About
Tunisia
Tunisia
may be the smallest country in North Africa, but its strategic
position has ensured it an eventful history. The Phoenicians,
Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans and French have all
picked at the region at one point. The earliest humans to set foot
here were probably a group of Homo erectus who stumbled onto the
place a few hundred thousand years ago as they joined north-west
across the Sahara from East Africa. It's believed that in those days
what is now arid desert was covered in forest, scrub and savanna
grasses, much like the plains of Kenya and Tanzania today. The
earliest hard evidence of human inhabitation was unearthed near the
southern oasis town of Kebili and dates back about 200,000 years.
The Phoenicians first set up shop in Tunisia at Utica in 1100 BC, using it
as a staging post along the route from their home port of Tyre (in
modern-day Lebanon) to Spain. They went on to establish a chain of
ports along the North African coast, the most important of which
included Hadrumètum (Sousse) and Hippo Diarrhytus (Bizerte). But the
port that looms largest in history books is Carthage, arch enemy of
Rome. It became the leader of the western Phoenician world in the
7th century and the main power in the Western Mediterranean in the
early 5th century. The city's regional dominance lasted until the
Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, which began in 263 BC and
ended in 146 BC with Carthage utterly razed and its people sold into
slavery.
The Tunisian territory became Roman property after the war. The emperor
Augustus refunded Carthage as a Roman city in 44 BC, naming it the
capital of Africa Proconsularis, Rome's African holdings.
Agriculture became all-important, and by the 1st century AD, the
wheat-growing plains of Tunisia were supplying over 60% of the
empire's requirements. The Romans went on to found cities and
colonies across Tunisia's plains and coastline; today, they're
Tunisia's principal tourist attractions.
By the beginning of the 5th century, with Rome's power in terminal
decline, the Vandals decided the area was ripe for plucking. Within
10 years, they'd taken Carthage as their capital and began to, well,
vandalize. Their exploitative policies alienated them from the
native Berber population, who in turn formed small kingdoms and
began raiding the Vandal settlements. The Byzantines of
Constantinople, who pulled the territory from the Vandals in 533 and
kept it for the next 150 years, fared no better.
Islam burst onto the scene in the 7th century, when the Arab armies swept
out of Arabia, quickly conquering Egypt. The Arabs had taken all of
North Africa by the start of the 8th century, and, with Kairouan as
its capital, the region became a province of the fast-expanding
Islamic empire controlled by the caliphs of Damascus.
The Berbers adopted Islamic religious teachings readily enough, but
they riled under their harsh treatment by the Arabs. Their uprisings
continued until 909, when a group of Berber Shiites, the Fatimids,
glommed together disaffected Berber tribes and took North Africa
back from the Arabs.
Their capital was raised on the coast at Mahdia, but the unity was
to be short-lived. When some of the tribes returned to the Sunni
mainstream, the tribes began to fight one another and North Africa
was slowly reduced to ruins.
Conflicts arose again when North Africa was caught in the middle of the
rivalry between Spain and the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the
16th century. Tunis changed hands half a dozen times in some 50
years, before the Turks took it in 1574 and it became an Ottoman
territory. Ottoman power lasted through to the 19th century, when
France became the new power in the Western Mediterranean and Tunis
came under increasing pressure to conform to their European ways.
In 1881, the French sent 30,000 troops into Tunisia under the pretext of
countering border raids into French-occupied Algeria. They quickly
occupied Tunis and forced the ruling Bey to sign over his power to
the French. Soon after, they had discretely nabbed the best of
Tunisian land. The fall of France in WWII opened the door for
Tunisian nationalists to step up their independence campaign, and
one man in particular, Habib Bourguiba, set about bringing Tunisia's
position into the international spotlight.
By the early 1950s, the French were ready to make concessions.
Tunisia was formally granted independence on 20 March 1956, with
Bourguiba as prime minister. The following year, the country was
declared a republic and Bourguiba became its first president,
instituting sweeping political and social changes. Regarding Islam
as a force that was holding the country back, Bourguiba set about
reducing its role in society by removing religious leaders from
their traditional areas of influence, such as education and the law.
The shari'a (Qur'anic law) courts were also abolished, and lands
that had financed mosques and religious institutions were
confiscated.
Bourguiba's presidency lasted through 1987, when after years of working to
squelch the Islamic party pretenders to his throne, his own minister
for the interior, Zine el-Abidine ben Ali, took advantage of the
Islamic citizenry's unrest to have Bourguiba declared mentally unfit
to rule and 'retired' to a palace outside Monastir.
Ben Ali quickly moved to appease the Islamic opposition, making a
pilgrimage to Mecca and ordering that the Ramadan fast be observed.
Since taking power his party's stranglehold on the government has
held fast. Today the main opposition parties remain disenfranchised
and media censorship is commonplace. In elections held in October
1999, Ben Ali won by a whopping 99.44%! Bourguiba's death in April
2000 inspired widespread and open dissent against Ben Ali's regime,
and signs of unrest are becoming more and more prominent.
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