In February 2023, Tunisian president Kais Saied warned of \u2018African hordes\u2019 bringing \u2018demographic change\u2019 that would render Tunisia \u2018just another African country that doesn\u2019t belong to the Arab and Islamic nations\u2019. A north African expression of white supremacy underpins Saied\u2019s rhetoric: African, Arab, and Islamic are all racialised terms here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Saied\u2019s racist remarks<\/a> are not an anomaly. Recently, Tunisia has seen mob violence against black migrants and citizens<\/a>, the forced displacement<\/a> of sub-Saharan Africans to the Tunisian-Libyan border and the signing of a new \u2018strategic partnership<\/a>\u2019 to combat undocumented migration to the EU. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a number of factors driving this violence, including Tunisia\u2019s dire economic situation, in which minorities and migrants are easy scapegoats. But it is also essential to understand local antiblack racism and constructions of whiteness in the country and region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Importantly, there were local anti-racism protests<\/a> in response to Saied\u2019s remarks. There is wider anger against the president, who in 2021 suspended and later dissolved parliament and has been arresting<\/a> opponents ever since. But the protests were also part of longer-term efforts to acknowledge and resist a broader problem<\/a> of anti-black racism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Black Tunisians comprise at least a tenth of the population and have long complained<\/a> of social and economic marginalisation, as well as being unrepresented<\/a> in public or symbolic spaces. These underexamined racial hierarchies must be accounted for in any consideration of Tunisian, broader north African and African commitments to a genuine liberatory pan-continentalism that offers a path to social transformation and freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Europe, north Africans are distinctly\u00a0constructed as not white<\/a>. But in north Africa, as in other postcolonial contexts, whiteness also takes on local meanings. These constructions of whiteness, shaped by the local and global, do not map identically onto European colonial constructions, but they do interact with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are shaped by local histories of racialised enslavement via the trans-Saharan slave trade, which historically was not taught in the Tunisian national syllabus, and shifting discourses around Arabness and Amazighness as well as whiteness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is essential to confront the racial and economic structures that underpin north African societies<\/p>\n\n\n\n Structural attachments to whiteness, white supremacy and Arab- Islamic supremacy are not, then, new. They were evident in the ambivalence<\/a> of some north African approaches to pan-Africanism \u2013 for example, in Egypt \u2013 even when pan-Africanism was at its most vibrant<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, however, such attachments are taking new forms. It\u2019s an anxious moment in which constructions of whiteness are latched onto as a route to social and economic capital. This \u2018aspirational whiteness\u2019 assumes it is possible to \u2018achieve\u2019 whiteness and, in doing so, attain a better life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In reality, it is always contingent, temporary and relational<\/a>. It isn\u2019t European whiteness, which is more tangible globally, meaning that attachments to north African whiteness tend to be anxious ones, blending colourism and class discrimination to approximate a perceived position of superiority to others in the global south.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historically, north African states and leaders, including most famously Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba and Algeria under Houari Boumediene, were active proponents of pan- Africanist projects. Beyond state politics, anti-colonial movements, made up of artists, intellectuals, and activists have envisioned and articulated alternative African futures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pan-African Cultural Festival<\/a> that took place in Algiers in July 1969, for example, reflected how north Africa states were a space of global connections, including for black American and Caribbean artists to escape<\/a> white supremacy and connect to other anti-colonial spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is important to note, however, that especially in the cases of statesmen and political leaders, being a proponent of pan-Africanism does not inherently equate to anti-racism; it is possible to be simultaneously a pan-Africanist and a white-Arab supremacist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One need only look to the late Libyan head of state Gaddafi, who famously pushed for a United States of Africa while at the same time using anti-black slurs to describe other African leaders. In a moment not dissimilar to Saied\u2019s, Gaddafi called for\u00a0EU funding<\/a>\u00a0so that Libya could prevent the \u2018threat\u2019 he described of Europe becoming \u2018no longer European, and even black\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a coexistence of a superficial north African pan-Africanism and anti-blackness seen in how blackness is repeatedly\u00a0constructed<\/a>\u00a0as non-indigenous to north Africa. This is also co-constructed with the \u2018naturalised\u2019 geographic division of the Sahara desert that supposedly splits \u2018north\u2019 and \u2018sub-Saharan\u2019 Africa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A superficial, anti-black north African pan-Africanism is co-constructed with the \u2018naturalised\u2019 geographic division of the Sahara desert that supposedly splits \u2018north\u2019 and \u2018sub-Saharan\u2019 Africa <\/p>\n\n\n\n We see it frequently, for example, in the practice among many in north Africa of referring to black (im)migrants as \u2018Africans\u2019 without any greater specificity, both homogenising people of varied origins and simultaneously robbing black north Africans of a claim to native national belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was visible when Saied doubled down on his anti-migrant rhetoric in a subsequent press conference. Standing alongside the Guinea-Bissau president, Umaro Sissoco Embal\u00f3, Saied said the \u2018unacceptable\u2019 problem was the \u2018malicious tongues\u2019 interpreting his words as racist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Embal\u00f3 responded, \u2018I wouldn\u2019t believe that you, the president of Tunisia, the country of [Habib] Bourguiba [first president of Tunisia], could be xenophobic or racist. You yourself are African.\u2019 Saied\u2019s response came quickly: \u2018I am African and I am proud to be\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tension between Embal\u00f3 and Saied points to the ambivalence in the inclusion of north Africa in Africa. Does African mean black? Does it mean, as Embal\u00f3 intimates, incapable of racism? How can Saied\u2019s Africanness be both a clear fact and bear clarifying? It is the affective force of whiteness as aspiration that structures this ambivalence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A young Tunisian man speaking to\u00a0Al Jazeera<\/a>\u00a0in July exemplifies this aspirational force. He gives his name as \u2018Zidan Chouchen\u2019, a racialised joke with which he distances himself from his black co-nationals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This 17-year-old is saving to cross to Europe by boat but sees himself as better than sub-Saharan Africans who come to Tunisia. \u2018For us, when we go to Europe we have an object: to rent a house and build a new life. For them, when they come here, they just want to start fights, take money and act like gangsters.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Broadly xenophobic, yes, but these ideas are more specifically legible through anxious claims to whiteness that are both global in reach and rooted in deeply local vernaculars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some stress that an\u00a0end to Saied\u2019s regime<\/a>\u00a0is a necessary first step. But it is also essential to confront the racial and economic structures that underpin north African societies. It is only by doing so that the radical promise of pan-Africanism and north Africa\u2019s role within it can be achieved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leila Tayeb looks at anti-black, anti-migrant sentiment in Tunisia and north African constructions of \u2018whiteness\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":40339,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[278,2587,244],"tags":[2737],"class_list":["post-40594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-africa","category-authoritarianism-far-right","category-race-racism","tag-leila-tayeb"],"yoast_head":"\nAspirational whiteness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
North Africans are African<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Tension<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This article first appeared in Issue #241\u00a0Pan-Africanism<\/em>. Subscribe<\/a> today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"