Over 1,000 Tunisians protested in Tunis on February 25, 2023 following
racist remarks by President Kais Saied [photo credit: Erin Clare Brown]
Since the end of colonisation, immigrating to France, getting a
steady job there and securing the red French passport has been
considered a standard of great success, for both the poor and the
privileged. Times have changed and the coloniser has lost much of his
influence as new world powers have arisen but many North Africans retain
a static image of France as a superpower. Thus, bi-national North
Africans are considered successful based on the above criteria, and yet
are made fun of, even in sitcoms, for their boastfulness in their
homelands, pretending to have forgotten their mother tongue and only
speaking French. This “privileged” category of North African immigrants,
who identify more with French people thanks to the gains they’ve made,
choose to take the same stance as the Rassemblement National, to assert
themselves as part of the 'winning team' and dissociate themselves from
the losing one. The legal immigrants are attracted to the RN’s
xenophobic ideas, while turning a blind eye to the fact that one third
of foreign doctors are of North African origin and each year over 600
Moroccan engineers head to Europe, most of them to France.
How to explain this contradictory frame of mind that consists of
denying African immigrants’ contribution to the wellbeing of France
while rejecting immigration’s collateral damage, illegal migrants, and
demonising those who are a part of it? The acceptance of such an
ideology mirrors the ideology of the colonisers, where all existing
material and human resources are directed towards a sole purpose:
serving the white man’s interests.
Unfortunately, this mindset, inherited from the colonisation era and
based at its core on the supremacy of the one with the lighter skin, has
been internalised by North Africans of the former French colonies. This
far-right ideology, based on xenophobia and racism, has always been
limited on the intellectual level. But that hasn’t stopped politicians
from embracing it, mimicking pretty much the same sorts of statements,
sometimes only slightly rebranded. For instance, while the Tunisian
president Kais Saied, last year, put forward a “Great Replacement” theory, scapegoating Sub-Saharan African immigrants, Rassemblement National candidates made anti-semitic statements scapegoating Jews. Similarly the new Tunisian constitution,
written by the Tunisian president, states that candidates in the
presidential elections should be "born of father and mother, paternal
and maternal grandfathers, all remaining of Tunisian nationality without
discontinuity" while the RN’s president announced
his willingness to prohibit dual nationals from occupying “strategic”
state positions, out of fear of foreign interference. Another
commonality between these xenophobic discourses, is that they have
triggered waves of violence in both countries; an increase in anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic attacks was noticeable in France, while Sub-Saharan immigrants were also massively victims of violence.
The surge of the RN shows that a racist ideology, based on white
supremacy, is still occupying an important part in the collective French
psyche. That this ideology, left behind by colonisers, is also still
prominent in North Africans’ minds, is paradoxical given the trauma
colonisation has left in them. This ideology, in which the stronger
endeavours to dominate and deny the weakest, is full of flaws yet it is
embraced in Europe and embedded in those who are the descendants of the
colonised in the Maghreb. To both, I say ‘we are a human community
living in this world that we’ve been sharing for millenia; we ascend
together and we fall together.’
Members can leave comments about this newsletter on the Arab Digest website