23

‪In Tunisia at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, after hundreds of years of forced immigration linked to slavery, the landscape changed rather radically. Under the French protectorate, it gave way to another form of immigration and population: it was no longer a question of trafficking but of voluntary migration, no longer of slaves but of ‘Sudanese’, ‘Tripolitan’, and other workers arriving from sub-Saharan regions via Libya. Faced with this massive wave of arrivals in a country where the organisation of foreigners was changing as a result of a new colonial administration, how was this flow, which represented a major economic benefit, managed? And how would this same administration deal with these multiple non-native identities? Today’s black Tunisian population is made up of both slave descendants and immigrants, but the history of these differences and the history of the immigrant movement are totally unknown. How did such an oversight come about? By trying to gain a better grasp of the contours of these different immigrant identities, and by reconstructing the processes by which they were ‘encompassed’ in other entities, we can establish the reality of the settlement and definitive integration into the ‘Tunisian nation’ of a certain number of Blacks of non-slave origin.‪