So I was in the archives minding my business, when I found the most insane box:

a STASH of LOVE LETTERS between Spanish women and Moroccan men from the 1940s seized by colonial authorities for having ILLEGAL RELATIONSHIPS

follow me!! 🇪🇸🇲🇦💄💃 María was a tango dancer in cabarets in Seville. She wrote passionate letters to her lover in Tetuán, the capital of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco. But the letters he wrote back were all seized, and their plans to get married, foiled by authorities

All day I've felt nauseous thinking about the attack against the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba.
Every time we're murdered, while we're shopping for food or praying, I think we've reached the lowest point.
Every time I'm proved wrong: nobody wants North African Jews to live / We are blamed for leaving, we are blamed for staying. We get killed in Paris, we get killed in Djerba. We get blamed for selling ourselves to the West and assimilating, we get called stupid for trying to keep our communities and traditions. /

What’s France’s longest border?

With Spain? With Belgium? With Italy?

Why not it’s with BRAZIL of course!!!

A thread on the EU’s only South American border 🇧🇷🇫🇷 🧵 Guyane is one of the overseas départements of France - it’s a full part of French Republic and EU. But it is the only such département that is not on an island and thus has a substantial land border with Brazil and Suriname.

Headlines in France have been dominated by events in Mayotte, a small island in the Indian Ocean, where a huge police operation is taking place.

Why is Mayotte so important for Fr politics? Why is it part of the EU? & why do most migrant deportations in France occur there? 🧵👇🏼 Let’s start off with a brief summary of what’s going on, which isn’t much covered in English:
the French minister of interior, Gérald Darmanin has announced a police operation called “Wuambushu” (‘taking back’ in shimaoré) on the island 2/

Anti-black violence is rapidly escalating in Tunisia, up to the very highest levels of government.

I want to post some resources here to contextualise what is happening, and hopefully others will add: the first context is much greater activism and visibility of Black Tunisians since the 2011 revolution, see this piece by @HudaMzioudet

taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/…

Today is World Radio Day! 📻🌍

I want to tell you a story of how radio can change people’s lives. It’s about a show in Gibraltar run by this woman, Norma Delgado

(photo credit: Gerry Martinez) From 1969 to 1982, Gibraltar’s border with Spain was closed for political reasons. There was no way out of the territory by land, and many people had family stuck on the other side.

Franco even shut down the phone lines! So you could not hear your loved one’s voices. Except…

I am spending this week archiving my Twitter data for safekeeping and deleting tweets.

Whatever your thoughts are about the current state of Twitter I highly recommend doing this before we lose access as the infrastructure may collapse rapidly Go to

-> Settings -> settings and privacy -> your account -> download an archive of your data

It takes about 24 hours for you to be able to download it

L’histoire de la colonisation française en Algérie a été écrite depuis des années par des chercheurs qui ne sont ni français, ni algériens.

Je vais vous en présenter quelques-uns ici, dans le désordre et sans exhaustivité 🧵👇🏼 Shoko Watanabe, japonaise, à plongé dans la période coloniale pour comprendre l’islam politique en Algérie en regardant l’histoire de l’association des oulémas

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

roll up, roll up:

I was not planning to tweet about my travels but I have just visited possibly the BEST museum in the whole world and I had to share.

Follow me for a visit of the MUSEUM OF CHEESE in KARS, Turkey 🧀🇹🇷🤯👇🏼 Let’s be honest - I thought this museum would be a joke. A museum of cheese? In a random ass town in nowhere, Türkiye?

I underestimated this museum. I mocked it. This thread is an atonement.

60 years ago today, the Evian Accords ended seven years of war between the Algerian FLN and the French government.

I was asked to comment on this for @France24_en

here’s a thread of what I didn’t have time to say or

~what peace negotiations can and cannot achieve 🧵 The Evian Accords were a massive turning point. They ended 132 years of French colonialism in Algeria by recognising that Algerians could vote for their own independence. They provided an immediate ceasefire that ended a war that had raged since 1954.

60 years ago, on 17 October 1961, the Parisian police threw Algerians into the Seine.

Dozens of men and women who were demonstrating against a discriminatory curfew targeting Algerians were massacred.

This event has to be understood as part of a bigger story 1/ Algerians had long migrated to France in large numbers since the 1920s. Colonial methods of repression followed them in their migration. Special police services tracked them, often made up of officers with experience in North Africa. 2/
muse.jhu.edu/book/60103

At the British National Archives today, I had the pleasure of revisiting one of the most extraordinary documents I've ever encountered:

an 1833 petition from the people of Constantine in Algeria asking for help from the British Parliament against the French 1/ It's unusual for several reasons: first, it's absolutely massive. It contains 2,000+ signatures of local representatives, and their seals.

But also because it uses the language of liberalism - it appeals to the Parliament's support for the 'rights of people' (huquq al-bashr)

2/

Mid-week adventure thread:

The ~~Rabbi Explorer of Timbuktu ~~

(yes this is real)

This is Mardochée Aby Serour and he is one of the more unusual characters in the history of European exploration 1/ Mardochée/Mardokhai was born in the village of Akka in the South of Morocco. Jewish families were common in the countryside. As you can see from the map Akka is right on the edge of the desert, and the region has traditionally been an important place for trade across the Sahara

How do you decolonise a settler colony?

I am struck that people seem to write as if this question has never been asked before, so let’s look at a concrete case - Algeria 🇩🇿 1/ First, a theoretical note: settler colonialism embodies a particular structural domination (colonialism) into a group of people (settlers). This raises peculiar issues: if you dismantle the structure, what do you do with the people left? 2/

Here it comes,

episode 2 of
A PARISIAN
reviews
EMILY IN PARIS

a show which is slowly sucking my life energy, a vampire-show, a dark night-creature show which feeds on our souls Emily goes for a job in the jardin du Luxembourg. She is still within the safe circle of episode 1.

The joke about the 4th floor being the 5th, which was never funny, is flogged again: Emily gets hit on by her hot neighbour.