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‘Maybe 12 o’clock. Maybe 5 o’clock,’ came the vague reply.
‘Which one?’
‘He will come.’
Hajer’s hairstyle, an exuberant greying Afro, suggested a man still caught in the giddiness of the seventies. On times and appointments he was consistently casual. He had heard of our plans and, like his boss Taher, heartily approved of them.
‘No-one do anything like this since Second World War,’ he declared. Excitable and warm by nature, he launched into a passionate recommendation that we extend our desert crossing into Sudan. ‘If you are British and you have money, you can do anything in Sudan,’ he promised. ‘We like the British too much.’
I told him Ned was a farmer in England.
‘Then you must invest in Sudan agriculture,’ was the unhesitating reply. ‘You will have a letter from the government and then you can do anything. ANYTHING.’ His eyes grew large with enthusiasm. ‘You want farm? You can buy farm. You want camels? You buy camels. No problem in Sudan. You do ANYTHING you like.’ He spoke in an excited, breathless staccato, a patriotic investment adviser in overdrive. There was no stopping him. ‘Sudan is VERY, VERY rich country. We have EVERYTHING in Sudan.’
For years Sudan had been one of the poorest countries in the world, crushed by civil war, famine and corrupt, xenophobic governments. None of this had dented Hajer’s boundless optimism.
‘You must see it. Not for one month or two months. No,’ he went on emphatically, ‘you must go for nine months.’
‘First we must talk to Taher,’ I said, trying to steer the conversation around to the present.
‘The government will help you too much if you like Sudan agriculture,’ he went on, looking meaningfully at Ned.
‘Perhaps we can discuss this a little later,’ I suggested. ‘But could you tell us where Taher is. He should be expecting us.’
Hajer looked upset. He had not expected to be diverted from his talk on Sudanese agriculture. ‘He will come,’ he said stubbornly.
Taher did not come. We waited several hours and still there was no sign of him.
‘Do you think he’s reliable?’ asked Ned over lunch in a semi-derelict hotel opposite our own. Like most swimming pools in Tripoli, this one was empty and looked as though it had been for years. Ned looked bored. I was, too, but was used to waiting for appointments in Libya.
‘As reliable as you can expect in Libya.’
‘Well, it doesn’t look like he’ll come today. Shall we go to Leptis Magna?’ he went on. We waited another couple of hours and returned to the office.
‘Taher come tomorrow,’ said Hajer, as though he had known this all along.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Ned, who had waited long enough.
We called a taxi and drove to the stately ruins of Leptis Magna, Libya’s most imposing Roman city.
Leptis owes its greatness to its most famous son Septimius Severus, the first African Roman emperor. He seized power in AD 193, after the murders of the emperors Commodus and Pertinax in quick succession. Elevated to greatness in Rome, Septimius never lost sight of his African origins and Leptis rose to the height of imperial grandeur, becoming one of the foremost cities of the empire. Architects and sculptors descended in droves from Rome and Asia Minor to create monuments such as the two-storey basilica, overwhelming in its sheer scale, gorgeous in its design, paved with marble and ruthlessly decadent, with soaring colonnades of Corinthian columns embellished with shafts of red Egyptian granite. Up went the Arch of Septimius Severus, built in AD 203 for the emperor’s visit to his birthplace, an immense testimony to Rome’s mighty sway, with marble reliefs detailing triumphal processions, naked winged Victories, captive barbarians and a united imperial family. A new forum was erected, the circus was enlarged and the port rebuilt to accommodate 1,000-ton ships guided into the harbour by a 100-foot lighthouse. Leptis had never known such glory and would never again. When Septimius died campaigning in York in AD 211, the city embarked upon a long decline from which it did not recover. Fifteen centuries later, Louis XIV had many of the city’s treasures exported to Paris.
For the art historian Bernard Berenson, Leptis was unforgettable. ‘We went on to the Baths, the Palestra, and the Nymphaeum,’ he wrote to his wife in 1935. ‘Truly imperial, even in their ruins, for one suspects that ruins suggest sublimities that the completed building may not have attained. In their present state they are evocative and romantic to a degree that it would be hard to exaggerate.’ Today, we wandered along the shore and clambered undisturbed over these neglected buildings, past piles of fallen columns and discarded pedestals lying strewn under the wide African sky. The hot silence of the place was overpowering. Deep in drifts of sand and choked by spreading trees and plants, Septimius’s city slept.
