The most striking aspect of Mohamed Bouazizi’s life is how ordinary it was. He was a typical 26-year-old Arab trying to make a living in a neglected Tunisian town, a fruit and vegetable seller whose ambition was to save enough money to buy a car. His meagre daily earnings were spent on supporting his family. No one of course will know what went through his mind when he bought a bottle of petrol and burnt himself alive. But the morning of his December 17 suicide had been a Kafkaesque struggle to recover the cart that had been confiscated by the police.
He was sent off from one government office to another. It was on the doorstep of the governor’s office that his desperation finally exploded, unleashing his agonising personal protest. While he died two weeks later from his wounds, he will forever be remembered as the spark of the Arab spring. With one tragic act, he awakened a generation of Arab youth from a long, uneasy sleep and altered Arab history.
The flame he lit in the little-known town of Sidi Bouzid led to the toppling of the country’s dictator and soon spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, as youth-led uprisings – some still raging – fractured a decades-old authoritarian order. Along the way he has shattered long-held assumptions on which world powers based their policies in the region and financial markets predicated their analysis – namely that autocracy was the key to stability.