Black Soldiers, Arab Civilians, and the Everyday Violence of French Colonial Rule in 1930s Tunisia

In April 1936, a group of 200 Senegalese artillerymen rampaged through the city of Sousse – a garrison town in Tunisia – assaulting pedestrians, disrupting open-air markets and even attacking a local police station.  One of many such low-level disturbances within the French protectorate, the incident was blamed by military authorities on the “primitive” character of the Senegalese along with “age-old” racial hatreds between Arabs and black Africans that had been exploited by anti-colonial agitators.

This paper examines the “incident at Sousse” in order to investigate the everyday complexities of colonial rule in interwar Tunisia.  Recent scholarship has suggested that French imperial outposts were often sites of colonial improvisation, division, and even failure.  This approach is especially useful for understanding the events at Sousse, where civilian populations were divided and French control was partial at best and often at odds with itself.  Examining colonial police reports and military correspondence, I will contend that the incident at Sousse emerged from quotidian interactions between garrisoned troops and civilians as well as ad hoc military decisions that sharpened tense relations among the local populace.  Most centrally, in Tunisia as elsewhere, French military dependence on “auxiliaries” (soldiers from elsewhere in Europe or from the colonies), such as the Senegalese tirailleurs, often destabilized the formal racial hierarchies intended to regulate European (“white”), North African, and sub-Saharan African troops.  It is here that the disturbance at Sousse offers an especially interesting window.  By teasing out the interactions and decisions implicated in this incident, I will attempt to reveal certain connections between small-scale conflicts and underlying fault lines within the complex structures of empire building.