Through his encouragement of camel breeding on the North African littoral, the African emperor had provided a huge fillip to Saharan trade. The merchants of Leptis are thought to have been the first to benefit from the introduction of this animal. The days of the horse, used for centuries to great effect by the formidable Garamantes, were numbered. The camel offered improved performance in the desert, was economical to run, and comfortable to ride. The Romans wasted little time in increasing the numbers of this versatile beast. By AD 363, when Leptis was invaded by the Austurians, a group of tribes from the central region of Sirtica, Count Romanus, commander of Roman troops in Africa, demanded 4,000 camels from the townsmen as his price for intervening on their behalf.
We met Taher in his office the following morning. He appeared taken aback by our arrival, like a burglar caught in the act. Sheepishly he confessed that nothing had been arranged.
‘I thought maybe you would not come to Libya,’ he said feebly.
‘But Taher, I told you exactly when we were going to arrive,’ I replied, exasperated. My previous trip to Libya seemed to have been for nothing.
‘We have too many problems in Libya,’ he said, as though this explained everything.
‘Well, it’s a great start,’ I said, turning to Ned. He was phlegmatic about this first upset to our plans. I should have been, too. Planning anything in advance in Libya was a lost cause. The country didn’t work like that. You had to be there on the ground to get anything done.
‘Now you are here I will go to talk to my friend,’ Taher said more hopefully. ‘Maybe you can buy your camels in Tripoli.’ It seemed unlikely.
We headed into Tripoli’s Old City and threaded our way through Suq al Mushir, the gateway into the medina, to drink tea, smoke apple-flavoured tobacco in shisha pipes, and mull over our situation, which did not seem particularly promising. On the outside of the old British Consulate on Shar’a al Kuwash (Baker Street) was a plaque put up by the Gaddafi regime describing the building’s history. Reflecting the leader’s distrust of western imperialism, it referred to the pioneering nineteenth-century missions into the Sahara that left from here as ‘the so-called European geographical and explorative scientific expeditions to Africa, which were in essence and as a matter of fact intended to be colonial ones to occupy and colonize vital strategic parts of Africa’.
Built in 1744, it served first as a residence for Ahmed Pasha, founder of the great Karamanli dynasty. Turkey had administered Tripoli since 1551, when Simon Pasha overcame a small force of the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, who until then had been maintaining the city as ‘a Christian oasis in a barbaric desert’. The Karamanlis themselves hailed from the racial mix of Turkish soldiers and administrators who had married native women.
From the second half of the eighteenth century, the building became the British Consulate, from where successive consuls kept London up to date on the Saharan slave trade, various measures to suppress it, and the continued obstruction of such measures by the Turkish authorities. Local officials tended to disregard with impunity Constantinople’s imperial firmans (decrees) and vizirial orders outlawing the trade for the simple reason that they benefited enormously from it. Typical of the correspondence between London and Tripoli was the instruction in 1778 to the British Consul Richard Tully to provide
an account of the Trade in Slaves carried on in the Dominions of the Bey of Tripoli, stating the numbers annually brought into them and sold, distinguishing those that are natives of Asia from those that are natives of Africa, and specifying as far as possible, from what parts of Asia and Africa the slaves so sold in the Dominions of the Bey are brought, and stating whether the male slaves are usually castrated.
Such correspondence makes grim reading. For all the British determination to stamp out this ‘miserable trade’, it continued apace and for more than a century after Tully’s time, consuls would write to London of the Turkish authorities’ ‘apathy and utter indifference’ to the slave trade, their ‘palpable’ neglect and ‘flagrant infraction’ of orders from Constantinople. In 1848, the sultan prohibited the Turkish governor of Tripoli and his civil servants from trading in slaves and in 1856 slave dealing itself was outlawed throughout the Ottoman empire. But in practice, the trade continued, albeit in reduced volume. In 1878, 100 years after the letter to Tully, Frank Drummond-Hay, the British Consul, was telling the Foreign Office that ‘the vigilance required in watching the Slave Trade, in thwarting the devices resorted to by the local authorities in order to evade the execution of the orders for its suppression, in obtaining information on the arrival of slaves by the caravans from the Interior, of intended shipments and other numerous matters in connection with this traffic’ justified a substantial increase in his salary.
