Aya Chebbi's journey started during the 2010/2011 Tunisian Revolution that toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his regime. When the protests started in December, Aya was a teenager in her final year of high school. When the government shut down schools to silence students who were taking part in the protests, Aya took to the internet, blogging about the revolution and galvanizing her fellow Tunisian youths. She quickly rose to prominence as a voice for democracy and her blog, Proudly Tunisian, was published across numerous platforms such as AlJazeera and OpenDemocracy. The Tunisian Revolution would later inspire a series of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East in what later came to be known as the Arab Spring. Aya has since been travelling the world as a mentor and speaker, teaching young people how to build and grow movements. In 2018, she became the first-ever African Union (AU) Youth Envoy to the AU Commission. She is the youngest person in the Chairperson's Cabinet. I reached out and she agreed to an interview about her and her work. Here she is, in her own words. YW: How would you describe yourself?AC: I am a young feminist and pan-Africanist. I am a product of the public education in Tunisia—I did my primary, secondary, and college education in Tunisia. I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in International Relations from university in Tunisia and then went on to do a Master's degree in 2015 in African politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. I am an only child in a very conservative family—especially my mother and her family—but both my parents' families are very conservative. But my father—he spent 40 years in the Tunisian Army—is very supportive. I've been moving from one city to another in Tunisia with him. I've been to lots of different cities in Tunisia—I've lived in about 8 different cities and studied in different schools because of his work. Being a nomad, being able to integrate in different cultures and diversity of our country from north to south to east to west contributed to who I am today. I am very blessed to have grown up like that; meeting different people from different parts of Tunisia and seeing my country's diversity taught me to respect diversity as I grew up. I am currently the Special Youth Envoy of the African Union Commission Chairperson, his excellency Moussa Faki Muhammed. I was appointed to this position on the first of November 2018. YW: What set you on the pan-Africanism path?AC: It started from an experience that I had. I had gone to volunteer at refugee camps at the Tunisian-Libyan borders in June 2011 and my father, who was still in the army, was managing all the refugee camps in the south. I spent some time there and witnessed refugees coming from Libya. There were also migrants from all over Africa. I got a chance to understand the history of Africa, and I met people from countries I'd never heard of and never studied about. It was eye-opening to me. There was also the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution in 2011 and the focus was on the Middle East but I was really fascinated about how youth movements across Africa got inspired by the revolution in Tunisia—a few weeks after the revolutions in Tunisia, a Senegalese youth movement started raising the same slogans, and then Burkina Faso, and then other countries. I was really fascinated by how interconnected we were and I wondered why there was no attention to these movements in Senegal and Burkina Faso. After the experience at the refugee camp, I got a chance to go to Kenya for the Global Voices Blogger Summit because I was, and still am, a blogger. At the summit, I met people from all over Africa and I fell in love with Nairobi—I really loved taking the matatus—and with Kenya. I started to get connections to other African countries and I started travelling around the continent, training people in mobilization, blogging, leadership, resistance, and non-violence. With that, the big questions that came to my identity, the African identity question, started from the refugee camp. That also linked me to my nomad life in Tunisia and seeing different practices of discrimination by name, ethnicity, etc. Travelling, crossing borders, living with people, taking matatus in Kenya ever day, talking to people...all these made me feel at home in every corner of Africa. I see myself as a bridge, because I can speak with people from Anglophone countries, from Francophone countries because I know French, and feel at home during Ramadan in Dakar and connect with different cultures and religions. I can connect to people in East Africa when they speak in Swahili because it has a lot of Arabic and I can connect with the sound, culture, and practice of it. All of that is how I started my journey looking for my African identity. It became a passion for pan-Africanism when I started learning about our history, because it is not enough to go around Africa as a young woman coming from North Africa, Tunisia, and try to connect. It's when I started to understand the history that connects us that the idea of pan-Africanism became an obsession for me. I think about how in the liberation movement, they used pan-Africanism, African solidarity, to liberate our societies and communities from colonialism. In 1960 alone, 10 African countries, in one year, got independence. It's not because the colonizers just suddenly decided to leave everyone, but because people, young people at the time, organised across territories and borders that the colonizers created. It fascinated me how they could organize at that time with very little resources and how are we not able to organize today with all the technology that we have. For me, pan-Africanism is more than just being African. It's the solution to what we're enduring today. It's the solution to getting together and organizing to liberate ourselves—from poverty, from corruption, from inequality...from every challenge we're facing. "Pan-Africanism is the solution to the challenges we face today." YW: