The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

  Salem, P. 1994. Bitter Legacy, Ideology and Politics in the Arab World. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

  Salibi, K. 1971. “The Lebanese Identity.” Journal of Contemporary History: Nationalism and Separatism 6: 76–86.

  Salibi, K. 1988. A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered. London: I. B. Tauris.

  Shehadi, N. 1987. The Idea of Lebanon: Economy and State in the Cénacle Libanais 1946–54. Papers on Lebanon 5. Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies.

  Terc, M. 2006. “A Modern, Integral and Open Understanding: Sunni Islam and Lebanese Identity in the Makassed Association.” Comparative Education Review 50, no. 3: 432–45. http://www.Jstor.org/stable10.1086/503884.

  Thomas, C. 2012. Les écoles chiites au Liban, construction communautaires et mobilisation politique. Paris: Karthala- Institut français du Proche-Orient.

  Toynbee, A. 1957. “Le Liban, expression de l’histoire.” Les conférences du Cénacle 6: 225–35.

  Traboulsi, F. 2007. A History of Modern Lebanon. London: Pluto.

  Chapter 48

  Punic Heritage in Tunisia

  Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Peter van Dommelen

  The relevance and importance of Phoenician and Punic studies extend well beyond an interest in Phoenician and Punic communities and their exploits in the past—they have an enduring impact on people’s lives today, as the Phoenician and Punic past has become inextricably interwoven with contemporary society in Tunisia and elsewhere. Ever since Bruce Trigger (1984) highlighted the use that contemporary nation-states and their overseas colonies make of archaeological remains and perceptions of the past more generally, the “politics of the past” have become a major concern of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians alike (e.g., Meskell 1998). In the Mediterranean, the Classical roots and Christian identities of (northern) European countries and societies have complicated this situation considerably as a result of multifaceted interactions between ancient and modern identities. A case in point are the islands of Crete and Cyprus, where recent and contemporary governments and communities, aligned with Western states and Christianity, have defined themselves in opposition to Islamic inhabitants and their roots in the islands. Violent conflict and displacements have ensued as a result in both cases (Herzfeld 1991; Michael 2011).

  Phoenician and Punic heritage has similarly become entangled in a multidimensional web of connections and contrasts. At one end, these are anchored in the Semitic and Near Eastern backgrounds of the Phoenician and Punic inhabitants of North Africa and their colonial expansion across the western Mediterranean; from another perspective, the subsequent conquests and occupation of North Africa by Romans, Muslims, and French have sharpened contrasts between colonizers and colonized, which have in turn been exacerbated by different religious backgrounds. Contemporary Tunisia stands at the heart of this entangled Phoenician and Punic heritage—first, because it is home to ancient Carthage, which was famously founded by the Phoenician settler-queen Dido, and which became the thriving capital of western North Africa in Punic and Roman times; and second, because Carthage was chosen by Habib Bourguiba, the first president of the Tunisian Republic, as the site for the presidential palace after independence from France. It remains the primary seat of power to this day.

  Over the past few decades, this situation has become even more intricate across the Mediterranean and Middle East, while tourism and the heritage industry have similarly spun more and deeper connections across the Mediterranean and beyond. Because package tourism was developed relatively early in Tunisia, and heritage tourism has increasingly become a major feature of the country’s economy, Tunisia stands at the heart of these developments, just as the recent revolution has upset political relations and has thrown perceptions of heritage and contemporary identities into sharp relief.

  Our aim in this chapter is to lay out the main associations, contradictions, intricacies, and subtle nuances that hold together and situate Phoenician and Punic heritage within contemporary Tunisia, as well as position Tunisia within the wider Mediterranean and international community. By “heritage” we mean an examination of past–present relationships, taking seriously the historic conditions of pressing social issues—whether political, economic, cultural, or moral—and the creative reworking of past endowments to meet present-day needs. In our view, cultural heritage thus functions as a mirror, enabling society to reflect upon its past and to mobilize social change (Hafstein 2012; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995; Lafrenz Samuels 2015a). Because we have written elsewhere about the colonial and Orientalist perceptions that have enveloped Phoenician and Punic heritage in Tunisia (Lafrenz Samuels 2010, 2012) and other Mediterranean regions, notably Sardinia (Van Dommelen 2014), in this chapter we focus in particular on the significance of tourism and the heritage industry for Punic heritage in Tunisia.

