Houda Mzioudet, “Yearning for Freedom, Reclaiming Agency: The Emancipatory Strategies of Black Tunisians and Libyans” in Mediterranean Mobilities: Between Migrations and Colonialism ed. Gabriele Montalbano (viella, 2024), pp. 175–184

The history of Black people in Libya and Tunisia remain shrouded in mystery and historical ambiguity; little is know with regards to their origin, movement and settlement in North Africa, and the slavery connection remains the quintessentially legitimate historical reason for this settlement. While more anthropological and historical work has been done since the 1980s by scholars such as Jouili, Bahri, Mrad-Dali, Montana, Jankowsky and Taleb on slavery and post-slave Libyan and Tunisian societies, numerous murky areas remain in the narratives of disenfranchised Blacks, alongside a lack of accounts where Blacks are no longer mere recipients, passive actors who lacked agency in building a Black North African history. In this chapter, I attempt to weave my arguments around Mrad-Dali and Montalbano’s historical and anthropological research on Libyan immigrants to Tunisia and enslaved Black Libyans who developed a web of solidarity to escape slavery in eastern and western Libya, all while stressing these marginalised groups’ activity as agents of change and of self-emancipatory action.