Aïcha, 28 years old

I have been living in Constantine for 6 years. I came from Mali for my studies. It’s my family who chose Algeria. I wanted to go to the United States or Canada, but my parents preferred to send me to a Muslim country. For me, the important thing was to be free and independent.

Before coming, I thought that Algeria was an open country, where people lived well together. But when I got to the airport, I was shocked. They were staring at us, pointing at us and someone shouted: “welcome to Algeria, kahloucha!” I remember that word very well, I didn’t know it was an insult yet.

The day I arrived at the university campus, it was the same, we were hooted. Later, in the street, my hair was in an afro, a young man put a cigarette in my hair. It set fire to my hair and made a hole. An old lady came to help me put out the fire. Everyone laughed. I began to run, I was crying. It was then that some nice girls taught me to insult in the Algerian dialect.

The more I went outside, the more I was assaulted, insulted or hit. All the time, it was: “kahloucha” (black, pejorative), “kahloucha zobbi” (black my dick), “nik mok” (fuck your mother), roh bledek (go back to your country). I still had fear, a lump in my stomach. There has never been a day without my being assaulted, beaten or having my hair pulled. I fell into a terrible depression, the beginning of madness. I walked around carrying a stick to defend myself.

I couldn’t stand life here, I couldn’t even go out of my room, and in the first year, I attempted suicide. A week later, my family came to pick me up. I could not go back because I was ashamed that my community would see me as incapable of studying, they do not know what is going on here.

Constantine is a particularly conservative city, it’s much worse than in Algiers or Bejaïa. The boys are constantly attacking us. If they see a girl alone on the street, they go crazy. They throw stones at you, they stone you. I felt like everyone wanted to hurt me. So I started to respond with violence. They hit me, I hit them, they hit me, I hit them. All my school years, it was fights morning, noon and evening. I didn’t even know that I had so much violence inside me, but in Algeria, it made everything come out.

On campus, some girls told me that I was beautiful, but it was to make fun of me. Others were so shocked to see a black girl that they froze or screamed and ran away. Sometimes, some came to apologize afterwards. I made friends, too, who really were there for me and invited me into their family. These friendships are the best part of my years in Constantine.

Thanks to me, a lot has changed at the college. At first, the foreign students spoke very little with the Algerians, they kept their headphones on so as not to be disturbed. They had no way to defend themselves, no place to complain. But me, every time someone insulted me, I got into a fight and I went to the administration. It was from there that black students began to be respected. One day a girl said to me, “Thanks to you, now I can take off my headphones, they don’t even insult me ​​anymore.” It was with violence that I made myself respected.

Among the black students we therefore created something like a family, with a lot of solidarity. The older students took care of the new ones. As soon as one of us had a problem, we were all there.

The administration says it is there for us. Indeed, we can file a complaint against those who attack us and the administration sanctions them with up to a year of suspension. But it does nothing to educate the students, apart from sharing us by working group so that we mix with the Algerians. They want us to integrate, but they don’t want integration. Many girls have experienced racism even from the teachers. A teacher asked a girl, “Are you a man or a woman? With blacks, I can’t tell the difference.”

Algerian society, I see it closed and racist. Blacks are still seen by many as slaves, as an inferior race. Here, the images that we are shown of black Africa, it is the disease, the famine, people who live in remote villages without any civilization. Few documentaries air on Africa, African history is not taught, and Algerians do not see themselves as Africans. They should be taught that both the people who come from large countries and they, too, are African. They don’t know anything about their history, just the Algerian revolution and the dark decade, so how can they respect black people? Society brutalized them. They are like sheep, while those in power get rich.