A Tale of Two Martyrs

I had never heard of the little Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. And yet, that’s where it all began. With an ordinary incident, one that happens frequently, but so frequently that it finally started something unstoppable.

Once upon a time there was a young man of twenty-eight, with some education but no job, who lived with his mother and brothers and sisters. To earn a bit of money, he’d managed to get himself a market stall, a sort of cart to display fruit and vegetables. A street pedlar: one sees them just about everywhere in the cities of the Maghreb. Cars often pull up alongside them, double-parking, for last-minute purchases of fruit for dessert at lunch. Too poor to set themselves up in a shop, such vendors live from hand to mouth. Their carts sometimes impede the flow of traffic, but everyone carries on. And if a vendor ‘buys’ the goodwill of the policeman on the corner, he can relax and sell his produce without fear of harassment. On occasion, that same policeman may make a show of zeal to impress his boss by sternly forcing the vendor to go elsewhere. Well, some spots are more strategically situated than others, and places with a lot of traffic are clearly the best for business. Such spots must be ‘purchased’, of course, with one or two bills slipped to a policeman, establishing between the police and the pedlars a dominance hierarchy that resembles the petty neighbourhood mafias in Italy. You want to work? Then you must pay. If the vendor protests, he’ll see his cart suddenly tipped over, or confiscated for ‘causing a disturbance on the public thoroughfare’.