The way sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa knew each other has been largely determined by colonialism, going back to Roman times and through the modern waves of colonization of Africa. The divide between the two parts of Africa has been institutionalized, weaponized and racialized through the knowledge borders and practices created by colonial powers and perpetuated through academia in Europe, North America and Africa itself. One outcome of it is that Sub-Saharan Africans thought of North Africans as white while the latter began to think of themselves as more like Europeans.  

Yet, before western modernity, the movement of ideas and people was quite intense. It gave us networks of scholars and affected the linguistic and religious landscapes across the continent. This has taken place in conjunction with the trans-Saharan economic and human trade, giving Tunisia, for example, a black population and active abolitionist movement which predate modern colonialism.    

On the other side, anti-colonial resistance and decolonization established links across the Sahara especially since the 1950s.  In this knowledge map, Tunisia, a space which was known to the Romans as Africa and to the Arabs as Ifriqiyya, has been a nodal point, and a puzzling case. This paper traces the complexity and the history of the relationship and looks at the recent rise in ethnonationalism in Tunisia and at attempts to counter it, particularly in the cultural and academic fields.