The global wave of anti-racism protests sparked by the US police killing of George Floyd has barely touched North Africa, despite everyday discrimination in a region with a long slave-trading history.
Black citizens in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who come to work, study or try to reach Europe, say they suffer endemic day-to-day racism.
“Floyd’s death awakened the anger and rage dormant within us,” said Fabrice, an undocumented Cameroonian in his 40s who lives in Algiers, adding that it twisted “the knife in the wound.”
Photo: AFP
However, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, most observers agree, has not triggered a major debate on racism or police violence against black Africans within the Maghreb region itself.
Only Tunis saw a small demonstration early last month of about 200 locals and foreigners, at the call of the association Mnemty.
The protest was “a message for African Americans from Mother Africa to say ‘We are with you,’” said Mnemty leader Saadia Mosbah, a dark-skinned Tunisian.
However, in Morocco and Algeria the BLM movement has generated only a few messages of solidarity online — not enough to challenge a long-standing culture of silence about race.
Most often the racism is verbal, but “sometimes words hurt more than being hit,” said Aisha, a woman from Niger who lives in Algiers.
She said black people often endure slurs such as kahlouche, “black” in Arabic, or Mamadou, a common name in West Africa. In the worst cases, they are called “Ebola and now COVID,” she said.
Her seven-year-old son refused to go back to school after classmates told him “you don’t belong here,” Aisha said.
“We have to wage a permanent struggle against these verbal abuses,” Algerian sociologist Mohamed Saib Musette said. “Some Algerians forget that they themselves are Africans.”
Interracial marriages are rare in North Africa, and “very few TV stars, civil servants or political leaders are dark-skinned,” he said.
Over the years there have been occasional campaigns that echo the goals of the BLM movement.
In Morocco, a coalition of associations in 2014 launched an anti-racism campaign in support of sub-Saharan migrants with the message Massmiytich Azzi! (“Don’t call me a black man”).
After a string of attacks in Tunisia, including a violent assault against an Ivorian woman, Mnemty successfully lobbied parliament into adopting a law against hate speech in October 2018.
The Algerian parliament followed suit in April of this year, reflecting the fact that the reality of racism “is there and must be fought,” Musette said.
Musette said the priority must be to “decondition” children and teach them to avoid derogatory terms for black North Africans, such as abid or oussif (“slave”).
Slavery was first formally abolished in the region by Tunisia in 1846. French-colonized Algeria partially followed suit two years later, while Morocco under French mandate only did so in 1922.
In the absence of official data, non-government groups estimate there are more than 200,000 African foreigners in Algeria, and tens of thousands in both Morocco and Tunisia.
Having often arrived in convoys or caravans through the desert, they typically end up working in the informal sector, as cleaners or construction workers, no matter what qualifications they earned in their home countries.
Algeria and Tunisia bar foreign Africans from obtaining residency papers unless they are students, but Morocco has granted residency rights to about 50,000 people, mostly from West Africa, since 2014.
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