Development and Disenchantment in Rural Tunisia

Mira Zussman went to northern Tunisia to determine whether independence had led to closer and more cooperative relations between state and rural society. What Zussman found was profound mutual disenchantment on both sides.

State elites were disenchanted with peasants’ resistance to outreach programs designed to increase agricultural productivity. Elites attributed this resistance to cultural factors, the stubborn “mentalité” of Tunisian peasants that made them conservative, fatalistic, irrational and risk-averse.

Peasants, for their part, were disenchanted with the Tunisian state they increasingly perceived as a reincarnation of the old colonial regime. Like the French colons of yore, governmental authorities were outsiders who came to “expropriate, distribute, regroup, and redistribute” (p.45), who dictated rather than consulted, who imposed strange methods of questionable value, who left peasants feeling “acted upon, frustrated, and power- less” (p.164).

The peasants’ profound sense of alienation from the state was reflected in the persistence of colonial imagery in their discourse on the state and in a culture of non-compliance with state directives that clearly undermined the achievement of national development goals.

Cambridge University Press Review
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