A Personal Reminiscence

by Richard H. Curtiss

My first visit to Tunisia was in 1970 or 1971 when I was setting up a network of correspondents for the Voice of America Arabic service. It was a pro-forma visit because we already had a Tunisian correspondent, the only one in the five countries of the Arab Maghreb. The fact that I don’t remember the year, have no recollection of the first of perhaps a dozen subsequent airport arrivals in Tunis, and that my VOA predecessors had already succeeded in doing in Tunisia what they had failed to do in any of the surrounding countries says everything about this small country on the southern Mediterranean coast. It’s a place where things work without hassles, and tolerance and moderation have been elevated to the status of a national creed in this country where 98 percent of the people are Sunni Muslims.

That is not to say I had no problems. On my first morning, driving from the luxurious Tunis Hilton, situated on a wooded hill above the city, I explained in Arabic to the garrulous taxi driver that I would understand him better if he changed from French to his native Arabic. “Oui, Monsieur,” he responded amiably, and went right on speaking French.

As it turned out, I had a lot of trouble understanding Tunisians in either language. Most city dwellers spoke a very colloquial North African Arabic at home, listened to radio news in French, and therefore assumed all foreigners spoke French as easily as they did. In those days probably not one in a thousand Tunisians spoke English.

For this reason our VOA correspondent was a Palestinian, one of several then working in the U.S. Embassy in Tunis where competent Tunisian English-Arabic translators were virtually nonexistent. This tri-lingual Palestinian became my guide and host in Tunisia, and one of the pleasures of returning to the country many times after my association with VOA had ended was to watch his evolution from young man-about-town to young husband and then young father, living the comfortable life that Tunisia offers its ever-expanding middle class.

Two years after I left VOA to become counselor for public affairs in the American Embassy in Beirut, I found myself counseling U.S. Embassy Arabic-language students on the eve of their forced evacuation from the Lebanese capital in October, 1975. The Lebanese civil war that had begun seven months earlier had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and they and their families were being evacuated to a hastily organized Foreign Service Institute language facility in Tunis, which still exists. They were incredulous when I assured them that they would find the climate, countryside, beaches and amenities in Tunis comparable to those in Beirut, which up to then had been called “the Paris of the Middle East.”

After my return to Washington there were regular visits to all of the Middle East countries and I soon learned that it was best, if at all possible, to made Tunisia the last stop of any itinerary in which it was included. I always ended up buying an extra suitcase there to accommodate the carpets, ceramics and other handicrafts that were so appealing and so inexpensive compared to anywhere else in the region.

On one of those visits to chair a meeting of cultural officers from U.S. embassies throughout the Near East and South Asia, I took a group of them for their first visit to Tunis’s remarkable souq, situated within the old city walls and extending for many not-so-square blocks down a gentle slope that links the hilltop mosques and palaces of the former Beys of Tunis to the modern city that has grown up around the port below.

A very junior officer from Washington on his first visit to the Middle East asked me if the merchants whose shops we were visiting would realize he was Jewish.

“They don’t care,” I assured him.

“No, no, that’s not the point,” he explained. “I’ve heard that a lot of these merchants are Jewish and I was wondering if there is some way of recognizing them.”

“Not that I know of,” I said, “unless you want to start asking them.”

“I couldn’t do that,” he replied, and I thought the subject was closed.

As the afternoon wore on, however, he kept giving the merchants and their shops searching looks. They, in turn, took this as evidence that he was especially interested in the goods on display and outdid themselves in creative bargaining.

After three hours everyone in our group had a few purchases, but my young friend had had to hire a boy to carry all the items pressed on him by hospitable merchants only too happy to accommodate a visitor who tarried a moment too long, and then didn’t know how to extricate himself from the offers of “a special price for your first visit to my shop.”

That conference was held in a suite on the top floor of the skyscraper Hotel Afrique, now the Meridien Africa, on Tunis’s tree-lined Avenue Habib Bourguiba, a major shopping street. With a view that encompassed the entire downtown area, and only four or five blocks from the warren of streets comprising the old souq, the hotel became my favorite for subsequent visits. However, for summer visitors there also are smaller first-class resort hotels on sandy swimming beaches in the suburb of La Marsa, adjacent to Sidi Bou Said, perhaps the most picturesque hillside village in the entire southern Mediterranean.

On all of my visits there were opportunities to sample Tunisian versions of standard Middle Eastern culinary fare. There also were meat, fish and vegetable versions of the north African staple, couscous (semolina); various kinds of Tajine, which can best be compared to a cross between an omelet and a quiche; brik, which is a sort of deep-fried chicken pot pie in which tuna and a boiled egg are substituted for the chicken; and pastries which vary from such Middle Eastern staples as baklava to such French staples as miniature chocolate eclairs. The fruits also are first class in a country where the apples, apricots, peaches, pears, grapes, figs, dates and the bananas all are locally grown.

For still another business trip I gave myself an extra day. When the business was concluded I rented a car and drove straight south, stopping too often and too long at all of the picturesque coastal cities and towns and finally reaching my goal, the bridge to Jerba island, just as the sun was setting.