On the other side of a massive wooden door was the cool marble floor of an elegant courtyard, decorated with plants, on one side of which a worn flight of steps led up to the ‘general scientific library’ to which the building was now devoted. This was the house in which Miss Tully, sister of the British Consul, composed her fascinating Narrative of a Ten Years’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa between 1783–93. This doughty lady lived through the great plague of 1785 that carried off a quarter of Tripoli’s inhabitants and regularly witnessed slave caravans arriving from the Sahara. One limped into town in the dreadful heat of summer in 1790. ‘We were shocked at the horrible state it arrived in,’ she wrote. ‘For want of water many had died, and others were in so languishing a state, as to expire before any could be administered to save them from the parching thirst occasioned by the heat. The state of the animals was truly shocking; gasping and faint, they could hardly be made to crawl to their several destinations, many dying on their way.’
An intimate of the Pasha of Tripoli’s family, Miss Tully heard eyewitness accounts of the assassination in 1790 of Hassan Bey, his eldest son and heir. Sidi Yousef, the Pasha’s youngest son and pretender to the throne, had been feuding with his elder brother for some time before announcing he was ready for the sake of the family to effect a reconciliation in front of their mother Lilla Halluma.
The Bey replied, ‘with all his heart’ that ‘he was ready’ upon which Sidy Useph rose quickly from his seat, and called loudly for the Koran – the word he had given to his eunuchs for his pistols, two of which were brought and put into his hands; when he instantly discharged one of them at his brother, seated by his mother’s side. The pistol burst, and Lilla Halluma extending her hand to save the Bey, had her fingers shattered by the splinters of it. The ball entered the Bey in the side: he arose, however, and seizing his sabre from the window made a stroke at his brother, but only wounded him slightly in the face; upon which Sidy Useph discharged the second pistol and shot the Bey through the body.
Hassan’s gruesome murder – Miss Tully informs us he was stabbed repeatedly by Sidi Yousef’s black slaves as he lay dying and had eleven balls in him when he perished – plunged Tripoli into chaos. Further assassinations of leading figures followed and the Karamanli dynasty, which had ruled Tripoli since 1711, found itself under siege. Fighting broke out against the neighbouring Misratans and the rapacious Sidi Yousef prepared to attack Tripoli Castle. From its ‘situation and strength’, the British Consulate was regarded as the only safe asylum among the consular houses. Miss Tully braced herself for an invasion: ‘The Greeks, Maltese, Moors and Jews brought all their property to the English house. The French and Venetian consuls also brought their families; every room was filled with beds; and the galleries were used for dining-rooms. The lower part of the building contained the Jewesses and the Moorish women with all their jewels and treasures.’
While the family’s internecine conflict raged, on 29 July 1793 a Turkish adventurer named Ali Burghul – well acquainted with the turmoil – sailed into Tripoli harbour with a fleet of Turkish vessels claiming to have a firman from the Grand Signior to depose the Pasha and assume the throne. The crimson flag with the gold crescent was raised over Tripoli, Turkish guards rampaged through the city and the Tullys fled. After the failure of their initial attempt to repel the usurper, the princes Sidi Yousef and his second brother Sidi Hamet escaped to join their father who had taken refuge with the Bey of Tunis.
By 1795, the father and his two sons had made up their differences and a reunited Karamanli family expelled the Turkish impostor from Tripoli, installing Yousef as the new Pasha. His rule dovetailed neatly with growing British interest in unexplored Africa, born of the desire both to extend commercial relations with the continent and to investigate and suppress the Saharan slave trade. In 1788, in recognition of the fact that ‘the map of the interior of Africa is still but a wide extended blank’, the Society Instituted for the Purpose of Exploring the Interior of Africa (African Society for short) was founded in London. European knowledge of the continent and its peoples had hardly developed since the times of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy. Arab writers and travellers of the Middle Ages such as Abu Obeid al Bekri, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta, the fabled fourteenth-century adventurer who blazed a swathe through the lands of Islam, had forged ahead. In the sixteenth century the Arabs pressed home their advantage, most notably through the travels of Ali Hassan Ibn Mohammed, or Leo Africanus (the African Lion), who crossed the Sahara to Timbuctoo in 1513. It fell to Jonathan Swift to lampoon this lamentable European ignorance.
So Geographers in Afric-Maps
with Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps:
And o’er unhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.
