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Becoming the 'Abid Lives and Social Origins in Southern Tunisia

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Becoming the 'Abid Lives and Social Origins in Southern Tunisia Antropologia della contemporaneità In 2011, after the popular uprising overthrew former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in Tunisia several issues came to the fore: among them, racism target- ing “black” individuals. Few black rights associations emerged, and their strug- Scaglioni Marta Marta Scaglioni gle culminated in the promulgation of a law punishing racist acts and words in October 2019. The step is historical, and stems from Tunisia’s foreseeing policy concerning human and civil rights. In 1846, Tunisia was the first country to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire and in the Middle Becoming the ‘Abid Eastern world. Becoming the ‘Abid addresses the issue of the legacy of slavery in a southern Tunisian governorate, where racism towards “black” individuals is Livesecoming the and Social Origins in Southern Tunisia still a painful experience and takes the form of professional, educational, and B marital discrimination. Referring to the concept of “structural inequality”, the book goes beyond the simplistic idea that race is only related to phenotype, taking distance from the Western racial concepts, and highlights how processes of racialization are contextual, processual, and changing constructions. Marta Scaglioni is a PostDoc at the University of Milan-Bicocca and holds a PhD in Co-Tutelle ‘Abid at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Milan-Bicocca. She has worked extensively in North Africa, specifically Egypt and Tunisia. From 2014 to 2018, she worked on the heritage of slavery in southern Tunisia in the frame of ERC-Grant SWAB (Shadows of Slavery in West Tunisia in Southern Origins and Social . Lives Africa and Beyond) at the University of Milan-Bicocca. Currently her research interests com- prise ageing processes of Egyptian migrants in Milan. Cover: ‘Abid Ghbonton women going to the seashores to collect babūch (clams). Picture by Jenny Tsiropoulou. www.ledizioni.it € 28 Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – 2052 – 390713894. Zugl.: Bayreuth, Univ., BIGSAS, Diss., 2019. L'opera è stata pubblicata con il contributo del Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione "Riccardo Massa" dell'Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. Antropologia della contemporaneità Marta Scaglioni Becoming the ‘Abid Lives and Social Origins in Southern Tunisia Ledizioni © 2020 Ledizioni LediPublishing Via Alamanni, 11 – 20141 Milano – Italy www.ledizioni.it [email protected] Marta Scaglioni, Becoming the ‘Abid. Lives and Social Origins in Southern Tunisia Prima edizione: Maggio 2020 ISBN cartaceo 978-88-5526-197-5 ISBN ePub 978-88-5526-199-9 In copertina: ‘Abid Ghbonton women going to the seashores to collect babūch (clams). Picture by Jenny Tsiropoulou. Progetto grafico: ufficio grafico Ledizioni Informazioni sul catalogo e sulle ristampe dell’editore: www.ledizioni.it Le riproduzioni a uso differente da quello personale potranno avvenire, per un nu- mero di pagine non superiore al 15% del presente volume, solo a seguito di specifica autorizzazione rilasciata da Ledizioni. Table of contents Acknowledgments 15 Introduction 17 Post-2011 debates on race and racism in Tunisia 17 Ethnic boundaries in southern Tunisia 21 Southern Tunisian post-slavery hierarchies 23 Gosbah 28 Methodology 30 Outline 34 Transliteration, names, and pictures 34 PART ONE 1. Notions and debates about slavery and race in Africa and in the Ottoman Empire 39 African slaveries 39 Islamic slaveries 43 Race in North Africa 51 Ottoman and Tunisian slavery 58 2. Abolition in Muslim countries and in Tunisia 67 Muslim abolitionism 67 Abolition and “collective manumission” 71 Tunisia’s early abolition 74 What happened to freed slaves? 79 Wala’ 85 PART TWO Becoming the ‘Abid 3. Freeing the ‘abid 99 Gosbah and the ‘Abid 99 People without an Arab origin 110 Becoming the ‘Abid 112 The seven brothers, or the ‘Abid Ghbonton’s foundation story 116 From slavery to wala’ 122 4. Marrying the ‘abid 125 The origin of “blackness” 127 ‘Abid Ghbonton marriages and the tendency to isogamy 129 Interracial marriages 131 Hypo- and hyper-descent 136 Race-evasion strategies 139 5. Working as ‘abid 145 Mohammed and Sana 145 Menial jobs 149 Sidi Bilal’s legacy 151 Stambeli 155 Tayfa, the prestige of the ‘Abid 157 Tayfa, the modesty of the ‘Abid 163 Generational gaps 166 6. Today’s ‘abid 169 Babūch, the gold of the sea 170 Djerba, the land of milk and honey 175 We don’t know how to do harga 180 2016 demonstrations 183 7. Post 2011 activism 187 The ‘Abid Ghbonton and black rights activists 187 The category of “black” Tunisians 191 The nation-building process 193 The homogenisation of the category of “black” Tunisians 205 After 2011: rise and development of black rights activism 198 Black rights activists’ discourse 208 Recent developments 211 Conclusion 213 Glossary 219 Bibliography 225 Notes 243 To Zeira, Zohra, Monia, Khaula, Leyla, Shaadia, Marwa, Zohra, and