HOMAGE OBITUARY
From the Jeune Afrique offices in Paris, BBY had a hotline to African leaders of all stripes
STUDIO KAHIA
VINCENT FOURNIER/JA
BBY (centre) as a young minister in 1957, with Habib Bourguiba (left) and Ahmed Mestiri (right)
BÉCHIR BEN YAHMED
1928-2021
The founder of Jeune Afrique and La Revue and publisher of The Africa Report, Béchir Ben Yahmed was a sharp observer and committed editorialist who provided deep insight into the continent’s major upheavals of the 20th century. He passed away on 3 May 2021 in Paris Perfectionist and self-critic that he was, Béchir Ben Yahmed (BBY) admitted that he had to give something of himself away in his memoirs, which he worked on for more than a decade. But committing his own view of himself to paper was a rare and undoubtedly difficult exercise for him. He described himself as a journalist, a businessman, a man of the left. Some said he was stubborn; “persevering”, he corrected them. Authoritarian? “It’s a
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myth,” he said, explaining that in his youth he had been “sickly shy” and that this character trait perhaps explained his sometimes abrupt approach. From a generation of young proindependence activists, he followed a different path from most of his comrades, which he said left him with no regrets. Many who knew him as a promising young minister in Tunisia’s first government asked what had happened to turn him away from politics.
THEAFRICAREPORT / N° 116 / JULY-AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2021
BBY replied without hesitation: “I did not want it. There is a price to pay. I don’t want to do what politicians do to get votes: beg, make sacrifices, compromise. I don’t have it in me.” Jeune Afrique, he said, was his life’s work. Béchir Ben Yahmed dedicated more than six decades to journalism, first as a reporter and then as the director of a media company. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, described to him as “a man of the press and of conviction, who both contributed to and shed light on the African independence movements”. For Hervé Bourges, the former head of French broadcasting, BBY was “a confidante, a daily interlocutor, a
