Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  It’s still a highly fashionable, moderately bohemian enclave and its centre is the celebrated Cafe des Nattes.

  It stands in a dominant position at the top of Sidi Bou Said High Street, and even when you’ve climbed up the hill there’s still a score of steep steps between you and the door, so you’re guaranteed to enter breathless. The wide, but intimate, rectangular room was once part of a mosque and dates back to the fourteenth century. There is a well-used feel to it, a definite sense of layers of history, behind the black and white horseshoe arch of the doorway. It’s a bit self-consciously traditional - very woody, with striped pillars and roof beams painted red, white and green, song birds in filigree cages, old wireless sets, black and white archive photos of Sidi Bou Said on the wall and a man behind the counter with a sprig of jasmine behind his ear. Wise old waiters in green and black striped jackets serve a largely young, international clientele sitting cross-legged on woven straw mats, the nattes that gave the place its name.

  I order a thick, rich Turkish coffee and a glass of the aux pignons, tea with pine nuts, for my companion Moez, a Tunisian film producer and director. Several people are puffing contentedly at bubbling chichas, so we order one to share. Moez says there’s an extra intensity to the smoking, since Ramadan began two days ago, forbidding the taking of anything by mouth during the hours of daylight. Not that this produces a drastically slimmed-down nation. Apparently, the month of fasting results in such indulgence during the hours of darkness that people come out of it having put on weight.

  The chicha is brought over by the waiter and set with courteous formality on a green baize table beside me. It’s the size of a small vacuum cleaner, and comes with various accessories, like a silver tray of fresh charcoal and a pair of tongs. My breath draws the smoke from the coal down through the tobacco and it cools as it passes the water chamber. It gurgles pleasantly and is completely legal. According to Moez, the sound is an important part of the relaxing process. The other is breath control. An accomplished smoker can keep the pipe going for an hour or more.

  ‘It’s not easy,’ Moez cautions, as I start puffing away like a steam engine. ‘Both of us would burn the tobacco in ten minutes.’

  We talk about his work. He’s making a film about the Tunisians who died in the Second World War. From the war movies I remember, you’d be forgiven for thinking any Tunisians were involved at all.

  Plenty of big foreign epics have been made in the country, including Star Wars, The English Patient and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but Moez prefers to work on local subjects.

  ‘We need to see our images, you know. The audiences here like to see Tunisian faces, Tunisian stories, Tunisian jokes.’

  Day Ninety-Two

  SIDI BOU SAID

  Out early. Sidi Bou Said is very walkable. It’s spotlessly clean with almost every wall and house and building painted white and cerulean blue. Bougainvillea and morning-glory burst out of tight, green gardens and spill over into the streets. The national flag is everywhere, red and white crescent and stars wrapped round lampposts and on bunting hung across the street. Tomorrow is the fourteenth anniversary of what the Tunisians celebrate as ‘Le Changement’, the day in 1987 when the great founding president, Habib Bourguiba, was declared senile and unfit to rule and power was painlessly transferred to his deputy, Ben Ali.

  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.

  Four members of the SPS, the Service de Protection Speciale, will be with me every time I leave the hotel. With Eamonn, that’s five, so we’ve almost doubled our crew already. And that’s not all. In certain high-risk areas like the casbah, another six members of the SPS will be drafted and men from the Commissionaire de Police of the casbah, the Casbah Cops as Eamonn calls them, will throw a cordon sanitaire around us.

  Having never had a cordon sanitaire thrown anywhere near me before, I suppose I should feel faintly flattered, but I feel bound to ask Eamonn if it’s all absolutely necessary.

  His reply is terse and to the point.

  ‘You’re a public figure. You’re a guest of the Algerian government. And frankly, if I lose you, I lose my job.’

  Pure James Bond.

  My immediate security team, four lean young men in suits with two-way radios, are affable and approachable. I learn from them that the French for walkie-talkie is talkie-walkie. That cheers me up a bit.

  I’m also reunited with Said Chitour, who takes me first to the Villa Suzini, a handsome Moorish house from whose roof there is a fine panorama of the city, laid out across wide, sometimes steep slopes curving round a generous bay. The French called it Alger La Blanche, and it is still a brilliantly white city, laid out like Lyon or Marseille, with tiers of imposing terraces, breaking down into the less regular outlines of the old town, the casbah, on the western arm of the bay.

  To the east, the skyline is dominated by a towering monument of 300-foot palm leaves, built of reinforced concrete, and dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution. Martyrs are very important to the Algerians, though there have been so many claimed by different sides that the word has become almost meaningless.

