Break the silence on North African xenophobia against black migrants

The deafening silence across the continent about the xenophobic maltreatment of black African migrants by the three North African countries of Tunisia, Libya and Morocco needs urgently to be broken. These widespread abuses have been enabled by the EU, which has "externalised" its border policies over the past decade, paying autocrats billions of euros to keep Africans out of "Fortress Europe".

This issue was brought into sharp relief in February 2023 when the repressive Tunisian president, Kais Saied, made a hate-filled speech scapegoating vulnerable black African migrant workers, students and asylum seekers residing in his country, thus inciting violence against them. Seeking to mask his own governance failures, Saied complained about "hordes of irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa" entering Tunisia "with all the violence, crime and unacceptable practices that entails".

In an echo of the "great replacement theory" embraced by many of President Donald Trump's white Christian supporters, Saied described the situation as "unnatural" and part of a criminal design to "alter the demographic makeup" of his country and transform it into "just another African country that doesn't belong to the Arab and Islamic nations anymore". The Tunisian Nationalist Party openly champions these views, which it regularly airs in the national media.

What followed from Saied's exhortation were pogroms by baton- and knife-wielding vigilante mobs against Cameroonian, Nigerian, Guinean, Ghanaian, Sierra Leonean, Burkinabè, Ivorian and other black residents, and the theft of their possessions and money. The Tunisian police and national guard turned the other way, even sometimes arresting black Africans who had been assaulted, and violating them.

Security forces rounded up more than 840 African residents across the country. After the Saied government threatened to punish anyone housing "illegal aliens", many landlords expelled their African tenants, forcing many onto the streets, into shelters and the notorious Ouardia detention centre in Tunis, where widespread abuses have been reported. Atrocities by the country's securocrats have included torture, rape of women, beating of children, and the dumping of migrants in the desert, abandoned to die.

Guineans and Malians were "voluntarily" sent back to their countries. At first Saied's regime spent two weeks denying these attacks, before an international outcry forced "new measures" to expedite legal residency for migrants and repatriate those who wished to return home.

Neighbouring Libya has remained divided since the Nato-instigated demise of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Its EU-funded coastguard continues to intercept migrant boats trying to reach Europe. Similar brutal violence is then frequently visited on African asylum seekers in squalid, overcrowded detention camps, often run by psychopathic militias. Torture, rape and starvation are widespread in these camps. Libya has further seen "slave auctions" and multiple "disappearances" of migrants, with many also perishing in the Mediterranean.

Further west, Morocco has engaged in the brutalisation of African asylum seekers, with Moroccan and Spanish security forces condemned by NGOs for forced returns of African migrants in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, bordering Morocco. In a notorious incident in June 2022 at least 37 migrants - mostly Sudanese and South Sudanese - were killed while trying to scale a fence from Morocco into Spanish-held Melilla. Amnesty International has accused Moroccan and Spanish securocrats of "widespread use of unlawful force".

Several asylum seekers later reported that highly militarised Moroccan border guards had trapped them at the wall, throwing stones at them and seizing their food and money, before attacking them with teargas and rubber bullets. Rabat was accused of hastily burying the dead without a proper investigation. This time, the AU at least expressed "deep shock and concern at the violent and degrading treatment of African migrants".

This article originally appeared in Business Day on 8 September 2025.