Listening to Our Revolutionary Ghosts: Resisting Anti-Black Racism and Comprador Colonialism in Tunisia

A few weeks after Tunisian President Kais Saied’s racist speech against Black Africans living in Tunisia, we asked Nadia Ben-Youssef to reflect on the current political climate in Tunisia, sixty-seven years after the emancipation of the country and twelve years after its revolution. Building on the living memory of her grandfather, anti-colonial revolutionary Salah Ben Youssef, she offers us tools to reanimate his spirit of Third Worldism for solidarity futures.

There was a time, not so long ago, when North African leaders spoke coherently about revolution. When Palestinian and Black American comrades found refuge in our cities and the heads of our movement for collective liberation articulated the irresistible dreams of the people: an end to colonization and the dismantling of human hierarchy, in all of its forms.

How heartbreaking then, to listen to the racist rhetoric of Tunisian President Kais Saied. How wretched, when we find ourselves, yet again, subjects of a hateful dictator who exploits mass suffering to consolidate power. In February 2023, President Saied testified before the National Security Council about the so-called “hordes”’ of violent, Saharan and sub-Saharan migrants who were committing crimes and posing a demographic threat to Tunisia. His dehumanizing tropes resonated with far too many people, and unleashed a pogrom against Black Tunisians, who make up at least 15% of the country, and the other 21,000 Black Africans living, studying and working in Tunisia. 

Saied’s vitriol that stoked violence against the most marginalized startled both Western pundits as well as some of the President’s remaining supporters among the Tunisian Left. Where was the mild-mannered, former constitutional law professor, elected to steward the country into economic stability and its rightful democratic future? Despite watching Saied freeze Parliament in the summer of 2021 and name himself head of every branch of government, his regime’s descent into the most hateful fear-mongering seemed to come to many as a surprise. 

Many others, of course—especially Black Tunisians—have fiercely challenged Saied’s racist authoritarianism and protests have erupted across Tunisia despite the President’s penchant for brutal political repression. Tunisians taking to the streets again and again are bolstered by a deep knowing of their righteousness and legacy. To these students of Tunisia’s anti-colonial past, descendants of its martyrs and dreamers, Saied’s racialized scapegoating of Black Africans is a dangerous outrage, yes. But importantly, for those organizing for another world, the racism and cowardice of the powerful represents the inevitable.

Saied is but a comprador of the current world order, a guardian of our violent status quo. The preservation of human hierarchy, as grotesque and explicit as such efforts have become, is simply all that colonial ideologies and institutions can accommodate.

We are living a brutal reality that our ancestors anticipated, and until we appreciate that reality for what it is, the radically different world that both inspired and ended their lives will remain but a mirage for us all.

My grandfather Salah Ben Youssef belonged to a movement aiming to change the shape of the world. Born in the multiracial and multireligious island of Djerba under French colonialism in 1907, Salah Ben Youssef began his political life as a law student in the early 1930s, organizing with the Association of North African students in France and serving as a founding member of the first French cell of Destour, Tunisia’s first national political party. Upon his return to Tunisia he joined his former comrade Habib Bourguiba in building the Neo-Destour party, which he would later say to an audience in Karachi, Pakistan, stood for “mass action,” a political project of freedom that depended on the biggest we possible.

As the anti-colonial movement grew in the 1940s and early 1950s, my grandfather and his co-conspirators found themselves regularly imprisoned and exiled. His first exile from 1952-1955 would not only change the course of his life, and that of our family’s, but place him squarely at a crossroads in human history. Over the three years he spent away from his homeland, Ben Youssef traveled the world to promote Tunisian independence. He leveraged the United Nations and challenged the inherent contradictions of the new international mechanisms that were simultaneously codifying human rights and accommodating empire. He felt embraced by newly independent countries across the Middle East as well as Asia, spending time in Pakistan, India, China, and Sri Lanka; he was accountable to his North African comrades in Morocco and Algeria who had gathered in Egypt a few years earlier to commit to collective freedom; and inspired by an international socialist spirit that rejected the capitalist horizon of extraction and racist exploitation.

