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Slavery was first formally abolished in the region by Tunisia in 1846. French-colonised Algeria partially followed suit two years later, while Morocco under French mandate only did so in 1922.

And the Algerian parliament followed suit in April 2020, reflecting, according to Musette, the fact that the reality of racism "is there and must be fought".

In Morocco, a coalition of associations in 2014 launched an anti-racism campaign in support of sub-Saharan migrants with the message "Massmiytich Azzi!", literally, "Don't call me a black man".After a string of attacks in Tunisia, including a violent assault against an Ivorian woman, Mnemty successfully lobbied parliament into adopting a law against hate speech in October 2018.

modern-day slave markets have been reported in war-torn Libya, where desperate migrants suffer horrific abuse at the hands of human traffickers

In the absence of official data, non-government groups estimate there are more than 200,000 African foreigners in Algeria, and tens of thousands in both Morocco and Tunisia.

Algeria and Tunisia bar foreign Africans from obtaining residency papers unless they are students.Only Morocco has exceptionally granted residency rights to some 50,000 people, mostly from West Africa, since 2014.

The tale of Lisabetta da Messina inaugurated the motif of the dismembered head placed into a vase and enjoyed several adaptations across regions and languages, such as the early modern murder ballad “The Bramble Briar,” which transferred the story to a village in Somerset. The folktale of teste di moro falls into this reception history, as attested by a more simple variant, in which the two lovers are decapitated as punishment for initiating an impossible interracial romance.

By appropriating Boccaccio’s exploration of Sicily as a locus of the macabre and projecting it onto the island’s premodern past under Muslim rule, the iconography and lore surrounding teste di moro inscribe fantasies of Mediterranean exchange within a commodified body that can be admired and reproduced for everyone to possess. Much like the port of Messina in Boccaccio’s tale (and others in the Decameron) or the resort in The White Lotus, the medieval Palermo of this folktale is a node within a broader maritime network. All three are places where peoples meet to trade in cultures, sex, and desire; if the exchange is unsatisfactory for one of the involved parties, they are also places in which one can also meet a violent end.

the displaced Muslim body becomes desirable only as a disembodied and sublimated commodity, to be pleasurably displayed in one’s garden or salotto — a stark contrast to the lived experience of other displaced non-European bodies living or passing through contemporary Sicily

the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.

To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.

many acknowledge their fresh of support for the President since his crackdown.  Asked about the 21,000 or so black migrants residing in Tunisia, no one here is racist, they say – they simply want to distinguish between those who are here legally and illegally. It sounds reasonable enough. In fact, it could probably pass for small talk at a Conservative Party fundraiser. However, at least in Tunisia, that reasonableness fades when pressed. “They’re selling cocaine, they’re selling their wives and their girlfriends to each other,” Bassem, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, told me. “They’re even buying boats and taking still more migrants to Europe.” In this part of Ariana, every Tunisian has a lurid tale, always experienced at one remove, which they reel off as ‘proof’ of the criminality of the country’s black migrant population.

Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out.