Nebras Magnnah, 26, is a black Tunisian who, like many others, has been terrified since since President Kais Saied’s fiery words sparked a wave of racist violence against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
Magnnah said she has received insults on the street since since Saied last month ordered “immediate measures” against sub-Saharan migrants due to an alleged “criminal plan” to alter the demographics of the North African nation.
The speech, according to Magnnah, a college graduate who works as a waitress, “incited physical and verbal aggression” with overtly racist actions carried out without fear of retaliation.
“Leave, what are you still doing here?”, she said people shouted at her in the street.
International human rights organisations claim that Saied’s remarks have stoked attacks, evictions, and other forms of retaliation against migrants, and West African nations have flown hundreds of their scared citizens back home.
The already marginalised black minority in Tunisia has also been impacted.
Ten to fifteen percent of Tunisia’s 12 million citizens are black, and many of them have longstanding ties to the country thanks to relatives who immigrated there as part of the slave trade.
The leader of the anti-racism organisation Mnemty, Saadia Mosbah, cited “five or six attacks on black Tunisians” in recent weeks.
“After the speech, I noticed that black Tunisians were also afraid,” said the 63-year-old former flight attendant, whose campaigning led to an anti-discrimination law being passed in 2018.
Racism “green light”
Mosbah has also received insults in person and online, with many people ordering her to “go home.”
She nevertheless continued to support the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in spite of this.
Among the more than 21,000 sub-Saharians living in Tunisia, according to the most recent official statistics, many of them lately found themselves without work or shelter, Mosbah assisted in supplying basics to the most needy.
Prior to the president’s remarks, Mosbah had maintained that the Tunisian state was neither “racist nor segregationist,” but racism that had been “more or less veiled” has now “rapidly risen to the surface.”
Saied’s speech was “like a green light from the political power to racists”, she said.
Even more unexpected, she found, was that among those who uttered racist views were the country’s so-called “intellectual elite”.
Black Tunisians, according to anthropologist Stephanie Pouessel, were “collateral damage” from Saied’s speech, which she claimed targeted undocumented migrants rather than people of a particular skin tone.
Nonetheless, she continued, “latent but systematic” racism was already present in Tunisia, and it was difficult for black people to obtain high-ranking positions.
Many live in poor areas in the impoverished south.
Most black Tunisians live in “disadvantaged areas and belong to the poorest strata,” wrote researcher Maha Abdelhamid for the EuroMeSCo think tank in 2018.
Many black Tunisians were mute on the subject of migrants after Saied’s “bombshell” remarks, Pouessel continued.
Many feared that speaking up over the rights of migrants would relegate them to a status of foreigners in their country “when they have always struggled to be considered fully Tunisians”, she added.
‘Demand respect’
Former national football captain Radhi Jaidi, denounced xx on social media.
“I am African not because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me,” he wrote on his Instagram profile.
Jaidi said he was “troubled that individuals took the initiative to do the government’s work against illegal immigration with aggression and outside the law”.
He had anticipated that his message would inspire solidarity from other famous people, besides tennis player Ons Jabeur, but there wasn’t much of it.
“My post sought to demand respect for the rights” of migrants, he told AFP, deploring the attacks that “marred Tunisia’s image”.
Jaidi continues to promote Tunisia as “a country of freedom and hospitality” but fears lasting damage.
He cited the “extremely political gesture” made by Senegal’s under-20 football team, who flaunted their dark complexion as they celebrated a recent victory over Tunisia.