the little Raudha, with the hope that your pain is rewarded in this life. To countryside women, and then to my mother and to my grandmother, for the privilege of having inherited their values. In April 2019 seven Tunisian female workers died when the pickup truck which carried them to the countryside collided with a minivan. With the wish nobody will ever cry mothers, sisters, or daughters for something like this again. To the little one who came to the world with a bent nose, Arturo. Acknowledgments This book would have not been written without the financial support of the ERC-grant 313737 SWAB (Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond)1. Special thanks go to the Principal Investigator, Prof. Alice Bellagamba, and to the research group which has tutored me for over four years: Antonio de Lauri, Laura Menin, Marco Gardini, Valerio Colosio, Luca Nevola, Gloria Carlini, Claudia Pandolfo, Vivana Toro Matuk, Raul Zecca Castel, Ismailou Balde, Luca Rimoldi, Alessandra Brivio, and all the PhD students, researchers, and members of the administrative staff at the University of Milan-Bicocca. The other half of my tutoring has been expertly carried out by my tutor at the University of Bayreuth, Prof. Georg Klute, and by all my colleagues and professors at BIGSAS (Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies)2. A heart-felt “thank you” goes to Emnet Tadesse Woldegiorgis. My thesis has been patiently read and discussed by Prof. Ann McDougall, Prof. Paul Lovejoy, Prof. Sandra Greene, Prof. Bruce Hall, Prof. Ismael Montana, Prof. Julia O’Connell Davidson, Prof. Joel Quirk, Prof. Judith Scheele, and I feel very grateful for the privilege of meeting them. Along these years, I encountered wonderful and inspiring scholars, such as Bruno Véras and Özgül Özdemir, and I would like to acknowledge the impact of their enthusiasm on my work. I would also like to thank my supportive family, my friends, and my neighbours in Milan. A special acknowledgment goes to Sylvia for their careful editing, and to Eva, Riad, and Marco, for the help with translations and transliterations. Enlisting all the people who hosted, welcomed, and helped me in Tunisia would be impossible. Thanks to Sana, Omar, Najiba and to their lovely family, to Samy for his caring aid, to Mariam and Selma for their work, and to the great Italian community in Tunisia. I am leaving out a lot of people, but not intentionally. Thanks to the ‘Abid Ghbonton for opening their arms and welcoming me unreservedly. Thanks to Chaker, Ramzy, and Mohammed for their inesti- mable time. Thanks to all women in Gosbah who never judged my “other- ness” but converted me to Islam behind my back, taking care that my soul would end up in the janna, the Islamic paradise. Introduction Post-2011 debates on race and racism in Tunisia After mass protests overthrew the former dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011), a renewed sense of freedom of expression brought to the fore issues previously considered taboo in pre-revolutionary Tunisia. The consciousness that human rights were no longer borrowed Western values but inalienable rights for all (Bahri 2014) stimulated, among other things, discourses on ethnicities and minorities (Christie, Masad 2013). A specific debate on racism (‘unṣuriyya) and discrimination (tamyīz) against “black” people entered the national debate, profiting from the climate of loosened censorship in the media and in politics. Racism and the existence of an eth- nic minority in Tunisia – “black” Tunisians but also “black” foreign nation- als – began being addressed by talk shows on television1 and online articles2, and slowly gained prominence. A foreword is necessary at this point. My understanding of “blackness” in today’s Tunisia refers to “social blackness”, since it is more a socio-cul- tural construction (Wade 2015, p. 3) rather than a physical, measurable characteristic. Racial constructions will be treated in this book as empirical conventions, or as a «local ethnography» (Hall 2011, p. 30), and therefore the terms “black” and “white” will be put in quotation marks throughout3. Arguably, without the political implications of the so-called “Arab Spring”4, no debate on racism and racial problems would have been pos- sible, and probably not even not even my research5. Yet, racial issues and their impact on the discourses on human rights have been neglected by post-2011 academic literature, which has focused mainly on women’s rights (Marks 2013) and on the rise of Islamist movements (Merone, Cavatorta 2013; Perkins 2013; Christie, Masad 2013), leaving ethnic minorities in the background. Little scholarly attention has been devoted to the changes in racial thought in North African countries (Bahri 2014), and very few studies have tackled the current debate on “blackness” in Tunisia (Pouessel 2012a; Pouessel 2012b; Scaglioni 2017; Abdelhamid, Elfargi, and Elwaer 2017). Becoming the ‘Abid However, in civil society, several black rights associations have emerged and started addressing the phenomenon of racism against “blacks” in Tunisia, bringing racial problems to the fore.
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