As Pasha of Tripoli, Yousef later gave assurances to the British government that he would, for a princely fee, guarantee safe conduct to any expedition to the River Niger. He held sway over parts of Fezzan, south of Tripoli – the central province to the south of Tripolitania that extended as far west as the borders with modern Algeria and, to the south, as far as the borders with present-day Niger and Chad – and claimed to be on friendly terms with the Sultans of Bornu and Sokoto in the heart of what Britons knew as ‘Negroland’ or ‘Soudan’, from where the caravans dragged their wretched human cargo across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. London duly dispatched the adventure-seeking surgeon Joseph Ritchie to Tripoli in 1818. His brief, as ambitious as it was unlikely, was to attempt an exploration from the north across the Sahara, install himself as British Vice-consul in Fezzan and chart the Niger. Like many of his assurances, Yousef’s promise of safe conduct proved worthless – the lands he controlled extended no further south than Ghadames, not, as the British believed, as far as Timbuctoo and Bornu. But what tempted London to launch the Ritchie expedition was the fact that it offered a considerably less expensive alternative to penetrating towards the Niger from the west coast of Africa. An expedition from Sierra Leone had already been devastated by disease and would end up costing Britain £40,000. Ritchie was given £2,000.
Once landed at Tripoli, he and Lyon met the redoubtable British Consul Colonel Hanmer Warrington, who took them to an interview with the Pasha to discuss their journey into the Sahara. Warrington, a brilliant servant of the Empire and a leading figure at the Pasha’s court, would watch British expeditions into the interior come and go during his residency from 1814 to 1846. Such was his influence that to many of his contemporaries, including the French Consul, it appeared that it was he, rather than the Pasha, who was running the country.
It was to the British Consulate once more that a sunburnt and bearded James Richardson headed on arriving in Tripoli in 1845. Sponsored by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Richardson had volunteered to investigate the Saharan slave trade, which he regarded as ‘the most gigantic system of wickedness the world ever saw’. His initial reception by Warrington was inauspicious. ‘Ah!’ said the British Consul, ‘I don’t believe our government cares one straw about the suppression of the slave-trade, but, Richardson, I believe in you, so let’s be off to my garden.’ Warrington, by now approaching the end of his marathon posting, was as superior as ever in his observations. ‘Whether the extraordinary indolence of the people proceeds from the climate, or want of occupation, I know not,’ the British Consul told the new arrival, ‘but they are in an horizontal position twenty hours out of the twenty-four, sleeping in the open air.’ Richardson and Warrington did not hit it off. With typical acuity, the supremely pragmatic British diplomat recognized Richardson as a loose cannon. ‘I wish again to say your conduct and proceedings require the greatest prudence or you may lose your life or be made a slave of yourself and carried against your will into the Interior,’ Warrington advised him in a letter. ‘Over zeal often defeats the object but I pray for your health and success.’ After waiting interminably and in vain for letters of recommendation, Richardson departed Tripoli for Ghadames ‘without a single regret, having suffered much from several sources of annoyance, including both the Consulate and the Bashaw’.
Fifty years later, it was the turn of Mabel Loomis Todd, an American writer who adored Tripoli, to descend on the British Consulate, this time to observe the eclipses of 1900 and 1905. Around her, excited Tripolitans watched the heavens in awe.
The fine Gurgeh minaret with its two balconies towering above the mosque was filled with white-robed Moslems gazing skyward. As the light failed and grew lifeless and all the visible world seemed drifting into the deathly trance which eclipses always produce, an old muezzin emerged from the topmost vantage point of the minaret, calling, calling the faithful to remember Allah and faint not. Without cessation, for over fifteen minutes he continued his exhortation, in a voice to match the engulfing somberness, weird, insistent, breathless, expectant.
Todd was also one of the few travellers to witness the final moments of the great caravan trade. The large expeditions that for centuries had carried off European arms, textiles and glassware into the desert, were no more, replaced now by much smaller and more infrequent missions into the interior. One morning, after ten months in the desert, a caravan of more than 250 camels was sighted approaching the city. Todd hurried over to watch its entrance:
The camels stepped slowly, heavily laden with huge bales securely tied up – ivory and gold dust, skins and feathers. Wrapped in dingy drapery and carrying guns ten feet long, swarthy Bedouins led the weary camels across the sun-baked square. In the singular and silent company marched a few genuine Tuaregs, black veils strapped lightly over their faces and enshrouded in black or dark brown wraps … In their opinion even the veils were hardly protection against the impious glances of hated Christians, and with attitudes expressive of the utmost repulsion and ferocity they turned aside, lest a glance might be met in passing. All were ragged beyond belief and incredibly dirty.
