Sub-Saharan Africans desperate to leave Tunisia after attacks

Advocacy groups have documented an increase in attacks against sub-Saharan Africans following comments from Tunisia’s president. Presidential incitement Yanga said her life in Tunisia has progressively worsened, particularly following President Saied’s February 21 comments at the country’s National Security Council, in which he said migration from sub-Saharan Africa aimed to change Tunisia’s national identity. “The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations,” Saied, who has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn since suspending parliament and dissolving the government in July 2021, said. Those comments, and Saied’s rhetoric since then, have been denounced by the president’s opponents and the African Union, and have led to what has been described by advocacy groups as a racist backlash against sub-Saharan Africans living in Tunisia, as well as Black Tunisians, particularly on social media. The far-right Tunisian National Party has also led a campaign calling for the expulsion of sub-Saharan African immigrants, framing immigration to Tunisia from other parts of Africa as being part of an effort to initiate demographic change in the country, an idea that has parallels with the European far right’s “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that immigration from Africa and Asia is aimed at replacing white people in Europe.