Opinions

I Am Not From a Third World Country

BYSofia Guellaty

September 3, 2026

At a dinner not long ago, a man across the table, educated and well travelled, said: “Thank God the Europeans took care of the pyramids and our artefacts. Third World countries don’t know how to take care of patrimony.”

Nobody flinched. A few people nodded. The conversation moved on to real estate.

I said nothing that night, and the silence has been sitting in my chest ever since. So this is my answer to him. It is about love. And it is about one of the most potent brainwashing operations in modern history, the one that taught a region to thank its looters.

Because before a man can thank the people who emptied his museums, he has to believe he ranks beneath them. That belief was given a name and a theory to boot. It was stamped on my region and became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Third World.

Sir, I don’t know about you, but I am not from a Third World country. I have never accepted the definition. I am from Tunisia, a small Arab country on the mighty African continent with an enormous history and a challenging present. A country that has produced civilization and barbarity, reform and repression, generosity and selfishness, like every country that has ever existed.

So why does my country carry a rank, a self-assigned C grade at that? Because the difference is not simply in what we are or how we run things. The difference is in who gets to assign the ranking and by which method.

This is why the man at the dinner table believes Europe “saved” our history. He has accepted their accounting system. He was force-fed a worldview in which civilization is measured by what you can extract, catalog, and display in a climate-controlled glass case, just as modern progress is measured by what you can quantify on a spreadsheet or narrate in the media.

GDP, currency strength, productivity, and number of patents, all of these things matter. I want functioning hospitals, excellent public schools, clean streets, competent governments, and an economy in which people can build decent lives. Of course I do. But when did being good at organizing a state become synonymous with being advanced as human beings?

Iconic Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine explains my view on the question better than anyone: “Do you know how to love, do you know how to care? This is civilization.”

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By that measure, look at my country. And I don’t need Carthage to defend myself. I don’t need to reach back to Ibn Khaldun. I only need to describe an ordinary week.

A man loses his job at 40 and returns to his parents’ house. Someone cannot pay rent and a family rearranges itself around them. A child needs looking after and suddenly six adults seem to be raising him. Anyone who has grown up in the Arab world knows what I mean. You ask for directions and sometimes the person simply takes you there. Your car breaks down and three strangers are suddenly looking under the hood. Somebody dies and food begins arriving. Neighbors show up. In my world, strangers are not automatically someone else’s problem.

Even the rankings occasionally catch a glimpse of this. In the World Giving Index, where Tunisia scores poorly on formal, institutional giving, 61 percent of Tunisians reported helping a stranger in the previous month. France answered the same question at 40 percent, one of the ten lowest scores in the world. Across the region, from Morocco to Egypt to Palestine, the numbers are among the highest anywhere.

There is something these numbers struggle to capture. A grandmother raising her daughter’s children does not appear in GDP, and neither does the neighbor sitting beside your mother in the hospital, the cousin lending money he knows he may never see again, or the stranger who refuses to let you deal with a problem alone. We have built sophisticated ways of measuring economies and remarkably crude ways of measuring much of what makes life bearable.

Civilization is what you create, yes, but it is also what you preserve. It is who you feed, how you treat the sick, and how you treat someone who cannot repay you.

So how does a man from this civilization end up praising its looters? Nobody arrives at that sentence alone. It was manufactured, and its history is not particularly difficult to trace.

In 1885, four years after France imposed its Protectorate on my country, Jules Ferry stood before the French Chamber of Deputies and said it plainly: “Les races supérieures ont un droit vis-à-vis des races inférieures”— Superior races have rights over inferior races.

This is what that idea does to you over generations. The Arab world was not merely conquered, it was explained to itself. Our language becomes less sophisticated, our religion becomes evidence of backwardness, our mother becomes traditional, our grandmother becomes uneducated, our architecture becomes dated, and our crafts become folklore.

Edward Said gave this machine its name. Europe produced itself as the position from which the rest of the world could be observed, classified, and ranked, holding what he called a “positional superiority” over everyone it described. Europe became rational, modern, and progressive partly by constructing an opposite that was irrational, static, and behind. Even the words we still use, developed, and underdeveloped, assume there is one road toward modernity, with some countries conveniently ahead on it and the rest of us eternally jogging to catch up. The extraordinary thing is not that they believed it, but how deeply we learned to believe it too.

Fanon understood the most dangerous part of this process. In Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, he explains that colonialism does not simply occupy land. It enters the mind. Inferiority was not discovered in us. It was produced in us. “It is the racist who creates his inferior. Once the hierarchy has lived inside you long enough, you no longer need the man who built it. You police yourself as his definition of progress becomes common sense. His standards become yours, and eventually you learn to look at yourself through his eyes.

Then one of the most devastating questions a colonized people can ask enters everyday speech: Why can’t we be like them?

Years later, at a dinner table, a man thanks the looters.

Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène answered that question decades ago when a French interviewer asked whether Europeans understood his films. “Europe is not my center, Europe is on the outskirts,” he replied. After a hundred years in his country, he pointed out, Europeans had never learned his language, while he had learned theirs. His future did not depend on Europe. He would like to be understood there, certainly, but it made no difference to how he understood himself or his work.

Take the map of Africa, place Europe and America inside it, and there is still room left. Why be a sunflower turning toward the sun, he asked, when I myself am the sun?

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I have Chahine’s and Sembène’s videos on loop on my phone because there is something in both of them that I keep coming back to. Neither man seems interested in asking Europe for permission to consider himself civilized. They have already moved beyond the question. Europe is allowed to exist without being the mirror in which everyone else has to examine themselves.

No one is from the First, Second, or Third World. People who believe they come from nothing behave differently from people who know they inherited something, and we inherited plenty. I want to thank the Egyptologists and archaeologists from our part of the world who studied and protected our history, the craftspeople who kept techniques alive, the grandmothers who carried stories across generations, and everyone who understood that culture survives because people care enough to keep it alive.

None of this requires pretending our societies are perfect. They are not. Families fail each other here, governments fail their citizens, people are lonely, poor, neglected, and abandoned in Arab countries too. I am not interested in replacing one ridiculous hierarchy with another and arguing that we are somehow more civilized because we take better care of our parents or because a stranger is more likely to stop when our car breaks down. I am interested in why some things have been allowed to define civilization while others barely count.

A country can be extremely advanced in one dimension of human life and terribly underdeveloped in another. I have watched societies build extraordinary infrastructure and still leave people desperately alone. I have also watched communities take extraordinary care of one another while living under governments that fail to provide the institutions and opportunities they deserve.

There should be room in our understanding of progress for both. For the hospital and for the person who sits beside your bed all night. For the school and for the grandmother who raises you. For the museum and for the people whose history fills it. For every child raised, every old person accompanied, every sick person watched over and every meal that arrives at a grieving family’s door. These things may disappear from GDP, but they do not disappear from life.

So here is what I should have said at that dinner: They did not take care of our artefacts. They took our artefacts. And far worse, they took the part of your mind that should have known the difference.

Infrastructure matters. So does the infrastructure between human beings. And ours is extraordinary, my dear friend, and so are our artefacts.

I Am Not From a Third World Country

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