​Fuck Ben Ali
Gary Hill
I came across this graffiti in 2011 in a backstreet in Sousse, Tunisia's third largest city. It refers to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the despotic recently deposed president of the country and his equally despotic and greedy wife Leila Trabelsi. I was told that half the personal wealth in Tunisia could be linked to either the Ben Ali family by blood, the Trabelsi family or their close friends. Due to corruption and patronage, forty-eight members of the two families were found to have extensive business interests as varied as banking, TV and radio stations, telecom and internet providers, to real-estate development, agriculture, car dealerships, retail distribution, an airline and even marble quarries. Ben Ali and Leila are estimated to have embezzled $US17 billion of Tunisian government money into various tax havens throughout the world. This is in addition to the 1.5 tonnes of gold ingots on board the flight that Leila had just appropriated from the vaults of the Banque de Tunisie with the help her private militia.
In the late-1970s I lived for a while in Brixton, an inner city suburb of south London. It was then primarily a low income area with a large Afro-Caribbean immigrant population. Walking back from the pub a little before midnight I encountered hundreds of posters pasted and pinned up on every possible vertical surface. They displayed two black and white photographs, side by side. One was an image of an elderly lady picking up discarded vegetables in Brixton Market. The other was Queen Elizabeth II sporting a priceless look of disgust, facing in her direction. The wording underneath the images stated: 'Elizabeth Queen £9 per week old age pension'; 'Queen Elizabeth £90,000 per week tax-free'. They had been placed there because the Queen was making an official visit to Brixton the following morning.
Walking through the same streets several hours later on my way to work, the posters were all gone. Someone had arranged for a gang of council-employed workers to remove them in the middle of the night. They were probably happy to do it, not because they were royalists but because, I later learned, they were paid double-time for working unsociable hours at short notice. I doubt very much whether costs such as these are ever factored in when the cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer is calculated.
And the graffiti on the backstreet of Sousse? A waiter in my hotel restaurant told me that there was no way that would have been allowed to stay put during Ben Ali's reign. It would have been removed in the middle of the night...............
A more comprehensive travelogue from my trip to Tunisia can be found here.
In the late-1970s I lived for a while in Brixton, an inner city suburb of south London. It was then primarily a low income area with a large Afro-Caribbean immigrant population. Walking back from the pub a little before midnight I encountered hundreds of posters pasted and pinned up on every possible vertical surface. They displayed two black and white photographs, side by side. One was an image of an elderly lady picking up discarded vegetables in Brixton Market. The other was Queen Elizabeth II sporting a priceless look of disgust, facing in her direction. The wording underneath the images stated: 'Elizabeth Queen £9 per week old age pension'; 'Queen Elizabeth £90,000 per week tax-free'. They had been placed there because the Queen was making an official visit to Brixton the following morning.
Walking through the same streets several hours later on my way to work, the posters were all gone. Someone had arranged for a gang of council-employed workers to remove them in the middle of the night. They were probably happy to do it, not because they were royalists but because, I later learned, they were paid double-time for working unsociable hours at short notice. I doubt very much whether costs such as these are ever factored in when the cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer is calculated.
And the graffiti on the backstreet of Sousse? A waiter in my hotel restaurant told me that there was no way that would have been allowed to stay put during Ben Ali's reign. It would have been removed in the middle of the night...............
A more comprehensive travelogue from my trip to Tunisia can be found here.
Original images and written content © Gary Hill 2011. All rights reserved. Not in public domain. If you wish to use my work for anything other than legal 'fair use' (i.e., non-profit educational or scholarly research or critique purposes) please contact me for permission first.
