Negrophobia is a scourge to be fought in North Africa. Racist mob attacks on migrants or students from sub-Saharan Africa, everyday discrimination against Black nationals, slavery in Libya: an awareness has been growing for some years now, notably in Morocco or Tunisia. This racism is not recent, and many thinkers, such as the sociologist Ibn Khaldoun, contributed to it.
Negrophobia in North Africa, a scourge to be fought
To fight this calamity effectively, one must still acknowledge this historical baggage and also discover the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa, notably that of the brilliant Malian empire…
"The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has not entered history enough".Nicolas Sarkozy
This sentence from Nicolas Sarkozy, delivered in a speech at the University of Dakar on 26 July 2007, would spark a major controversy in France. What his words designated, obviously, was sub-Saharan Africa, the Africa peopled by Black men. One might think this negative view of the African continent belongs exclusively to Westerners, but it does not. In the Maghreb too, sub-Saharan Africa, its culture and its inhabitants are looked down on.
How is it to be explained?
The reasons for negrophobia are many.
The legacy of slavery
As with the Europeans, slavery inevitably distorted relations. For several centuries, millions of slaves were sold in North Africa to be used as household servants, convict laborers, soldiers or in the navy. The inevitable result is a form of condescension inherited from that period. In Tunisia, for example, the word "oussif", meaning servant, has come down through the centuries and some still use it to refer to Black people.
The retreat into racial identity
The second reason is quite simply racial. Many Maghrebis unconsciously lay claim to their Arabness, believing it would grant them superiority. If only they knew that Maghrebis are themselves looked down on, in Europe as much as in the Arabian Peninsula, by other racists… If only they also knew that this Arabness is merely cultural and certainly not genetic, as many scientists have proved in recent years. The average Maghrebi is the result of a multitude of origins, so often has the region been invaded in the course of history. Still, this crude racism and this persistent negrophobia hamper relations between Black and white people in the Maghreb. Mixed marriages are thus rare and often complicated. Racial mixing is frowned upon, and there is a cult of whiteness that cannot be denied.
The weight of certain Maghrebi thinkers
The last reason is intellectual. Many Maghrebi thinkers disparaged Black people and their culture, displaying an ethnocentrism that is laughable to say the least. The paganism of these people, or their very recent conversion to Islam, also reinforced that feeling of superiority and confirmed them in their negrophobia. Such is the case, notably, of the historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldoun, one of the fathers of modern sociology. The intellectual, born in Tunis in 1332, thus writes in his introduction to universal history, Al-Muqaddima, published in 1377:
"South of this Nile there exists a Black people known by the name of Lemlem. They are pagans who bear marks on their faces and on their temples. The inhabitants of Ghana and of Tekrour make incursions into this people's territory to take prisoners. The merchants to whom they sell their captives take them to the Maghreb, a country where most of the slaves belong to this Negro race. Beyond the land of the Lemlem, in a southerly direction, one meets a population of no great size; the men who make it up resemble wild animals more than rational beings. They live in wooded marshes and in caves; their food consists of grasses and seeds that have undergone no preparation; sometimes they even devour one another: and so they do not deserve to be counted among men.".Ibn Khaldoun
Ibn Khaldoun then returns to slavery in this same work, stating, in volume IV of his book, that
"It is true that most Negroes grow accustomed to servitude easily; but this disposition results, as we have said elsewhere, from an inferiority of organization that brings them close to brute animals".Ibn Khaldoun
Obviously, these remarks, shocking to say the least, are to be placed in context and do not call into question other work by the sociologist. Still, it clearly appears that the negrophobia of the Maghrebis has run through history. The lynchings suffered by sub-Saharan migrants and the discrimination suffered by Black Maghrebis bear witness to it.
A growing awareness
Happily, civil society in these countries is responding in order to fight this scourge, and in Tunisia this has even led to a bill against racial discrimination. It provides for penalties against anyone inciting hatred and racial discrimination. It also provides for the setting up of a commission whose remit will include developing policies to fight discrimination effectively.
The task will be an arduous one. As the Colombian lawyer and essayist Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe, who campaigns in France against white supremacism, very rightly recalled:
"It must be understood that even if racial equality was upheld by the precepts of the Islamic religion, in fact the literature, the arts and the folklore of Muslim peoples expressed the opposite. This is how it comes about that, very quickly, Muslim literature began to convey a repellent image of Black people, whose skin color, associated with their servile condition, became a burden heavier than servitude itself. Most Islamized Black people, women and men, ended up subscribing to this image of inferiority, quickly spread through Arab-Muslim culture".Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe, Victimes des esclavagistes musulmans, chrétiens et juifs. Racialisation et banalisation d'un crime contre l'humanité, éditions Anibwe, 2012
Education, the only lasting weapon
So how can this "repellent image of Black people" be fought? Education is certainly the only effective means. Studying the Eastern slave trade and its horrors is essential to begin with (razzias, castration of men, executions…). This 13-century trade (from the 7th to the 19th century), which concerns the whole of the Arab-Muslim world, brought Black people by the millions into the countries of North Africa in particular.
It would also be necessary, in a second stage, to discover African cultures. Who knows, for instance, that Picasso's cubism drew its inspiration from African art and its masks?
Who knows that Malian civilization was a forerunner in the matter of human rights?
By Jean-Riad Kechaou
A history teacher in the Paris suburbs, Jean-Riad Kechaou is the author of a socio-historical essay on the Bosquets estate in Montfermeil, the neighborhood of Ladj Ly's film Les Misérables. An activist against discrimination, he is also an opposition member of the Montfermeil town council and a public-speaking trainer working with young people in Seine-Saint-Denis.