By the time I had crossed the bridge and reached the island it was pitch dark, and I found a hotel with difficulty. It was winter and my plane from Jerba back to Tunis left the next morning at 6 a.m., long before sunup. So I became one of the few Americans who up to that time had ever visited Jerba, now a tourist Mecca, which houses one of the oldest synagogues in the world. I probably also was the only visitor to the island who left without seeing it except in the dark.

I made only one visit to Tunisia in the 1980s, and that was on a U.S. AID-funded contract to find outlets in 19 Middle East countries for distribution of publications on demographics, maternal health and family planning. While such a mission was politically sensitive in such countries as Algeria and Yemen, and politically impossible in Saudi Arabia and some of the Arab states of the Gulf, that visit to Tunisia reminded me of my first arrival in that most progressive of Arab countries. Tunisia had had an active family planning program since the 1960s. My outlet already existed in the government-sponsored family planning agency.

So, with time to spare, I found myself sitting as in the past at a lunch table at the top of the souq with my old friend from VOA days, but this time accompanied by our wives and chatting animatedly as vendors of all manner of things Middle Eastern padded amiably by.

Retired from the foreign service and back in journalism in Washington, I met Ossama Rhondami, the U.S. representative of the Tunisian news agency and one of the few Tunisians I had met who spoke excellent English. He occasionally brought me good photo stories for our magazine. Later, as press attache at the Tunisian Embassy in Washington, he invited me for a visit to his country the same kind of visit I had arranged as a U.S. Information Agency officer for hundreds of official visitors from the seven different countries in which I had served.

That 1993 visit was backstopped by Tunisia’s newly created Agency for External Communication, which arranged any interviews I requested, and then made sure that I got there on time. That visit also marked the end of my language difficulties. Tunisians by now seemed much more attuned to my Levantine Arabic, and I to theirs, because by then most of their radio listening was to stations broadcasting in modern standard Arabic, which does not vary from Morocco to Oman.

More pertinent, however, was the fact that I was accompanied to all of my interviews by one or the other of two interpreters. One was a young man who had spent summers with a sister who lives in the United States. His English flowed easily but he was not familiar with all of the jargon of national development. The other interpreter was a young housewife and mother who had taken a degree in English literature but who had had little practical experience in using it. She knew exactly what my interlocutors were talking about, but had trouble keeping up with the rapid flow of their answers to my questions.

Nevertheless I was beguiled by the whole experience of visiting a country I’d always admired at exactly the time when the dreams of its visionary leaders were starting to come true. Perhaps even more exciting was having all this explained by two enthusiastic members of that country’s younger generation, neither of whom were shy about describing their own hopes and aspirations for the future.

By 1996, my old friend Ossama Rhondami had become the dynamic new director of Tunisia’s Agency for External Communication, and as a result my latest visit to his country was both exhausting and exhilarating. I arrived knowing what and whom I wanted to see. So I saw them, assisted by an interpreter so skilled that he monitored my note taking to make sure that as I recorded the simultaneous translation he provided at conversational speed I did not leave any key point unrecorded.

When I worried that my packed interview schedule might not leave me enough time to take the photos I needed, I was introduced to an archive of slides and prints that, I suspect, is the largest and most accessible in any Arab country.

Most exciting of all, however, was my realization that, for the first time, almost half of my interviews were being conducted in English. Those pioneer Tunisian students who broke the pattern of education in French at Tunisian universities, followed by graduate work in France, have come back from technical or liberal arts courses in Britain or graduate work at American universities.

Now at the higher reaches of the Tunisian government there are ministers and heads of agencies who speak and read English easily and who are familiar with American progress in their own fields of specialization. There may even be some who have a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of Americans, with their undiluted good intentions, unabashed ignorance of history, alien cultures and even foreign geography, and unalloyed pragmatism that does, somehow, get important things done.

In many positive ways Tunisia is becoming more and more like the United States. According to Mr. Rhondani, 60 percent of Tunisians now belong to the middle class, and only 5 percent now fall below the poverty line. Education is compulsory and as a result, “virtually everyone born after independence (1956) is literate today,” he explained.

“Not only is there a generalization of education,” he continued, “but there is a generalization of basic amenities adequate housing, public transportation, electricity, clean water. Once you have experienced this, you can only accept something better. You are witnessing an emerging young nation that accepts only the same standards of freedom and dignity that are enjoyed by certain developed countries.”

Tunisia’s forthcoming association with the European Union is a manifestation of this. So is the increasing use of English. Again, according to my friend Rhondani: “The English language is seen increasingly as a vehicle with which to engage the outside world. The challenge that has become one of the distinctions of Tunisia’s 40 years of independence is the ability to forge a kind of stable and dynamic identity for Tunisia: a new modernizing nation state that is also Arab and Islamic.

“It was not done easily, but I think we have earned the right today to be proud. Our accomplishments are the result of human effort and not extensive natural resources. We already have become an intermediate level country and we hope by the turn of the century to reach the level of the countries of Northern Europe. But, as much as we keep our eyes on that prize, we remain committed also to who we are.”

America, with its 200-plus years of history, has become the biggest kid on its block, well-meaning but sometimes arrogant, and increasingly unconcerned about the feelings of others. Tunisia, with its 3,000-plus years of history, is the nice kid in a tough neighborhood who has to be smarter, better educated, and always careful in order to survive among jostling, oil-rich giants. In the Middle East, Americans couldn’t have better friends than the Tunisians.