In the many stories I’ve heard about Bou Saadia—whose name translates to “father of Saadia”—he is described as a figure who haunts the medina of Tunis, having gone mad in search of his daughter. He goes from door to door, humming and dancing “like the Africans do,” scaring the children on the streets with his black skin, leather clothes covered with cowrie shells, and brusque bodily movements.

According to folklore, Bou Saadia came “all the way from Africa”—the faraway other in the Tunisian imagination—to search for Saadia, who was sold into slavery. No one knows exactly when this mythical figure originated and whether his and Saadia’s stories are based on any recorded historical people. Until 1841, enslaved black women and men were sold in the Souk El Berka in Tunis, where there are shops selling gold jewelry today.

In all the versions of the story I’ve heard, Bou Saadia never finds Saadia. So he continues, to this day, to appear in the street performances during Ramadan, dancing to the rhythms of drums and shekashek, often as a part of mystical rituals known as stambeli. Can we ever bring closure to these strands of stories that are omnipresent in urban legends, in family gossip, and in the novels that circulate all over Tunisia?

The 1846 abolition of slavery by Ahmed Bey, then governor of Tunisia, is often constructed in popular discourse as the “end” of slavery. Many Tunisians I meet proudly tell me that “racism” ended in Tunisia “two years earlier than in France,” where slavery was abolished in 1848. In these conversations, racism, anti-blackness, and slavery are often conflated into one. Slowly, I came to realize that in the Tunisian vernacular language, where many terms to denote blackness are derived from Arabic words for servitude, there is no way to talk about blackness without (indirectly) talking about slavery.

In the region that makes up modern Tunisia, the practice of slavery continued until the early 20th century. While we may know little about the folkloric Saadia herself, the shelves of the National Archives in Tunis abound with traces of enslaved women brought to Tunisia from the Lake Chad region over the 19th century. Many of these women, like Khadija bent Fatma, were forced to work as domestic workers even after the re-abolition of slavery in 1890 under the French colonial rule.

Today, this “domestic” nature of black women’s historical servitude is often used to challenge the validity of the term “slavery” to name their condition, since slavery has come to be associated, in global imaginations, with the body-breaking exploitation of enslaved people on the plantations of the Americas. Another challenge is the slavery versus post-slavery binary: Does slavery end and become “post-slavery”—that is, a servitude status (and period) assumed to be less dehumanizing than the one preceding it—after the legal abolition of slavery? Or is post-slavery about the degree of servitude rather than the legal act of abolition? If so, and in the absence of testimonies like Saadia’s and Khadija’s, how do we measure this degree of servitude and linked dehumanization that these women underwent? And do we indeed need this measure in order to consider their pain worthy of recognition?

The presence of the traces of the black (ex-)enslaved women and men in the archives—often in colonial administrative documents—does not necessarily imply that the black families in Tunisia who descended from ex-enslaved individuals know the story of their ancestors. One key reason is the taboo linked to slavery. As black Tunisian scholar and activist Maha Abdelhamid has pointed out, family members who may know of the history of enslavement of their ancestors often hide this information, implying that it has been lost over generations.

It was Saadia Mosbah, a black Tunisian activist in her 60s, who brought my attention to the mythical Saadia during one of our earliest conversations in 2020. Mosbah noted that black women are often given auspicious names that bring blessings to their families. Saadia means “happiness”—the kind that brings contentment and joy. While Mosbah had most likely received her name from her family, was that also true for the mythical Saadia? Or had her enslavers (re)named her Saadia, hoping to make her enforced presence a blessing?

Over the years of fighting anti-blackness in Tunisia, Mosbah has herself become a living archive of the stories of suffering and humiliation faced by those racialized as black. Our conversations were often filled with these strands of stories. One way to find closure for the mythical Saadia could be to weave these strands together, extending a myth through pieces of the real.

Maybe, like Mosbah’s ancestors, Saadia had been brought to Tunisia from Mali. And maybe she was sold into slavery in Gabès, in the south of Tunisia, explaining why Bou Saadia never found her in Tunis. And maybe, after fighting for her manumission, she was forced to inherit her ex-enslaver’s family name and, finding herself without a source of subsistence, worked as a bonded laborer in the homes and the farms of the ex-enslaving family. (One may pause here to ask: Did Saadia’s enslavement end with her manumission?)

Maybe Saadia’s children and grandchildren inherited this bonded servitude and its vicious poverty. And maybe the first great-granddaughter who was sent to school after Tunisia became an independent country ran away from her class when her teacher humiliated her in front of other students, calling her out as the source of the stink in the class, naming her with all the insults that marked her as black, inferior, and “slave.”

Maybe Saadia’s great-great-granddaughter was the one who fell in love with a passport-less man from Senegal who worked in a local ceramic factory. Maybe, while everyone was celebrating the 2011 revolution that ended the authoritarian rule of then President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the police arrested and deported this Senegalese man for being an illegal migrant. Maybe this would be the last time that his daughter would see him.

Through the work of black activists like Mosbah, we have learned about the links between historical slavery and contemporary hatred for black migrants. Historically, the stigma of blackness justified a more humiliating treatment for the enslaved black individuals compared to their non-black enslaved peers. Today, in Tunisia, the stigma of blackness justifies a more humiliating treatment of the black migrants compared to their non-black migrant peers, be they Syrian or Italian.

Since Tunisian President Kais Saied’s statement against sub-Saharan migrants in February 2023, state and societal violence against Tunisia’s black migrant population has escalated. In the months following the statement, Saadia Mosbah—one of the key figures campaigning for the rights of these black migrants—became a target of virulent online hatred that called for ridding Tunisia of its black population.

Based on unfounded accusations circulating on social media, Mosbah was arrested on May 6, 2024. As I write these words, she remains in prison. In the meantime, the Tunisian state continues to extend its violent control over the lives of black migrants, arresting and deporting them into the desertic borders with Algeria or selling them to trafficking networks in Libya. As I write these words, it is probable that many black migrant women are living the fate of the mythical Saadia, forced into servitude in locations unknown to their families.

The list of those arrested or forced into exile for showing solidarity with black migrants has grown since the arrest of Mosbah. Despite political threats, many Tunisians and non-Tunisians continue to show solidarity with the black migrants, often organizing material, legal, and medical aid through secure networks. In spite of pending investigations and continued state surveillance, many black Tunisian activists still live and work in Tunisia, calling out the venomous anti-blackness that harms lives, often fatally. Maybe among these brave faces is a descendant of our long-forgotten Saadia, calling for the rights of those like her father, whom she has not seen since his deportation to Senegal, and fighting for the liberation of her ancestor’s namesake.