  Unlike other countries of the French empire, such as Tunisia, Senegal, Mauritania and Mali, Algeria’s independence was won at considerable cost. Hundreds of thousands of French settlers had made their lives here, and, rather than accommodate the demands for self-determination that swept through Saharan Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, they decided to make a fight of it. Their battle to turn back the tide of history ended in ignominious failure in 1962, when General de Gaulle, heavily influenced by world opinion, finally handed over the country to the nationalist FLN (National Liberation Front).

  The elegant old Villa Suzini played a particularly sinister part in all this. Down in the cellars, below the Carrara marble floor and the mosaic tiles and coloured glass of the central courtyard, are rooms into which the sun never shines. Plaster peels off the walls and there is a sour smell of damp. It was down here that the French paras interrogated their suspects. Torture was routinely used. Electric shocks were administered to various parts of the body through serrated pincers known as ‘crocodiles’. Some of those who died of their beatings were buried in the garden or thrown down a well at the back of the house. The Villa Suzini was, until two or three years ago, used as an office, but now, apart from a sallow-complexioned caretaker and two or three dogs, it is deserted. No-one will work here.

  ‘Too many ghosts,’ explains Said.

  Near the villa there is a funicular railway, and we take a car down the hill into the working-class district of Belcourt, where Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was brought up, and about which he wrote in an unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man).

  He made much in his book of the different levels in Algiers, both literal and metaphorical, with the poor crowded down by the port and the big houses with gardens higher up the hill. It’s like that still. In one short ride in a bruised and dented cable car, the atmosphere of the city changes, from villas to tenements, from well-swept streets to open ground strewn with drifting rubbish. Though the streets are meaner, they’re full of life and bustling activity. One of them borders a cemetery, whose outer wall is an open-air clothing store, hung with dresses, nighties, headscarves, coats, trousers and huge brassieres, with one section entirely devoted to football strips. One of the young boys wears a Manchester United shirt, but the strips on sale are mainly those of the big Algiers club, CRB Belcourt. Various international team names have been painted on the wall, including one which just reads ‘Holygans‘.

  The Camus family apartment at 93, Rue Mohammed Belouizdad (formerly the Rue de Lyon) is still there, above a photographer’s shop. There is nothing to commemorate the fact that a Nobel prizewinner lived here, but then Camus was a French Algerian, one of the European settlers they called the pieds noirs, and he was as critical of the Marxist revolutionaries of the FLN as he was of the French colonialists. But it does mean that the room in which he worked is very little changed, apart from a sticker in Arabic on the door, which reads ‘In the name of God and Mohammed his messenger’. It’s small, maybe 15 by 18 feet, with grey-blue French windows opening onto the street with its neatly clipped shady trees. It faces west and even now, in November, I can feel the force of a midday sun that must have made life unbearable in the long hot summers.

  The modest two-storey house may be unheralded, but it’s certainly not unused. It’s owned by an old but sprightly Algerian, who lives there with his
wife, three sons and their wives and children. Eighteen people altogether.

  One of the sons says that we are the first people to visit since 1998. I’m quite moved to be here and linger by the window for a while, looking out at the children’s wear shop opposite, the milling crowd, the line at a bus stop, the ordinary everyday life of the city which Camus observed so carefully.

  Day Ninety-Five

  ALGIERS

  Judging by the headline in Liberte, this might not be the best day for our visit to the casbah. ‘Algerie en Colere!‘ it screams - ‘Algeria in Anger!’ - but for once it isn’t a massacre or another killing that’s responsible. The anger this time is directed at the inadequacy of public services, and especially the water supply, which has remained unchanged since the French left. After another long dry summer, water in some areas is now rationed to one day in five, and there are reports of a typhoid outbreak in the poorer parts of the city. We’re told on no account to drink tap water.

  Before entering the casbah we rendezvous with the local police outside the white walls of the Barberousse prison, named after the Barbarossa brothers, two Turkish corsairs brought in by the ruler of Algiers to fight off Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century. It stands at the top of the hill looking balefully out over the narrow, crowded roofs of the casbah. Because of the heightened security and the momentousness of our visit (the first foreign film crew to be allowed in for several years), we’re all a touch jumpy, and when, with a sudden blaring of horns, a convoy of cars bursts round the corner, we instinctively rush for cover. Much mirth on the part of the security men, as it turns out to be nothing more than a wedding procession, in the middle of which is a portable band - six musicians in fezzes, white cotton tunics and red waistcoats, sitting in the back of a pick-up truck. With a salvo of car horns they move past down the road.