Episode: 48 — "Libya and Tunisia Are Extensions of Each Other" · Full Episode #48
Date: Season 5
Language: Arabic
Houda Mzioudet (هدى مزيودات) is a Black Tunisian researcher who has lived in seven or more countries. Her work engages with race, identity, and North African history. She is one of the few Black Tunisian voices in Arabic-language media to address anti-Black racism in the Maghreb directly.
Houda did not know the origin of her own surname until a Libyan colleague informed her that "Mzioudet" is Amazigh. The discovery reframed her understanding of her family's history. Tunisia's nation-building project under Bourguiba and subsequent governments had systematically de-emphasised both Amazigh and Black identities in favour of a homogeneous Arab-Muslim national narrative. Houda's ignorance of her own name's etymology was a product of that erasure — not a personal failure of curiosity but a structural outcome of a state that had decided certain identities were inconvenient.
Houda shared a historical detail: Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia's first president and the architect of its post-independence national identity, had family origins in Misrata, Libya. The irony is substantial. Bourguiba built a Tunisian nationalism that defined itself against its neighbours and emphasised a singular Tunisian identity. That the man who did this was himself of Libyan origin undercuts the very premise of the national project he constructed.
Houda conducted research in Tawergha, a predominantly Black Libyan town whose residents were displaced en masse in 2011 by militias from Misrata in acts widely documented as collective punishment and racially motivated violence. During her fieldwork, Houda removed her hijab in order to appear "African American" — a calculated decision to reduce the risk of being identified as a local researcher, which could have made her a target. The detail reveals the layered dangers of researching race in Libya: the subject itself is dangerous, and the researcher's own body becomes a variable that must be managed.
Houda made a striking comparison: she felt safer conducting research in post-conflict Libya than she did living as a visibly Muslim woman in Quebec. The islamophobia she encountered in Canada — ambient, institutional, daily — produced a sense of threat that was, in her experience, more psychologically corrosive than the overt dangers of working in a conflict zone. In Libya, the risks were known and navigable. In Quebec, the hostility was diffuse, deniable, and constant.
See: Safer in Libya Than Quebec
Throughout the episode, Houda addressed the broader question of anti-Black racism in Tunisia and across the Maghreb. The region's dominant narrative positions itself as Arab (or Arab-Amazigh) and frequently erases or minimises its Black populations, despite centuries of presence, contribution, and — critically — enslavement. Houda's work sits at this intersection: recovering histories that the nation-state has chosen to forget.
"Quebec felt more dangerous to me than Libya." (EP 48)