Tataouine

Tataouine is a young town in an old landscape. The hills of the Dahar around it have been settled by Amazigh communities for many centuries, who built their villages on defensible ridges — Chenini, Douiret, Guermessa — and stored their grain in ksour, courtyards ringed by vaulted cells stacked several storeys high. The granaries belonged to clans and families, with each cell, or ghorfa, held by a household; Ksar Ouled Soltane is dated in part to 1699. They served semi-nomadic people who moved with their flocks and needed a secure place to keep barley, oil and dates against raiders and drought.

The town itself grew from a French military post established in the 1890s, when the far south was administered as a military territory and a garrison was placed at the foot of the hills. It was long known as Foum Tataouine, the mouth of the springs, and served as the administrative centre for a vast, thinly populated district reaching to the Libyan frontier. Under the protectorate it acquired the reputation of a place of exile and punishment: from 1892 to 1951 it was the garrison town of a French penal infantry unit.

After independence the town became a governorate capital, and the surrounding population steadily moved down from the ridges into it and into roadside villages, leaving the old hilltop settlements half empty. From the 1970s the ksour began to attract visitors, and the region's name entered global popular culture when Star Wars gave a version of it — Tatooine — to a desert planet, with several nearby sites used for filming. Since 2011 the south has also lived with the consequences of instability in neighbouring Libya, including refugee arrivals and disrupted cross-border trade, and Tataouine has seen repeated protests over unemployment and a share of southern oil revenues.

The Dahar is one of the strongholds of Amazigh culture in Tunisia. Berber speech survives in Chenini, Douiret and a few other villages, and the ksour, cave dwellings and terraced fields are the physical record of a society organised around clans, shared granaries and the movement of flocks between hills and plain. Families identify strongly with a particular village and ksar even when they have lived in town for generations, and return for weddings, funerals and festivals.

The Ksour Festival is the town's main cultural occasion, filling Tataouine and the granaries with music, sung poetry, horsemanship and craft displays, and drawing performers from elsewhere in the Maghreb. Weddings are long, public affairs with drumming, processions and henna nights, and hospitality is formal: tea is offered immediately, refusal is awkward, and a guest is fed before anything is discussed.

Crafts follow the materials of a dry country — wool woven into blankets and striped cloaks, palm fronds into baskets and roofing, olive wood into tools and bowls, and clay into the jars that lined the granary cells. Emigration is part of the culture too: men from Ghomrassen and the surrounding villages ran shops and bakeries across Tunisia and in France for generations, and money sent home built much of what stands in the town today.

The municipality counted nearly 67,000 people at the 2014 census, and it serves a governorate covering a huge, almost empty stretch of the south. Housing spreads along the valley and up the low ridges, mostly single-storey and built from concrete block, and the villages of the Dahar hold a few thousand more residents apiece — far fewer than a century ago. Households are large, and many depend on relatives working in Tunis, on the coast, in Libya or in France.

Work comes from administration, schools and the army, from sheep and goat herding and olive growing on the terraces, from small-scale trade, and from a modest tourism business around the ksour. The region sits near Tunisia's oil and gas fields — a new field was found south of the town in 2016 — and the gap between that wealth and local unemployment has driven sustained protests. Cross-border commerce with Libya, formal and informal, has long been an important income and has become unreliable.

The rhythm of the week turns on the market, prayers and the school day; the rhythm of the day on the heat, with business done early, shutters closed in the afternoon and the cafés of the main avenue filling after dark. Water is trucked or piped to many villages, and drought years are felt directly in the flocks and the olive crop.

Food in the south-east is plain, dry-country cooking. Barley and semolina dominate: couscous steamed above a stew of lamb, goat or vegetables, and thick barley dishes dressed with olive oil. Kadid — meat salted, spiced and air-dried — is the old way of keeping the meat of a slaughtered animal and is cooked into couscous through the year. Tabouna bread, baked against the wall of a clay oven, is eaten with oil, olives, harissa and fresh curd cheese.

Pastry is the speciality of the district, and above all of Ghomrassen up the road, whose bakers are known across the country for ftaier, fried doughnuts sold hot from the pan, as well as for makroud and zlabia; families from the town have carried those trades to shops all over Tunisia. Dates from the oases to the west, figs, almonds and pomegranates round out the sweet side.

The national dishes are all present — brik, the fried pastry parcel with egg; chorba, a peppery broth with fine pasta that opens meals in Ramadan; lablabi, a chickpea soup poured over torn bread; and mechouia, the salad of charred peppers and tomatoes — with harissa on every table. Mint tea, boiled slowly over coals and poured from a height with pine nuts or roasted almonds in the glass, is drunk all day and is the standard gesture of welcome.