Houda Mzioudet

In July 2004, the Pan-African, French-language monthly Jeune Afrique published a column by Affet Mosbah entitled “Being Black in Tunisia.”[1] Hailing from a family of black rights’ activists—Mosbah’s sister, Saadia, is a long-time organizer in Tunisia and her brother, Salah, is Tunisia’s most famous black singer and a strong advocate for the black community in his own right[2]—Mosbah’s article considered the taboo of anti-black racism in Tunisia, recounting the banality of discrimination that...

Since executing his coup d’état on July 25th of 2021, Kaïs Saïed’s “revolution from within the state” has posed a number of difficult questions for the Tunisian bureaucracy.

On February 21, 2023, Tunisian President Kais Saied made an inflammatory speech warning of the danger posed by Black African migrants allegedly hell-bent on replacing Tunisia’s Arab-Islamic identity with an African one.1 His rhetoric encouraged some Tunisians to attack sub-Saharan African migrants and accuse them of wanting to colonize the country. Many Tunisians remained silent about the president’s speech, whether because of fear of repression or implicit agreement.