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“She is the friend of Marwa. She is a Ghbonton, but not an ‘abid one”, Zeira said to me. She’s a colourfully dressed, middle-aged woman, and we’re sitting on the patio of her one-storey, cement block house in Gosbah, a village in the arid environment of southern Tunisia. While ‘abid (singular: ‘abd) means literally ‘slaves’ in Arabic, Zeira was not referring to Marwa’s legal status. Slavery in Tunisia was abolished in 1846. ‘Abid is now a historical category in southern Tunisia, marking certain individuals as the descendants of former slaves and positioning them at the bottom of local social hierarchies. The ‘Abid Ghbonton – a Southern Tunisian tribe of slave descendants – live side by side in Gosbah with the Ghbonton, their former masters, dwelling on the less fertile and less watered part of the land.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘Abid Ghbonton officially parted from the Ghbonton lineage, whom they had been allegedly serving as slaves since ancient times. After their manumission they remained bonded to them by a pre-Islamic institution known as wala’. This obliged them to keep their former master’s family name as their own, with the addition of the ‘slave’ prefix, and to carry out sporadic domestic chores for the ‘whites’. In Zeira’s imagination, ‘abd was synonymous with ‘black’.
