In Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, published in 1966, an unnamed university graduate returns to his home country, Sudan, full of hope about the new era of independence in his country. But an old man from his ancestral village warns him: “Mark these words of mine, my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.”

As Salih predicted, the regimes that have followed European occupation of the Arab world have consolidated power in the hands of a small elite, which was often beholden to foreign countries and bent on repressing the civil and human rights of its people. Over the last two generations, the majority of young Arabs have known only two or three heads of state, each brought to office thanks to heredity, coup d’état, or sham elections. This is why, reading about the events in Tunisia earlier this month, it seemed to me I was witnessing the first national uprising in the Arab world since independence.

And what joy it is to be alive at this moment! To see Ben Ali chased out of the country he led for 23 long years is to feel that nothing is impossible. While the rest of the world was busy trying to come up with a suitable name for this revolution, the Tunisian people coined a new verb: “se benaliser”, which means “to run away in fear”. It is certainly a lovelier coinage than the one they lived with for far too long: “se trabelsier,” which means, “to steal, in the manner of the Trabelsis”. (The Trabelsis are the widely despised family of Ben Ali’s wife, Leila Trabelsi.)

The aftershocks of the Tunisian uprising are beginning to be felt across the region, with a spate of self-immolations and street protests. The doyen of Arab dictators, Muammar Gaddafi, in power for 41 years, seems particularly worried, given his scolding of Tunisian protesters and his rush to stamp out protests in Libya over subsidised housing. The slogans used by protesters in Cairo and Alexandria demonstrate how much they have been inspired by their Tunisian brothers: “Mubarak, dégage!” (“Mubarak out!”) said one. And “Mubarak, Mubarak, Ben Ali welcomes you – the Jedda Hotel awaits you.”

Of course, protests in the Arab world are nothing new. The Arab dictators long ago learned how to muzzle the independent press, to stifle political opposition, to instil fear in their citizens and especially to let young people blow off a little steam every once in a while. But Tunisia demonstrated what hundreds of hypocritical lectures on democracy could not: even against such odds, change is possible. In that sense, it has transformed the Arab world.

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-born writer and critic.