Humanitarianism and black female bodies: violence and intimacy at the Moroccan–Spanish border

ABSTRACT

Around Ceuta and Melilla, progressive Moroccan migration policies implemented since 2013 have not produced much positive change, as political, diplomatic and economic issues take over, producing a violent game of borders, both material and symbolic, racialised and gendered. Through an ethnographic approach, this article addresses the issue of violence experienced by migrants from Central and West Africa on the Moroccan–Spanish border, emanating from humanitarian and religious actors. Based on two and a half years of field research in Morocco (mainly in Rabat and in the North) and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, with a special attention to embodied experiences of the border, this contribution shows that the humanitarianism practiced in a border town in Northern Morocco is also a space for updating relations of race and gender, which can, contrary to its claims, lead to even greater constraints on the mobility of people, notably women, being ‘helped’, and can reproduce a racialised and gendered order at the border. This contribution also proposes to reconnect this contemporary violence to history and underline the coloniality of such humanitarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• gender
• humanitarianism
• migration control
• race

Acknowledgements

I thank the participants of this research and particularly the people who shared their stories and points of view with me. I am grateful for useful comments on earlier version of this text provided by Jane Freedman, Nina Sahraoui, Lorena Gazzotti and Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no quantitative datasets were generated during the study. The qualitative datasets are not publicly available for the respect and protection of the research subjects.

Notes

1 The social action of the church is permitted by a royal decree dating from 1983.

2 Translation by the author of excerpts from the institutional page in Spanish: https://www.msf.es/actualidad/msf-atiende-alto-numero-victimas-violencia-marruecos.

3 See Yabiladi (2013).

4 Yabiladi (2013).

5 The divisions of the Catholic dioceses in follow the colonial-era divisions between Spanish and French protectorates. Thus, in North there are mainly Spanish clergy (as well as in the Sahara) and French clergy in the rest of Morocco.

6 The ‘mapping’ activity is justified by the staff as a way of having estimations of the number of people present in the forests, and the profiles (nationalities, gender, pregnancies, children, sick people), to adapt the interventions. This activity also helps the organisation to fulfil the reports meant to be sent to their donor (the Swiss cooperation agency at the time).

7 On this practice in the frame of the attempts to cross the border by sea, see Tyszler (2018, 2019a).

8 Abortion is prohibited after 40 days, except in cases of compelling necessity, which must be the subject of a debate.

9 About the migrant camps’ organisation at the border and the figure of the chairman, see Tyszler (2019a, 2019b).

10 See Bhambra (2015).