We left the Consulate and descended a gloomy street to Tripoli’s only Roman ruin, the four-sided triumphal arch dedicated to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus in AD 163. With innocent disregard for the city’s glorious past, a young boy was urinating on its base. We exited the medina and walked around the fish market next to the port, where mountainous men were hacking tuna into pieces. Behind them rose the ghostly water pipes commemorating Gaddafi’s Great Man Made River, at one time the largest engineering project in the world, designed to bring fresh water up from the desert to the coast via 5,000 kilometres of pipelines. The last time I had been here, this bizarre urban sculpture had been a working fountain. Today, there is no sign of water. It is probably still too early to know whether the project is an act of genius or an ecological catastrophe waiting to happen. Certainly, it had an inauspicious start. When, with great fanfare, Gaddafi turned on the taps in September 1996, as part of the 27th anniversary celebrations of the revolution, half the city’s streets promptly exploded. After decades of corrosion by salty water, the antiquated pipes could not take the pressure. Many of the streets across the capital still lay in rubble, monuments to the leader’s madness.
Looping back into the Old City, we passed through throngs of African immigrants selling fake Nike and Adidas T-shirts, tracksuits and trainers, and drank more tea in a café belting out mournful love songs from Oum Koulthoum, the late queen of Arab music. Opposite us was the elegant Turkish Clock Tower (all of its timepieces stuck at different times, its windowpanes dusty and broken), given to the city in the mid-nineteenth century by its governor Ali Riza Pasha. In Green Square, renamed by Gaddafi as another reminder of his revolution, we went into the Castle Museum. After the open-air glories of Leptis and Sabratha, it was of less interest, except for the top floor, which was given over entirely to Gaddafi propaganda. Photos traced the leader’s development as international statesman from the meeting with his then hero Nasser shortly after the 1969 revolution to later encounters with revolutionaries like Syria’s President Assad and Fidel Castro (the latter being the winner of the 1998 Gaddafi Prize for Human Rights). On the walls were reality-defying slogans from Gaddafi’s Green Book.
‘Representation is a falsification of democracy’
‘Committees everywhere’
‘Arab unity’
‘Forming parties splits societies’
We picked up a copy in a hotel. It was marked 1.5 dinars but the man behind the counter (who thought we were lunatics) let us have it for nothing. Libyans have to live with the grinding follies of their leader on a daily basis. ‘The thinker Muammar Gaddafi does not present his thought for simple amusement or pleasure,’ the dustcover proclaimed. ‘Nor is it for those who regard ideas as puzzles for the entertainment of empty-minded people standing on the margin of life. Gaddafi’s ideas interpret life as it erupts from the heart of the tormented, the oppressed, the deprived and the grief-stricken. It flows from the ever-developing and conflicting reality in search of whatever is best and most beautiful.’ The Green Book rejects both atheistic communism and materialistic capitalism in favour of the Third Universal Theory. Libyans have yet to work out what it all means.
There is an unmistakable whiff, then, of Orwell’s 1984 about Tripoli, an Oceania on the shores of the Mediterranean, a city whose people just about get by. The wonderful climate is deceptive. The first-time visitor sees a handsome, whitewashed city basking in the sun. A refreshing breeze blows along the boulevards lined with palm trees and grand stuccoed buildings from the Turkish and Italian era. In the square to the south of the castle, water dances in the Italian fountain. Here and there are cafés, filled with men smoking shisha pipes, playing chess and backgammon. Women bustle along, window-shopping in the brightly lit gold boutiques. Bride of the Sea and gateway to the desert, Tripoli is an elegant place.
But these are only first impressions. When he looks more closely, the visitor finds that much of this handsome city is falling apart. Even the charm of the medina, with its colonial-era architecture, shaded streets and small, labyrinthine suq is one of decay. Its graceful Turkish and Italian buildings, once the finest homes in the city, are crumbling away. The visitor finds, too, that the men are smoking pipes and playing chess in the cafés because they have no jobs to go to. And the women waddling through the suq are window-shopping because they can only afford the bare necessities.
