Swimming was already political in Tunisia - and then they won a gold medal

[muriel_volestrangler]

Hafnaoui wasn’t expected to win. He had barely qualified for the race and was competing in an outside lane, which may put swimmers at a slight physical disadvantage (from the waves splashing off the wall) as well as a psychological one. He also comes from a country of empty swimming pools. As one Tunisian Twitter user put it, ‘any small Australian or American university has better infrastructure for swimming than the whole of Tunisia.’ (Australia and the US took silver and bronze.) Hafnaoui trains at a fifty-metre pool in the south Tunis suburb of Ezzahra, where he has been allocated his own lane by the national team for the last two years. But there are so few pools in Tunis that lanes are ‘overexploited’, sometimes with forty swimmers at once, according to Hassen Touni, a swimming coach.
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Omar Labidi, a 19-year-old football supporter, was running from the police after a match at the Rades stadium in Tunis in March 2018. They chased him to the banks of a river and pushed him in. He shouted that he couldn’t swim. They told him to learn and left him to drown. ‘Learn to swim’ is now an anti-police slogan.
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When Hafnaoui won his gold medal, Tunisians posted photos of him next to pictures of Labidi on Facebook and threw the slogan back at the government: ‘Your people learned how to swim and brought you gold.’ Later in the day, anti-government protests took place across the country.
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On Sunday evening, President Kais Saied announced that he was suspending parliament for thirty days, revoking MPs’ immunity from the law, dismissing Mechichi and assuming the prime minister’s powers himself. He has also put himself in charge of public prosecutions and says he will prosecute all MPs with legal cases pending against them. Saied, a political outsider who won a landslide victory in 2019, has long spoken of replacing the parliamentary system with locally elected councils that would ‘invert the pyramid of power’. But much of his energy so far has been spent in a power struggle with the parties in parliament, especially Ennahdha.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/july/learn-to-swim

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Thank you for an interesting sidelight on a political hotspot

I thought the article was going to be about men controlling what women wear (again). But I guess that 95% of the few pools they have would be men only.