  Political and Economic Contexts

  For modern Tunisia, Carthage is the site of the presidential palace, and as such it represents the primary seat of power. This was especially the case during the regime of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011), who was ousted from power during the events of the 2010–2011 revolution. The decision, taken by Ben Ali’s predecessor Habib Bourguiba in 1957, to situate the presidential palace in Carthage was significant because the new president sought to emphasize the Punic heritage of the newly independent country in direct opposition to the colonial French association with the Roman heritage of North Africa. Both Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali used Punic Carthage to bolster their authority primarily to a home audience, explicitly underscoring the national sovereignty of Tunisia in the face of international and colonial politics.

  The Punic identification was taken much further by Ben Ali, as is evident from the publication of a number of political treatises in support of the Ben Ali regime that stand out for their evocative titles like Le retour d’Hannibal ou la résurgence d’une époque (The Return of Hannibal, or the Resurgence of an Era; Chaâbane 2005), and Non delenda Carthago: Carthage ne sera pas détruite, autopsie de la campagne anti-tunisienne (Non delenda Carthago: Carthage Must Not be Destroyed, an Autopsy of the Anti-Tunisian Campaign; Haddad 2002). Portraits of Hannibal and Hamilcar Barca and architectural reconstructions of ancient Carthage were also widely used on prominent and highly official media like bank notes, coins, and stamps (figure 48.1). At the same time, the adoption of Punic heritage by Ben Ali prompted satirical critiques of the regime that imaginatively played on the Punic past. The Tunisian writer and activist Abdel Aziz Belkhodja published a comic book on Hannibal with implicit political messaging (Belkhodja 1998), while his later novel Le retour de l’éléphant was more overtly critical of Ben Ali’s repressive and authoritarian rule (Belkhodja 2003). The narrative creatively plays with the temporal basis of heritage, mixing elements of Punic culture projected a hundred years into the future. Belkhodja would later serve as one of the leaders of the many political parties that formed following the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011. He has also written a number of other novels and histories of Carthage.

  Figure 48.1 Banknote of 5 dinar (2008 edition), showing Hamilcar Barca in profile, with a reconstruction of the circular harbor in the background. The reverse shows centrally a stylized sailing vessel with the number 7 and the year 1987 written across in large font, thus commemorating Ben Ali’s ousting of Habib Bourguiba and take-over as President on November 7, 1987.

  Source: Public domain.

  Ben Ali’s identification with Tunisia’s Punic heritage fed into the cult of personality he cultivated. Tunisian governance was personalized to the office of the presidency under Ben Ali in a way that drew on historical precedents reaching back to colonial rule and the Ottoman Empire. It was an unusual ruling style for countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In part, it enabled Ben Ali to build an international reputation for Tunisia as one of the most “liberal” and “western” Arab states, an ally in the fight against terrorism, and it earned Tunisia widespread praise and rewards as a success story of democ
ratization and economic development.

  The reality, however, was quite different. Tunisians were held under the thumb of Ben Ali, who ruled with tight de facto one-party authoritarian control, in a police state where one in ten individuals was employed in security services, often as secret police patrolling the populace. Police brutality and the use of torture on political opposition were widespread. When in May 2008 human rights activists tried to post video testimonies on YouTube from former political prisoners, the Ben Ali administration blocked access to YouTube in the country. Activists responded by staging a “virtual sit-in” on Google Earth, geo-tagging the videos to spatially position them over the presidential palace at Carthage in an attempt to provide alternative public access to the recorded testimonies.