Some pan-Africanists claim that feminism has no place in pan-Africanism. As a feminist and a pan-Africanist, how do you reconcile the two?AC: There is no pan-Africanism without feminism. It's not even something to reconcile; they are together. In every single conversation, I identify myself as a pan-African feminist. They are inter-linked. One cannot be without the other. The feminist movement has played a key role in the liberation movement that adopted the pan-African spirit, and women have been on the front lines of organizing in armed struggles. After that, the women's movement has still been instrumental in organizing the pan-African space. Today, women are still in the front lines of these movements, and I don't know how pan-Africanists claim that there is no feminist space when, obviously... They do that because, at the end of the day, when WE all win the battle that WE fought for, men take on the leadership and women are left behind. Probably that's why they claim that feminism has no place in pan-Africanism. But they shouldn't forget that the Africa we should be working towards is where we value the contribution of women. YW: Some people may feel that you have no space in pan-Africanism because of how you look, precisely your light skin. How do you reconcile your ethnicity and light-skinnedness with pan-Africanism?AC: When I started travelling across Africa, of course I've been called 'mzungu' in Kenya and 'brownie' in Ghana. I have been perceived as...how can I be a pan-Africanist with the way I look? But, for me, after 8 years of pan-African organizing, I don't feel the need to explain who I am and what I do because majority of the people in the youth pan-African space know very well what I stand for because I show that through action. I've organized movements and provided training on what it takes to be a pan-African. I see myself as a bridge-builder. The Sahara has all these intense cultural aspects that are merged. The nomads live in the deserts and they merge and re-emerge in different ways in how they manifest in their culture and in how they look and dress and adopt different practices from people who pass by. I like to think of our continent as such, as different shades and colours, as a continent that celebrates its diversity. I recognize that, as a light-skinned person, the way I am perceived is different and I recognize that privilege as well. I also take the time to talk to people who call me things like "mzungu" and start the whole conversation of me being Tunisian and the indigenous people in Tunisia, the Amazigh, and the cultural and the food similarities between Kenyans and Tunisians...things like that. When I started my pan-Africanism journey, it did not bother me because I came from the understanding that there has been a division that was created, labeling the northern parts as Arab and closer to Europe and Middle Eastern; and labeling the southern parts, sub-Sahara Africa, as Blacker and darker. I think this has been enforced throughout the years in our education, economics, and politics. It is our role as young people today who are much more open to accepting the other who is different from us to bridge that. Because Sahara used to be a bridge of people going back and forth between both parts. Why are we making that to be something that divides us along skin colour? In the words of Kwame Nkurumah, "I am African, not because I was born in Africa, but because African was born in me." YW: Pan-Africanism is the “the principle or advocacy of the political union of all the indigenous inhabitants of Africa”. It is also described as “a worldwide movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all people of African descent.” Given the rise of Black movements, most notably Black Hebrew Israelites and other such groups, who bastardize or demonize the movement, how would you introduce pan-Africanism to people who haven’t heard of it or to people who have heard the bastardized/demonized version of it?AC: We have to redefine pan-Africanism because pan-Africanism of the 50s and 60s wanted to liberate our countries from colonialism and their aim was to create independent nation states. For my generation, the Africa we want today is a borderless Africa. We want e-governance and digital spaces. We want markets and many other things that are different. The pan-Africanism of the 50s and 60s served its own purpose, which was the political solidarity for independence. As we move on with the African Union, the union now has to become a space of economic integration because the Africa we want today is not just about political solidarity but also economic integration. We want open borders, we want to trade with each other, we want to exchange, we want to study in each other's colleges and institutions...we want so many things as one continent. The ultimate idea of pan-Africanism is solidarity. For me that means that your liberation is my liberation, my access is your access. If, for example, I have access to education in Tunisia and someone else in Africa doesn't have access to education, then we didn't achieve our purpose. The liberation has to be a collective liberation, and that identity has to be a collective identity. It has to be a collective action for a collective benefit. That is the pan-Africanism I want to introduce to people. Did you like this interview? Click the button below to read part 2.
6 Comments
I have a deep love for Africa and African people. I belong to a military family and almost all serving men in my family have been to different countries like Senegal, Liberia, Sierra Leonne, Ivory Coast and Congo under the UN missions. I dont know how it's perceived by the local people but our men bring back fond memories and stories about the love of the local people and the culture. It fills my heart with joy to see movements like Pan-Africanism finding a voice in the world. Love from Pakistan.
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Mashibaby
3/6/2019 10:16:58 pm
What an amazing young lady!
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