whiteness, and detach it from the rest of the continent.[18]
The colonial-nurtured disjunction between north and sub-Saharan Africa, between “black” and “white”, is what Hassan Mohamed terms “a racialist cartography”.[19] The consequence of this cartography persists to this day. It is present in a Hegelian imaginary of Africa[20]—one that Kais Saied himself subscribes to—which positions racial whiteness as native to North Africa, racial Arabness as reinforcing that whiteness, and racial blackness as foreign.[21] The last of these tenets weighs heavily on contemporary Tunisia. It has perpetuated the fiction that the country’s black communities are of servile and external lineage—an “African diaspora in Africa”. In other words, it erases the historicity[22] and indigeneity of black Tunisia, rendering the latter into an alterity.[23]
Conclusions: History Weighs Heavily on the Present
Observing a massacre of Sudanese migrants at the Moroccan border with Mellila, Samia Moucharik has posited that a new form of antiblack state violence is emerging today. Hinging upon the figure of the black migrant, this one links the logics of border control to a reconfiguration of internal enemies.[24]
The logic Moucharik discerns clearly abides in Tunisia. While long constructed as foreign and inconvenient, since February 2023, sub-Saharan migrants have been reimagined as internal enemies by both public authorities and the Tunisian population. They have been redefined by the state apparatus as an independent category, portrayed not just as a socioeconomic inconvenience but as a civilizational threat to the state and its people. Via the question of the border, however, this same category of persons also furnishes the state with a key material resource: Framed as threat and burden though they may be, it is these migrants which grant Carthage leverage over a desperate Europe.
It is in the nexus of Europe’s racialized fears and Tunisian (post)coloniality, then, that one finds the animating force behind the antiblack violence of the present. It is here we find a tragic reenactment of the programmed disunity of the African continent. And it is here that the contest for a better tomorrow must be waged.
* Image Credit: Department for International Development/Kate Joseph
[1] Racialized violence, administered either institutionally or socially, is not new to Tunisia. Historically, it often targeted black people more generally rather than black migrants in particular. Cognizant of this, the 2011 Revolution birthed a prolific anti-racism movement that questioned the country’s trans-Saharan slavery legacy, entrenched antiblack stereotypes and practices, and antiblack racism’s intersections, most notably that between blackness and womanhood and blackness and migration. Although initiated by and for black Tunisians, post-2011 episodes of racial violence against black migrants sparked wide outrage and bolstered the movement around sub-Saharan Africans’ lived experiences of racism as well. Advocacy and mobilization efforts culminated into the promulgation of the 2018 law against all forms of racial discrimination, which notably framed antiblack racism as an individual, not structural problem, that the State ought to mediate and sanction, excluding the role of the latter as the main racializing agent.
[2] Tunisia lacks an asylum law. After the coup d’etat in 2021, which was enabled by popular disillusionment and which brought to power a conspiracy-minded President, the establishment of one has become an impossibility. Saied has borrowed extensively from European far-right ideology, the Great Replacement Theory in particular, in discussing the migration of sub-Saharan Africans into Tunisia. He also adds his own personal flourishes, all of which draw on postcolonial trauma. With vague references to Western interventionism, imperialism and settler-colonialism, the President has suggested that a conspiracy to make Tunisia an “African” rather than Arab Muslim country began at the start of this century. The Tunisian Nationalist Party, one of the President’s ideological allies, has likened this to Zionist plots in Palestine.
[3] On the notion of security, Al-Barghouti contends: “Security is an extremely valuable commodity for a colonial power: security of international trade routes, security of foreign enterprises and businesses, security of European residents, including the military occupation forces and so on. The local elite then also becomes involved in the provision of such a commodity either by direct participation in security apparatuses or, due to their claim of representation, by creating a mirage of native participation and legitimizing the colonial structure of power. […] to provide security efficiently, the native elites have to have some legitimacy among their own population. By their efficiency I mean that the native elite’s provision of security should be less costly to the colonial power than direct occupation and policing by the colonial power’s own forces.” (p.93)
[4] Al-Barghouti, T. (2008). The Umma and the Dawla: the Nation State and the Arab Middle East. Pluto Press.
[5] Al-Barghouti, T. (2008). The Umma and the Dawla: the Nation State and the Arab Middle East. Pluto Press.
[6] Al-Barghouti, T. (2008). p. 95.
[7] There is little ambiguity on what Brussels bought with its money. €67 million of the €150 million earmarked for budgetary support were designated to enhance the capacity of the Coast Guard, covering costs for fuel, spare maritime equipment, vehicles, and training for operational teams.