In April 1955, Salah Ben Youssef found himself in Indonesia as the head of the North African delegation to the historic Bandung Conference. His opening statement to the conference captures his awe and optimism about the gathering, “representing the greatest combination of anti-colonial forces in the world,” and his clarity about the conditions necessary for liberation. Days later, when he received word that Bourguiba had taken advantage of the absence of Tunisia’s revolutionary leaders to unilaterally sign the accords of internal autonomy with France, my grandfather immediately decried the “fake autonomy” and warned that the agreement of incremental, solitary “independence” would have grave consequences for Tunisia and for all colonized peoples. There were only two paths available for the Third World: complete freedom for all in a reordered society, or integration into a liberal world order premised on unfreedom for many. To Salah Ben Youssef’s horror, his beloved country was being seduced into an endless oppression.

Later that year, Salah Ben Youssef finally returned from exile to a divided Tunisia, with two ideological camps emerging from the Neo-Destour party. The Bourguibistes, who were chosen by France to champion the accords and lead the country into an acceptable and subservient “independence”; and the Youssefistes, Tunisian militants, peasants and revolutionaries who resisted the accords and the crumbs offered by their oppressors, believing that only the oppressed could set the terms of their own liberation. So began what many are eager to call an interpersonal conflict between two political leaders, Bourguiba and Ben Youssef, but what was in fact a mass public confrontation of competing values and visions for the future.

Rooted in the belief that they,  the multitude, possessed the power to remake society, the vision of the Youssefistes was irresistible and contagious. Youssefistes rose up across Tunisia, with those from the interior and the south of the country—the most neglected and marginalized regions— leading the uprisings (just as their grandchildren would sixty years later). They rejected the notion of economic subordination to France and refused to demand anything less than full self-determination of all people under colonial rule.

Amid fierce though asymmetrical clashes—France backed their comprador Bourguiba completely—my grandfather was forced to flee in January 1956 and enter his second exile in Cairo. Though he was physically absent, his spirit loomed large. Bourguiba had him sentenced to death twice in absentia and forbade Tunisians from making any contact with my family. Ultimately, Bourguiba used the cruelest, most impotent tool of oppression and ordered my grandfather’s assassination on August 12, 1961.

The day he was killed, my grandfather was scheduled to board a flight to Conakry, Guinea, where he had been invited by victorious revolutionaries. Where Bourguiba stepped into the role of a neo-colonial president and darling of the West, Ben Youssef remained a beloved and trusted figure in the Third World anti-colonial movements. His politics remained that of radical solidarity, of collectivism, of deep love for all people resisting oppression. And having so clearly seen the “day after revolution” and condemned the imminence of neo-colonialism, comrades sought out his counsel. Salah Ben Youssef’s message was a threat to the powerful and a warning to his siblings in struggle: if we fail to firmly and decisively uproot all colonial infrastructure, we will not know freedom.

In the decades since the end of formal colonialism, the West has buoyed Tunisia’s successive dictators (Saied included), and indulged their intolerance for democracy and pluralism. Tunisia, post-independence, has been welcomed into the prevailing economic order whereby the “First World” dictates to the “Third World” how it should structure its society so that the former colonizers can extract the most profit. Despots have found refuge in leading a country where foreign investors are happy to line the coffers of leadership and participate in the silencing of dissent. The Tunisian elite and landowners have benefited enormously from the mandated inequality of racial capitalism, getting rich off of World Bank and IMF-sponsored neoliberal reforms while the masses fall deeper into poverty.

The colonial system today in Tunisia has evolved and adapted, but it continues to require subhumanity, particularly of Black Africans. Where the Third World politic rejected this fundamental premise of racism and required the relinquishing of any power that served to maintain oppression, Tunisia’s continued colonial reality is predicated on widespread anti-Blackness, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, and disdain for the poor. What a cruel, miserable death-struggle that our ancestors were desperate for us to avoid. But while Kais Saied and his ilk will use all means possible to obstruct the promise of collective struggle, we are not destined for our present condition. The political decisions that were made to choose and then refine colonialism rather than abolish it, can be unmade. There is an antidote to the ideological poison of dehumanization.

The inextinguishable charge that always crackles just beneath the surface of oppression, which has electrified the beautiful Tunisian uprisings from 1955 to the 2011 revolution, to the present day, is the human yearning for dignity and collective flourishing.

Salah Ben Youssef described his vision of true independence as “fundamentally democratic in spirit, and essentially social in character.” A future of care, self-determination, and accountability; of centering those most marginalized so that all people can live in the fullness of who we are and co-create healthy, safe and joyful societies. Solidarity is the answer and, despite what our appointed leaders will have us believe, complete freedom is our inheritance. ■