Ben Ali’s likeness is everywhere. A fleshy, pleasant-looking man staring glassily down from the posters and wearing a purple sash. He is almost as popular as Bourguiba and credited with bringing in young well-educated technocrats to modernise industry and business. Ben Ali and the Technocrats may sound like a 1960s rock band but they are hailed here as the new saviours of Tunisia.
One of those Tunisians who has benefited from all this lives nearby, in a sprawling 100-year-old mansion next to a golf course in Carthage. Three seriously impressive satellite dishes sprout from the roof. Leaves blow across a tennis court and gather in the swimming pool. Over the hedges there’s a glimpse of orange orchard, and at least a dozen oddly assorted dogs caper about beneath palms, pines and cypress trees at the top of a long drive. All it needs is a shooting party and a crowd of Tunisian country gentlemen to complete the picture. In fact, one small middle-aged woman emerges from the front door to welcome us. She’s short and compact with thick dark hair and a strong broad face. Her name is Hyett Alouami. She’s fifty and has two children. Her husband died of an aneurysm at the age of forty-six.
From the moment she greets us it’s clear that this is the sort of formidable woman who doesn’t do things by halves. She has not one but twelve dogs, all of them from a shelter which she herself started. She also has three cats and four transport companies.
She introduces us to the dogs, which have names like Cafe, Chocolat and Vodka. One she’s particularly fond of is just called Back.
‘Because he keeps coming back,’ she explains.
She gives instructions to an elderly manservant in a fez and green wellies, slipping her hand through his arm as they walk together through the garden. Then we repair to the waterfront to talk, for most of her life has been spent in the shipping business.
She was born on a farm near Sousse, but began work in the port of Bizerte, not as a clerk in an office, but actually on the dockside, in the resolutely male world of stevedores.
‘It was hard for the first five or six years, sure. There were always little things. I always had to open the gates for myself in the morning.’
She speaks effusively of her country’s debt to President Bourguiba. Without his insistence on a secular state, free universal education and equal opportunity for women, she would never have had the chance to go into business, let alone run companies. She is not alone. She reckons there are at least 1000 women of her generation who are entrepreneurs. All of which makes Tunisia quite exceptional in the Arab world. I ask her quite why this should be. The Tunisians, she points out, are a mixture of many races, including Romans, Phoenicians, Turks, Greeks; even the Normans came down here.
‘It’s a melting pot and that makes the nation a little bit different from other Arab countries.’
How different?
She nods, then stares out across the bay for a moment, before delivering a trenchant, if heretical judgement on the Tunisian male.
‘They are educated, they are sweet.’ She watches me for a moment. ‘But he’s quiet, he’s not a fighter.’ She breaks into a smile. ‘We say the Tunisian men are women.’
The smile becomes a surprisingly deep throaty chuckle.
‘I mean, I prefer that they are women rather than be men and kill each other.’
I ask her if Tunisia itself feels threatened, a slip of a country sandwiched between the oil- and gas-rich giants of Libya and Algeria. Again, her reaction is not quite what I’d expected. Her eyes seem positively to shine at the prospect of not having oil.
‘We are lucky. We are lucky to be in a small country without oil. Oil … is a malediction. God continued not to give us oil so we have to work hard to survive. In a way we feel a little bit more proud than the Libyan and the Algerian. We, not we, I mean Bourguiba, has invested a lot in education, health care and women. And women are leading the country, actually.’
Day Ninety-Three
TUNIS TO ALGIERS
The electric train service into Tunis is clean, efficient, regular and stops at Carthage, which may have been laid waste by the Romans 2000 years ago but is now the smartest place to live in Tunisia. A sign of its significance is that there are no less than five Carthage stations listed between here and Tunis. I get on at Carthage Hannibal, partly because station names don’t come much better than that, and partly because I’ve always had a fondness for anyone who stood up to the Romans. Hannibal’s dramatic invasion of Europe and his spectacular feat of transporting an entire army over the Alps made him their enemy number one and resulted in the eventual destruction of the Carthaginian empire. As a symbolic gesture of this destruction the Romans ploughed up the fields and sowed them with salt.
At Tunis Marine we disembark and take the tram a short way through the city to the main station in Place Barcelone, from where the Trans-Maghreb express leaves for Algiers.
We pull out, on time, at 1.10 p.m. Six blue and white coaches run by SNCFT, Societe Nationale de Chemins de Fer Tunisienne, the name itself an indication of how comfortably Tunisia has dealt with its French colonial past. A hundred and twelve miles, and three hours away is the border with Algeria, where things are tragically different.
Jamina, the girl sitting opposite me, is studying in Tunis and going back to see her family at the weekend. She speaks English well, but with the over-deliberate emphasis of someone who has taken the learning of it very seriously. Jamina gets off the train at Ghardimaou, less than a mile from the Algerian border. I watch her go, confident and self-possessed, on her way to see her mother, who was illiterate but whom she and her sisters have taught to read and write.
She has a spring in her step, a belief in herself and her country, which is a sharp and poignant contrast to the apathy and resignation I’ve seen in so much of the Sahara.
ALGERIA
Day Ninety-Four
ALGIERS
Eamonn O’Brien is walking me through the lush gardens of the Hotel El Djazair, Algiers, formerly the St George, known to the Victorians as ‘The Leading Hotel of North Africa’. An elaborate network of paths winds past beds in which hibiscus, rose and flowering cacti seem to grow in profusion, undaunted by prolific fronds of banana and palm trees. The paths, together with occasional colonnades, pergolas and ornate ironwork screens, show that this bosky little Eden has not grown wild. It was laid out by the British, who built the hotel in the 1880s, when the warm Mediterranean air, sheltered by the mountains from the harsh dry winds of the interior, made Algiers a favoured destination.
The hotel, with its rambling mix of European and Moorish styles, looks much the same as it does in the century-old black and white photos on its walls. But one thing has changed. There is no equivalent now of the crowd of smiling, heavily dressed foreigners photographed taking cocktails under wide umbrellas. Neither the British, nor anyone else for that matter, come to Algiers these days to enjoy the balmy warmth of a Mediterranean winter. It is, as Eamonn is telling me, just too dangerous.
Sitting together on a bench between two ornamental columns, like characters out of a John Le Carre novel, Eamonn tells me the grim reality of present-day Algeria. An estimated 100,000 people have lost their lives in the civil war, which began ten years ago when the government cancelled an election that a radical Islamic party was poised to win. Since 1993, all foreigners have been under a fatwah, a sentence of death, and over 100 have been killed. As the aim of the rebels is to cause maximum embarrassment to the government, those with a high public profile are particularly at risk. I’m not exactly Tom Cruise, but I appreciate Eamonn paying me the compliment of scaring me stiff.