[8] The creation of the Search and Rescue Region (SRR) is above all a commitment to the international community. According to the IMO, in being member, Tunisia must now “ensure that help is provided to any person in distress, regardless of that person’s nationality or status”. This latest development is in line with Italy’s strategy of outsourcing border control. By assigning responsibility for rescue and repatriation to Tunisia, Italy is seeking to relieve pressure on its own migrants’ reception and management system. “It could only be a matter of time before violent behavior also targets sea rescue NGOs or the crews of their ships”, worries Marie Michel of SOS Humanity, who explains that the NGO ‘fears a potential increase in cases of human rights violations and the use of physical violence against migrants’. An increase in interceptions by the Tunisian coastguard is likely to lead to more forced returns to Tunisia. See: https://inkyfada.com/fr/2024/10/24/nouvelle-region-maritime-recherche-sauvetage-opaque/
[9] Amongst the President’s statements: “The solution can only be humanitarian and collective, based on humanitarian standards, ‘but’ in accordance with the legislation of the state”/ “We are Africans, they are our brothers and we respect them, ‘but’ this situation that Tunisia is experiencing and has never experienced is an abnormal situation and we must put an end to these inhuman conditions”/ “They are victims of poverty, civil wars and the absence of the state, and they turn to Tunisia as a refuge. ‘But’ we are also a state that has its own laws and respects the law and human beings. ‘But’ everyone must respect the laws and sovereignty of the Tunisian state”/ “The solution must not be at the expense of the Tunisian state. We naturally preserve and protect these people and don’t let those who attack them walk away, ‘but’ they must also respect Tunisian laws”/ “We will not accept any attack against them, and we will protect them, ‘but’ they must be under legal conditions”/ “The humane treatment these migrants receive stems from our values and character, contrary to what is promoted by colonial circles and their agents whose only concern is to serve these circles, and nothing is more obvious than that their positions are the same as those of the frenzied trumpeters abroad who are paving the way for a new type of colonisation, falsifying facts and spreading lies.” See: Tabbabi, K. (2024, December). From African jungles and deserts to the forbidden land, Tunisia. migration.info. https://migration-control.info/en/blog/from-african-jungles-and-deserts/
[10] Speaking of Europe and the dangers posed to it by migration in 2022, Borrell said the following: ” Europe is a garden. (…) It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build (…) The rest of the world (…) is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
[11] Mrad Dali, I. (2005). De l’esclavage à la servitude: le cas des noirs de Tunisie (From slavery to servitude: ‘Blacks’ in Tunisia). Cahiers D’Études Africaines, 45(179/180).
[12] Montana, I. M. (2013). The abolition of slavery in Ottoman Tunisia. University Press of Florida.
[13] Marcel, J. J., & Frank, L. (1851). Histoire de Tunis: précédée d’une description de cette régence. Firmin Didot Frères.
[14] Elouafi, A. A. (2009). The colour of Orientalism: race and narratives of discovery in Tunisia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(2), 253–271.
[15] Haleh Davis, M. (2021). Incommensurate Ontologies’? Antiblack racism and the question of Islam. Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.
[16] Mazrui, A. A. (2001). Africa and other civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest. Africa World Press.
[17] The maps soon represented a North Africa from which Libya – under Italian rule – and Egypt – under British rule – were excluded. In other words, a Maghreb patterned on French possessions.
[18] Hannoum, A. (2021). The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East. Cambridge University Press.
[19] Mohamed, M. H. (2010). Africanists and Africans of the Maghrib: casualties of Analogy. The Journal of North African Studies, 15(3).
[20] In Hegel’s words: “Africa consists of three continents which are entirely separate from one another […] The first of these is Africa proper, the land to the south of the Sahara desert […] The second is the land to the north of the desert, […] which might be described as European Africa. And the third is the region of the Nile […] which is closely connected with Asia […]. What we understand as Africa proper is that unhistorical and undeveloped land which is still enmeshed in the natural spirit.”
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on the philosophy of world history. Cambridge University Press. pp. 173-183.
[21] Tayeb, L. (2021). What is Whiteness in North Africa? Lateral, 10(1).
[22] Mohamed, M. H. (2010). Africanists and Africans of the Maghrib: casualties of Analogy. The Journal of North African Studies, 15(3).
[23] Tayeb, L. (2021). What is Whiteness in North Africa? Lateral, 10(1).
[24] Moucharik, S. (2023, June 24). Le devenir-ennemi d’exilés noirs : enquête politique sur le massacre d’Etats à la frontière coloniale de Mellila/Mlilya. https://indigenes-republique.fr/. https://indigenes-republique.fr/le-devenir-ennemi-dexiles-noirs-enquete-politique-sur-le-massacre-detats-a-la-frontiere-coloniale-de-mellila-mlilya/