Nonetheless, children of senior government officials, chic in designer clothes, chat into mobile phones and congregate in the new fast-food outlets springing up around the town. Together with high-ranking military personnel, they hurtle along the roads in black Mercedes and BMW saloons with tinted windows, past less favoured government employees rattling along in ancient Peugeot 404s held together with string, while African immigrants from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Sudan sit by the roadside, waiting for construction and painting jobs that may never come.
Back at the hotel there was no sign of Taher in his office.
‘It might be a good sign,’ I said to Ned. ‘Perhaps he’s still talking to his friend about buying camels.’ I didn’t really believe a word of it. Ned looked equally unconvinced. Fearing the worst, I checked in with Hajer to see if he could shed some light on Taher’s prolonged disappearance.
‘Taher go to Tunisia,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘He go to meet new tourists.’
This was testing our patience excessively. It was all very well waiting in the hope of something happening, but Taher was obviously over-stretched and doing nothing on our behalf. There was no point delaying any further in Tripoli. We had to get on with looking for camels ourselves. Hajer looked uncomfortable, as though he feared the worst from his boss should he let us leave during Taher’s absence. He implored us to stay. We shook our heads. He changed tactics.
‘Taher very angry you go Ghadames.’
‘Well, we’re very angry he went off to Tunisia without even telling us,’ I replied.
‘No, you stay in Tripoli,’ said Hajer. ‘Taher go to Tunisia.’
‘We go to Ghadames,’ we responded firmly.
CHAPTER III (#ulink_a456bfd7-d71d-5cdf-afa6-0705e3131e9a)
‘Really We Are in Bad Condition’ (#ulink_a456bfd7-d71d-5cdf-afa6-0705e3131e9a)
Libya is – as the others show, and indeed as Cnaeus Piso, who was once the prefect of that country, told me – like a leopard’s skin; for it is spotted with inhabited places that are surrounded by waterless and desert land. The Egyptians call such inhabited places ‘auases’.
STRABO, THE GEOGRAPHY
The details of the [slave] traffic are really curious. A slave is heard of one day, talked about the next, reflections next day, price fixed next, goods offered next, squabblings next, bargain upset next, new disputes next, goods assorted next, final arrangement next, goods delivered and exchanged next, etc., etc., and the whole of this melancholy exhibition of a wrangling cupidity over the sale of human beings is wound up by the present of a few parched peas, a few Barbary almonds, and a little tobacco being given to the Soudanese merchants, the parties separating with as much self-complacency, as if they had arranged the mercantile affairs of all Africa.
JAMES RICHARDSON, TRAVELS IN THE GREAT DESERT OF SAHARA IN THE YEARS OF 1845 AND 1846
Outside Tripoli, we got out of our taxi and stopped in a roadside restaurant for a hasty supper. The news bulletin was just beginning. Until recently, the opening sequence had showed Libya and the Arab world as a solitary block of green in a black world. In the heavens hung a copy of The Green Book, growing steadily brighter as a ray of light beamed up towards it from Tripoli. Then, like a satellite sending out signals, the book started zapping countries one by one until the whole world had succumbed to Gaddafi’s malevolent genius and turned green itself. All this was until 1998, when invitations were sent to Arab leaders to join the celebrations in Tripoli for the 29th anniversary of the revolution. Not one turned up. Several premiers, including Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, had arrived several days earlier and made a discreet exit before the ceremonies began. Foreign heads of state were limited to a handful of African leaders. Stung by this snub from his Arab brethren, the man who had spent three decades in power campaigning for a single Arab nation, declared that henceforth Libya was an African, not an Arab, nation. The news no longer showed the outline of the Arab nations. Libya beamed out green light to the black continent of Africa instead.
The main item tonight was the meeting in Libya between the All African Students Union, an African president and Gaddafi. The African leader sat in impressively colourful costume, nodding off periodically during a long ranting speech from his host. Flanking the Libyan head of state was Louis Farrakhan, the American Muslim firebrand, who had probably been given a handsome stipend to lend revolutionary Islamic chic to an otherwise tedious function. Dutifully, he praised his Libyan host. ‘We admire your great moral stature in international affairs and your fight against the imperialist policies of colonialism,’ he droned on sycophantically. ‘You are one of Islam’s great revolutionary leaders. We salute you for your work around the world in support of our Muslim brothers.’ The next item reported claims made by the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler that Britain had plotted to assassinate Gaddafi. ‘It was a pity they didn’t kill him,’ muttered a driver on the neighbouring table.