  In addition, the economic livelihood of the average Tunisian suffered badly under the Ben Ali regime (Ben Romdhane 2006; Cassarino 2004; Hibou 2005, 2006, 2011). Economic growth in Tunisia went primarily to benefit Ben Ali, his family, and his inner circle. How well-off one was in Tunisia depended on how many degrees removed one was from Ben Ali (Angrist 1999; Bellin 1994; Durac and Cavatorta 2009; Entelis 2005; Murphy 1999; Rijkers et al. 2014). As a result, economic growth in Tunisia was marked by deepening economic inequality and diminishing opportunities, especially for the rapidly growing numbers of young people. Compared to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Tunisians enjoyed many social services, which were presented as flowing directly from the patronage of the president (Blin 2009; Harrigan and El-Said 2009). These social services included in particular a widely accessible college education. This, however, resulted in a highly educated younger generation who had “nowhere to go,” as young Tunisians were faced with the prospects of unemployment despite holding college degrees. For example, graduates in archaeology and related fields felt extraordinarily fortunate if they were able to obtain a job as a site tour guide, and they usually would have had to work social networks of patronage to do so.

  These economic and demographic pressures eventually came to a head in the revolution, sparked by the self-immolation of a young man—Mohamed Bouazizi—who had lost all hope under the crushing economic constraints he shared with so many of his generation. Unfortunately, half a decade on from the revolution, there are still not enough jobs, especially for college graduates: the unemployment rate in Tunisia remains stubbornly high at 15 percent, but is desperately high at 38 percent for young people, and higher still at 62 percent for college educated youth (OECD 2015). The revolution was driven by economics and the structural inequality created by the Ben Ali regime—and these economic conditions remain largely the same today. It is this economic situation, and its close entanglement with the political conditions in Tunisia, that are crucial for understanding the role of Punic heritage in Tunisian society.

  The Tourism Industry

  Both the economic and the political contexts of Punic heritage are primarily defined by tourism. The tourism industry has been a mainstay of the Tunisian economy since Habib Bourguiba took office in 1957, following the country’s independence from colonial rule. His administration actively promoted tourism development as a means for economic growth by encouraging private investment and through direct state support for building hotels and other tourism facilities: between 1960 and 1965, the state built 40 percent of the hotel bed capacity in the country (Smaoui 1979). Tourism was therefore a highly managed form of economic development in Tunisia, which aimed at 20–25 percent annual increases in tourist-bed nights throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Bouhdiba 1981). It was primarily based on the attraction of mass tourism and package tours, with 80 percent of tourists to Tunisia arriving in groups (Bergaoui 1996; Poirier and Wright 1993: 154). By marketing Tunisia explicitly as a “sun, sand, and sea” destination, these planning measures resulted in what is known as “enclave tourism,” which concentrated the country’s tourism facilities and visitors in a few narrow coastal strips with attractive beaches in eastern Tunisia, notably the shore between Hammamet and Nabeul, the Sahel coast, and the island of Djerba. Through enclave tourism, the Bourguiba government could not only control the flow of foreign tourists, including the associated revenue, but also manage tourist experiences and thus Tunisia’s international image. The growth and importance of the tourism industry are evident from the statistics: during the 1970s and 1980s, the number of hotels in Tunisia doubled from 212 to 532, and the number of beds quadrupled from 34,000 to 123,000. From 1981 to 1988, revenue from tourism covered 44–97 percent of Tunisia’s trade deficit (Poirier and Wright 1993: 154–57). By the 1980s, tourism had clearly become vitally integral to Tunisia’s economic health.

  The massive and sudden growth of the tourist industry, as well as the focus on enclave tourism, did not remain without consequences, however, especially in highlighting economic inequalities. By the late 1970s, a number of Tunisian tourism experts drew attention to the impact of tourism, and called for diversification—in particular, a shift to cultural tourism. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba (1976: 11) described tourism in Tunisia as:

  the behavior of a wasteful society in the midst of a society of want. What the average tourist consumes in Tunisia in a week in the way of meat, butter, dairy products, fruits and pastries is equivalent to what two out of three Tunisians eat in an entire year. The rift between rich and poor societies at this point is no longer merely a theoretical scandal based on academic analysis. It is everyday reality.

  Bouhdiba moreover argued that enclave tourism created a missed opportunity, because tourism could also offer a meeting place between cultures for mutual enrichment and for building international relations and goodwill. He called for Tunisia to promote its past and present cultural heritage as a way of “humanizing” tourism and of integrating culture with economics.

