Guillaume Colin & Pauline Penot/Flickr. CC (by-nc-nd)
Over the past decade, growing public and media attention to the racial and colour-based discrimination faced by black Africans in the Maghreb and in the Middle East – be they sub-Saharan African migrants, slave descendants, black Maghrebians or haratin (a term generally translated as 'freed blacks' or 'free blacks') – has opened up new spaces to debate the relationship between 'racism' and legacies of slavery in the two regions.
Whereas societal debates on slavery and its contemporary legacies are far from new in a context like Mauritania, where former slaves and slave descendants have struggled for decades against enduring slavery and descent-based discrimination, in many other North African and Middle Eastern countries they have emerged only relatively recently or remain unspoken. This is perhaps because, as the Moroccan historian Chouki El Hamel notes, a “culture of silence” has long prevented these countries from engaging with, and discussing overtly, questions of race, slavery, and colour.
