This article investigates the racialisation of West and Central African migrants in Algeria; a state historically celebrated for its anti-colonial solidarity. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Oran and Algiers, it centers the migrants’ lived experiences to reveal a pervasive landscape of everyday racism and dehumanisation. The analysis argues that Algerian racial formations exceed Euro-American binaries, operating through context-specific logics that render Blackness hyper-visible yet structurally excluded. The article traces contemporary anti-Blackness to what I term the afterlives of decolonisation, through which the legacies of slavery, French colonisation, and religious hierarchies continue to shape racial formations in postcolonial Algeria, marginalising and erasing Black histories and presence within dominant Arab-Islamic national imaginaries. Ultimately, the study reveals how a state forged through liberation struggle reproduces colonial structures of negation, casting Blackness as a threatening “other” incompatible with Algerian identity.