The beating of three Ivorians in the streets of Tunis has brought the issue of racism back the spotlight in Tunisia. On August 23, several Tunisians in their 20s started throwing stones at a pregnant woman from Côte d'Ivoire. When her husband and an Ivorian passer-by tried to defend her, the situation quickly degenerated into a fight. The two Ivorian men suffered cuts to their heads and faces. Authorities have launched an investigation.

Daily insults

"This is not the first time that such a racist assault takes place in Tunisia; it happens often," Ghayda Jeanne Thabet, communication officer for the Tunisian Association for Minority Support (ATSM), told InfoMigrants. Last May, the ATSM provided testimony from a student from Burkina Faso who said young Tunisians insulted her and threw eggs at her. In late December 2016, three Congolese were stabbed in downtown Tunis.

If physical assaults are common, racist slurs are a daily occurrence, Thabet said. "Monkey," "dirty negro," "slave," are words that black-skinned people hear regularly when they walk in the street.

"I can’t keep track of the spitting and the racist insults that are poured on us all the time," Samuel*, a Cameroonian migrant currently living in the Tunisian capital told InfoMigrants. "I had to stand on the train even though there were empty seats because the Tunisians didn’t want a black man to sit next to them," he added.

"The comments and bias are everywhere. Even the barber in my neighborhood refuses to do a black person’s hair. I have heard it said several times: 'I do not put my comb on the head of a black'", Thabet said. “And it’s worse if you are black and non-Muslim.”

Blacks seen as slaves

The problem doesn’t only affect foreigners -- black-skinned Tunisians say they also suffer discrimination. Racism has been an integral part of Tunisian society since the abolition of slavery. People with white skin are considered to be superior, and blacks are considered inferior because they are seen as slaves. The bias is passed on from generation to generation and children start committing racist acts at an early age, regardless of social class.

Complaints filed with the police about racist attacks are closed without investigation. "Some police officers don’t even file complaints," Thabet said. Tunisia doesn’t have a law forbidding racist acts, though a bill defining racial discrimination as "a distinction based on ethnicity, color or origin" is currently being debated in a legislative committee. The draft law punishes racially motivated crimes with prison terms and mandates fines for racial abuse, incitement to hate or membership in a hate group. Civil society groups, though, bemoan a lack of political will. The law was proposed in late 2016 and still has not been voted on.

* The name has been changed at the subject’s request