Black Tunisians and Racism in the Discourse of National Media, Urban Elites and Local Rural Actors: the Case Of ‘Abid Ghbonton

Pre-revolutionary Tunisia was marked by a strong state, where the personalization of power, the fast pace of modernization, a state hostile to and distrustful of civil society silenced public debates and left behind marginal areas. The strong pace of modernization and the rapid and forced transition from a conservative society to a Western-oriented, secularized one has had different grips on different social, geographical, and cultural areas. In this paper I intend to demonstrate that modernization in Tunisia has been carried out mainly by civil (non-military), urban (non-rural), secular (non-conservative) elites, in a rapid and top-down way. The cleavage between elites trained in cities and actors from marginal areas, especially the South and the desert, is blatant in the mobilization against racial discrimination, which has been on the top of the agenda of media and advocates in the last post-revolutionary years, profiting from a renewed sentiment of freedom of expression and debate. While former dictators promulgated a deep modernization, secularization, and westernization of the country, propagating an embellished image of Tunisia where stability and peace would reign, discrimination based on skin color targeted mostly Black Tunisians, unmasking the bitter reality of dark-skinned citizens still bearing the legacy of slavery. After 2011 the debate focused on the case of ‘Abid Ghbonton (‘abid stands in Arabic for slave), a 5,000 Black inhabitants community in the Southern countryside cut off by their White counterpart and void of access to basic resources such as grazing land and water. Urban human rights advocates soon developed a discourse around the ‘Abid Ghbonton based on a urban, secularized, and Westernized concept of human rights, which was however promptly rejected by the ‘Abid Ghbonton themselves, unmasking a deep cleavage between countryside and cities, South and North, Western-like secularized activism and a conservative society.