Africa Tantalizing Tunisia

Tantalizing Tunisia

July 5, 2023

In January we visited Tunisia, which was (and remains) something of mystery to me. Despite that, the country has left me with vivid memories: orange trees dropping fruit on a city street, shop signs in French and Arabic, elegant decay, ready-to-wear turbans, the petrichor on overgrown urban lots after a brief burst of rain, character-full stray cats.

Once arriving in Tunis, we spent a couple of nights at a hotel designed with media people in mind. The lobby was decorated with antique video cameras and the corridors were decorated with old movie posters.

We only spent a night in Tunis because we were planning to spend most of our time by the sea in Hammamet.

The ride down south to Hammamet afforded views of fertile farms, interesting rocky formations, a humid sky, trucks piled high with hay and vacation resorts, some of them looking a bit worse for wear. Like most countries, Tunisia suffered some tourism setbacks thanks to the pandemic. Not only that, but (not unreasonably) travellers are afraid of terrorist attacks.

Terrorism

Tunisia has the dubious honor of being the country with the highest number of foreign terrorist fighters in the world. After the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ (which Tunisians prefer to call the ‘Sidi Bouzid Revolt’), between 3,000 and 7,000 Tunisians have joined terrorist groups fighting in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The peak of in-country terrorist attacks was 2015, when there were at least two deadly incidents targeting tourists—one at the Bardo Museum and another at a resort in Sousse—and a suicide bombing targeting a bus carrying presidential guards. The last of these threw the country into an official state of emergency that is still in place today.

Most attacks since then have been thwarted–thanks both to dwindling membership in Islamist terrorist groups and also to an increase in funding and training in counterterrorism. There have been about a dozen deadly incidents since 2015, most of them targeting security forces. An exception is the attack on a synagogue in a pilgrimate site on Djerba Island in March this year, in which a Naval Guard killed six people. The El Ghriba synagogue, on Djerba Island, is one of the oldest synagogues in Africa and a major pilgrimate site. It has been the target of attacks before, in 2002.

President

Hope that the country would magically transform into a corruption-free superdemocracy after 2011 are unfortunately fading as the current President Kais Saied has been throwing his weight about in an alarming manner. Last year he fired 57 judges for ‘corruption’ without proof or substantiation. This year, he angrily denied he was censoring a couple of books that disappeared suddenly from the Tunisian book fair line-up–snatched up by security forces. What did these books have in common? They criticized him. The books were Le Frankenstein tunisien by Kamel Riahi and Kaïs I^er, président d’un bateau ivre (“Kais I: President of a Drunken Boat”) by Nizar Bahloul.

Hammamet

Hammamet was almost incredibly beautiful. Perhaps because it was winter, the hotel we stayed at was practically empty. It offered an amazing view of the sea and the sky and there were three pools, which were all freezing cold but that did not stop John from swimming every day. I tried it once and decided it was not for me.

There was a very friendly porter. The first day, when he asked us where we were from, we told a small fib and said we were both from New Zealand (John is an honorary Kiwi anyway) because John wasn’t sure exactly how welcome someone from the States would be.

After seeing John jump into the cold pool for the fifth day in a row, the porter hurried over to me where I was having coffee and he said, in an awestruck whisper, gesturing to the pool, “Madam, but Madam! What kind of people are there in New Zealand?!”

Food

One thing we saw a lot of ads for was harissa. This is a kind of hot chilli pepper paste favored by all Maghrebi people. I would have thought that one brand of harissa was much like another, but this is probably naïve. In any case, it is delicious.

In Hammamet I tried several other distinctive and tasty foods including, but not limited to, the following:

Sorghum porridge with toasted sesame seeds.

Semolina and olive oil bread

Makloub—basically a folded pizza slice.

Masfouf—sweet couscous

Lablabi—chickpea soup

Painters

An interesting piece of trivia was that Tunisia was a source of inspiration for two of the great painters of the twentieth century: Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, both proponents of Der Blaue Reiter ‘The Blue Rider’ art movement. Paul Klee had sworn off color before arriving in Tunisia, which changed his mind just by existing. Kandinsky was enchanted by the heavenly combination of white and blue found in much of the architecture around here.