  Pivoting to Cultural Tourism

  With Ben Ali’s takeover of the presidency in 1987, the developmental vision for tourism in Tunisia began to diversify and to shift focus from packaged mass tourism to cultural tourism (Hazbun 2007, 2008; Saidi 2008). During the late 1980s and 1990s, Tunisian economic development underwent two periods of “structural adjustment,” which are a set of policies required by multilateral development banks, like the World Bank, for countries to have access to funding. Packaged in a suite of neoliberal prescriptions, these reforms aimed to implement privatization and trade liberalization, and promote foreign investment. Many of the state-built tourism facilities were privatized and special incentives to private investors grew investment in tourism fourfold from 1987 to 1992, from $73 million to $290 million. As a result, the tourism sector was critical to Tunisia’s economic liberalization and integration into the world market (Gray 2000; Hazbun 2007; Moore 1991; Murphy 1999, 2001). The rapid growth of tourism under structural adjustment dovetailed with the shift to cultural tourism, which meant that Tunisia had to build the infrastructure and facilities for cultural tourism, such as the development of archaeological sites and museums, marking out of touristic routes, and training of heritage professionals (Abdelkafi 1998). In essence, Tunisia undertook a concerted campaign to build capacity for cultural heritage tourism, which culminated in the 2000s in a major World Bank project. Called the Tunisia Cultural Heritage Project, it included among other goals the further development of facilities at the site of Carthage (Lafrenz Samuels 2010: 207–11, 221–69). In the end, however, the tumultuous shake-up of the revolution and the thorny real estate pressures endemic to Carthage caused the World Bank project to be scaled down and to focus on fewer sites.

  On the face of it, Ben Ali’s administration pursued cultural heritage tourism as a way to distribute tourism revenue throughout the country, since many archaeological sites are located in Tunisia’s interior or otherwise away from the usual beach haunts of the “sun, sand, and sea” tourists. However, income continued to be swallowed up by package tours run by foreign operators from France, Italy, and Germany, which meant that much of the revenue from cultural heritage tourism was funneled out of the country, as tourists effectively spent lit
tle of their money on Tunisian-run services and in Tunisian businesses. At best, a single business might benefit from heritage tourism by procuring the connections to be a stop on package tour itineraries, as for example the Thugga Hotel does for the archaeological site of Dougga. Moreover, as in all prominent economic sectors under Ben Ali’s regime, cronyism and corruption were rampant in the tourism industry, and the economic growth spurred by heritage tourism primarily benefited those associated with Ben Ali’s family and inner circle. Easy financing for tourism facilities resulted in a hotel building spree, as well-connected Tunisians seized the opportunity to launder some of these loans and to generate cash—for example, to send their children to university in France. Because of the resulting overcapacity, Tunisian hotels were running at 50 percent occupancy by the time of the revolution (UNWTO 2010).

  International Conservation Efforts at Carthage

  At the same time that heritage tourism was contributing to increasing economic inequality, the cultural content of Tunisia’s heritage was used to project an image of intercultural coexistence and tolerance to the foreign audience of tourists (Lafrenz Samuels 2012, 2015b). The widely used metaphor for Tunisian society as the “Tunisian mosaic” refers to the country’s history as made up of multiple waves of cultural influences, beginning with the Phoenicians, which together have shaped a modern society known for its tolerance and openness to other cultures (Gray 2012: 301). This message fed into the cosmopolitan discourse celebrated by international actors, such as UNESCO and the international conservation efforts of UNESCO World Heritage. For example, in 1995, Carthage provided the backdrop for a speech by the Director-General of UNESCO, Federico Mayor, who extolled the city as a symbol of tolerance. Drawing on the universal heritage of Carthage, Mayor advocated tolerance by teaching universal values, while also “not imposing our own models, beliefs or points of view,” or presuming “to lay down rules or norms for those remote from ourselves” (Mayor 1995: 2–3). Indeed, the birth of an international consciousness for protecting heritage—of a shared global history whose protection is of international concern—was attributed to the early conservation campaigns to “save” Nubia, Carthage, and Borobudur (UNESCO 1990, 2004; Errahmani 1990). Carthage duly became one of the first sites inscribed to the World Heritage List in 1979.