We sank into the seats of our Peugeot taxi and sped through flat, barren country, listening to French rap, soft Arab rock and All Saints. All that broke the emptiness of the evening landscape were occasional car scrapyards, unsightly heaps of abandoned Peugeot hulks next to squat Portakabins, and thick bands of rubbish on the roadside, mostly car tyres, food packets, and empty tins and bottles. And then darkness fell. At three in the morning, we nosed into the black mass of Ghadames and drove to the house of Othman al Hashashe, where I had stayed the last time I was here. Othman, a gangling twenty-six-year-old accountant and devoted Manchester United fan resplendent in Nike leisure suit, rubbed the sleep from his eyes wonderingly, recognized me and let us in. It was a bitterly cold night inside the house, a harbinger of things to come.
Richardson reached this oasis on 24 August 1845, after an uncomfortable two weeks on camel. He had been preceded by a letter announcing him somewhat disingenuously as the ‘English Consul of Ghadames’. Initially, he was ecstatic. By his own account he was only the second European ever to set foot in this holy trading city. Another Briton, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, had passed through twenty years before en route to becoming the first European to reach Timbuctoo, but had been murdered shortly afterwards. Back in 1818, Ritchie and Lyon had intended to travel to this far-flung town but had been discouraged by Yousef Karamanli ‘on account of the alledged dangers of the road’.
‘I now fancied I had discovered a new world, or had seen Timbuctoo, or followed the whole course of the Niger, or had done something very extraordinary,’ Richardson gushed. ‘But the illusion soon vanished, as vanish all the vain hopes and foolish aspirations of man. I found afterwards that I had only made one step, or laid one stone, in raising for myself a monument of fame in the annals of African discovery!’ For the time being, the great mission to investigate and help eradicate the slave trade had been forgotten. Richardson’s personal ambitions as an African explorer were proving more immediately compelling.
I awoke next morning to a familiar booming voice. Mohammed Ali, who had acted as guide and interpreter for me during my last visit, was breakfasting with Othman. I joined them and was instantly bombarded with a barrage of greetings from Mohammed.
‘Mr Justin, kaif halek (how are you)? Fine? Really, I have missed you, believe me. I thought maybe you were not coming to Libya. How are you? Fine? How is your family? Now I am happy to see you, alhamdulillah (praise God). Believe me, I am too shocked now you come to Ghadames. Alleye berrik feik (God bless you). How is your father? How are you? Fine?’ The exchange of greetings lasted some time. Libyans are an exceedingly courteous people. It reminded me of Lyon’s first impressions of Tripolines in 1818, when he observed:
Very intimate acquaintances mutually lift their joined right hand, repeating with the greatest rapidity, ‘How are you? Well, how are you? Thank God, how are you? God bless you, how are you?’ which compliments in a well bred man never last less than ten minutes; and whatever may be the occasion afterwards, it is a mark of great good breeding occasionally to interrupt it, bowing solemnly and asking, ‘How are you?’ though an answer to the question is by no means considered necessary, as he who asks it is perhaps looking another way, and thinking of something else.
Mohammed was small and stodgily built, bordering on the portly, with a hurrying ramshackle gait and a baritone laugh. A man of constant good humour, he had a lazy right eye, so it was often difficult to know if he was addressing you or someone else. On the basis of my brief time in Ghadames the previous September I was now considered an old friend. Throughout our stay in Libya, Mohammed would behave like an old friend too – unstintingly helpful and loyal. Without our asking for assistance, he had taken today off from his job as one of Ghadames’s three air traffic controllers to show us the Old City and help us look for camels. With an average of one incoming flight every month or so, it was not a demanding job. Before the 1992 embargo, there had been three flights a week to Tripoli and two to Sebha, the capital of Fezzan. Mohammed owed his staccato command of English to a nine-month course at the Anglo-Continental Educational Group of Bournemouth. This was our first experience of the Libyan Dorset connection that would resurface bizarrely during our time in the Sahara. Trained at Herne airport in Dorset in 1978, Mohammed was an ardent Anglophile, though this probably owed more to his extracurricular activities than to any great love of air charts. He spoke fondly of his time in Badger’s and Tiffany’s nightclubs, where he had spent many happy hours slow dancing (‘Oh, my God, really very slowly, believe me’) with the belles of Bournemouth and a girlfriend called Anne.
