Mohamed Bouazizi

Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside a municipal building in Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010 and started the Arab Spring. He was twenty-six, sold fruit and vegetables from a cart to support his mother and siblings, and had done so since his teens; the story that he was a university graduate denied work is one of the details that grew in the retelling and is not true. What happened that morning is disputed in its particulars and clear in its shape: a municipal inspector confiscated his produce and his scales over a permit he may or may not have needed, there was an altercation, and by his family's account he was slapped in public. He went to the governor's office to complain and was refused a hearing. He returned with paint thinner and set himself alight in the street. Protests began in Sidi Bouzid that afternoon, spread through the interior towns where unemployment was worst, reached Tunis within a fortnight, and on 14 January 2011 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia after twenty-three years in power. Bouazizi died of his burns on 4 January, having been visited in hospital by the president in a photograph that did the government no good at all. Egypt followed in weeks, then Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. The square in Sidi Bouzid carries his name and his cart is on a monument there. Tunisia produced the one durable democracy of the Arab Spring and then lost much of it after 2021, when President Kais Saied suspended parliament and ruled by decree. His sister said in an interview that in Sidi Bouzid those with no connections had no way to be heard, which is the whole account of why it started there rather than in Tunis.

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