In the far south of Tunisia, where men live underground in cunningly fashioned burrows, or above ground in cliff houses, or out in the desert in black tents, the Mediterranean region ends and Africa begins. Here among the great chotts, the dead salt sees which waste and sour the land, a primordial culture still exists, Berber in its origin.
The Berbers originally came from the Barbary coast of upper Tunisia. They were the pirates who raided ships along the coastline during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Now a fierce and tenacious people, they are the troglodytes of southern Tunisia, the lone survivors of a massive population influx in A.D. 1045.
During the early Islamic era, from the late seventh to the late eighth centuries A.D., Islam spread rapidly throughout North Africa converting all Christians except for the Copts in Egypt. But Islam's conquest was political, dealing with religion, language, and culture. The regional Berber and Arab rulers tried to maintain the prevailing economic order and their inherited Greek and Roman civilization.
This civilization remained undisturbed until 1045 when an overpopulated Saudia Arabia pushed hundreds of thousands of Bedouin nomads, known as the Beni Hillal, into Egypt. The Egyptian ruler, the Fatamid Mousetansir, who felt no friendship for his neighbor Tunisia, in turn pushed these primitive nomads over its border where they disrupted the existing civilization.
The Beni Hillal went into the heart of the agricultural and urban areas of Tunisia. In the agricultural areas, they upset the existing balance between cultivated lands and animal husbandry. They brought in their own herds and let them loose to eat the vegetation. Their flocks depleted the existing forest, consequently increasing the desert in the area of North Africa on which they grazed, destroying, moreover, the Tunisian irrigation system, which had been in place since pre-Christian times. Most of the Tunisian population either starved or left, except for the Berbers who escaped to the hills and caves to live. Their descendants who remain there have adapted to a way of life that is almost a thousand years old.
These people cling to their old ways, in the face of pressure from Tunisian officials and foreign experts who genuinely attempt to provide a "better" way of life for the southerners. A people whose ancestors faced the Vandals, who knew firsthand the ravages of Beni Hillal, and who were ignored by French colonialism must now reckon with the development plans of a new republic. This millennia-old civilization has not yet totally changed, but change is spreading rapidly.
Pilgrimage through places of the past
Medenine, located in a high-altitude desert in the southern part of the region, was a village in 1915. Still little more than a village, it now presides as a county town in the largest Tunisian governorate. A deep gully (oued in Arabic) called the Smar divides the town. On one slope uninteresting administration buildings fill the view. The other, older northern slope offers a vision of a fascinating marketplace, teeming with booths tended by tattooed Berber women. On the right, beside the Jorfa Road, lie the ghorfas, one of the three types of early Berber
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