Under scrutiny: Tunisia’s President Kais Saied. (Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images))
According to Tunisia’s President Kais Saied, the biggest problems facing his country is not the deteriorating economy, the chronic unemployment or his own efforts to consolidate power within the office of the presidency, which has been described by his critics as a lurch towards authoritarianism.
Instead, Tunisia’s greatest threat comes from a “criminal arrangement” to “change the demographic composition of Tunisia” by flooding the country with refugees and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. President Saied has offered no evidence for this claim, which echoes the so-called “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory popular among far-right and white supremacist movements in Europe and North America.
The premise here is that there is a deliberate effort to eradicate white populations by replacing them with non-white populations.
“Hordes of illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are still arriving, with all the violence, crime and unacceptable practices that entails,” the president said on 21 February, calling on security forces to “quickly put an end to this phenomenon”.
The consequences of the president’s words for the country’s estimated population of 21 000 African migrants were brutal and immediate.
“Saied’s scapegoating statement … has opened a floodgate of racialised terror and violence in Tunisia that previously bubbled just beneath the surface,” reported New Lines magazine.
“Reports filled social media and private WhatsApp groups of the targeting of black people — whether from sub-Saharan countries or black Tunisians — with verbal and physical abuse.”
Yasin Ahmed*, a refugee from Darfur who lives in Tunis, told The Continent that the country had, overnight, become dramatically more hostile to black people.
“Yes, being black, you feel fear always, especially at night,” he said. “Some people throw stones at you, sometimes they call you a monkey. My friends have been beaten. There is a lot of discrimination, and I can’t describe it all to you because I can’t stand it when I talk about it.”
Some migrants have reported being fired from their jobs, and at least a thousand have been kicked out of their homes. Hundreds of people have sought protection outside the Tunis embassies of Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Mali as well as the office of the International Organisation for Migration.
Various African states are chartering flights home for their citizens.
A dangerous divide
Saied was elected president in 2019 and in 2021 enacted what political scientists describe as a “self-coup” — he used the Covid-19 pandemic to dismantle democratic protections and seize what are effectively dictatorial powers. In the past weeks, these powers were used to arrest prominent critics and opposition leaders.
“The political witch-hunts and racist manhunts are two sides of the same coin: a new, dangerous and highly destabilising dictatorship is consolidating itself in Tunisia,” said Monica Marks, a professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi.
“Saied has no economic plan and Tunisians’ standard of living is in freefall. So he’s scapegoating journalists, judges, lawyers, political critics and the bodies of the most vulnerable — including black immigrants and refugees,” she said. While doing so, the president is exploiting a familiar, populist fault line.
His political allies, the far-right Tunisian Nationalist Party, use the term ajasiyin — derived from the Arabic for “Africans south of the Sahara” — as an insult. For them, and for the president’s other supporters, “to be Tunisian is to be Arab and Muslim, all of which are antonymous to being African,” writes Shreya Parikh in the Review of African Political Economy.
“By extension, to be Tunisian is to not be black.”
Not everybody is buying what the Tunisian president is selling. Civil society groups have condemned the president’s anti-African rhetoric and mobilised to support migrants in need of assistance.
Last week, hundreds of protesters marched through central Tunis chanting “no to racism”.
Esperance de Tunis, the country’s oldest and most successful football club, last month released a limited edition “Africa kit” in what appears to be a pointed symbol of solidarity.
Perhaps the president’s populist message is not quite as popular as he would like to think.
*Not his real name.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.