‘Now we go to Taher’s office,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Believe me, soon you will have camels and then you will leave Ghadames.’ Ned and I exchanged glances – would it be so easy? – and followed Mohammed to the office, a whitewashed hole in the wall run by Taher’s younger brother Ibrahim. He could hardly have looked less like his brother in Tripoli. Where Taher was slim, well-dressed, alert and enjoyed handsome, aquiline features, Ibrahim was a dozy mountain of a man, shambolically clad in a voluminous jalabiya which hung off him like a tent. Overweight and unhurried, he contemplated his surroundings with a lazy air of equanimity. Everything about him took place in slow motion. He was as laid-back as you needed to be in the sleepy town of Ghadames, where nothing much happened these days. If it had been a mistake to count on Taher to get things done, the prospect of definite assistance from Ibrahim seemed infinitely remote.
We discussed the first leg of our journey from Ghadames with him and asked if he could find a guide to take us to Idri, a little less than 300 miles south-east of Ghadames. Ned and I had already agreed that it would be better to look for the camels ourselves, rather than go through a middleman who would doubtless receive some sort of commission and force up the price. Ibrahim considered our request for a couple of minutes, talking intermittently to Mohammed Ali as he did so, and then turned back to us.
‘I find you good guide,’ he said slowly. He knew someone suitable to escort us to Idri and would talk to him later that afternoon. ‘No problem,’ he continued, ‘I arrange everything for you.’
Perhaps we looked unconvinced. Mohammed, as unswerving in his optimism as Hajer in Tripoli, was quick to reassure us all would be well.
‘Believe me,’ he confided sotto voce, ‘Ibrahim is very good man. My God, he will help you. Really, he will do everything for you. Don’t worry about a thing. Mohammed is also praying for you.’
We left Ibrahim to it and set off with Mohammed to explore the old city of Ghadames, one of the most evocative oases in the Sahara. From the searing noon heat and light that bleached everything in sight a painful white we stepped into the deep shade and delicious cool of its covered streets. The contrast was intense. We plunged into a labyrinth of streets and zinqas (alleys), through gloom penetrated every few metres by strong shafts of sunlight shining through the openings between houses. In and out of the light we walked, sometimes emerging into the open air alongside gardens of date palms and vegetables. We climbed up on to one of the roofs and looked down on the tattered maze of paths running between walls of dried mud that sliced through this lush growth. To the south the mosque of Sidi Bedri loomed above the shadowy streets.
The columns and capitals of its interior are thought to have been removed from the Byzantine basilica that stood here during the time of Justinian, the sixth-century Roman emperor, when Ghadames was an episcopal see. A deathlike stillness lingered over the place, broken occasionally by the bleating of sheep and goats and the hum of a few small farmers tending their plots of land. Against the drab beige desert that pressed in on all sides, Ghadames was a bright emerald splash of life.
Until recently, these whitewashed rooftops had been the entire world of the women of Ghadames. Only on three occasions in the year – including the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed – were they allowed to descend to the streets and make their way to one of the town’s seven squares to celebrate their return to earth. The rest of their lives they led in airy seclusion on the interconnected roof terraces of the town, surrounded by date palms, passing from one housetop to another to gossip, exchange presents or buy goods such as scarves, silk sandals, brooches and coloured leather slippers from their neighbours.
‘It is a very old city – 2,000 years old or 5,000 or 12,000,’ Mohammed said definitely, as we surveyed Ghadames from this lofty vantage point. Ten thousand years seemed to be a wide enough range to cover all the options. ‘I have been on government tourist course,’ he went on. ‘This is what they told us to tell the tourists – 2,000, 5,000 or 12,000 years – but believe me, it is very old city.’ And, then, as an afterthought, he added: ‘There are only six guides in Ghadames but only Mohammed Ali can speak English.’
Richardson met with little more success in his attempts to establish the exact age of Ghadames when he visited the town in the mid-nineteenth century. Rais Mustapha, the Turkish governor, told him then it was 4,000 years old. ‘The people of the town, I suppose, have told him so,’ the Englishman wrote sceptically, ‘but where is their authority?’
We know from Pliny the town is at least 2,000 years old. In 19 BC, with war breaking out along Rome’s southern frontier, Cornelius Balbus, the Cadiz-born Proconsul of Africa, set out to conquer the Garamantes, the trouble-making confederation of tribes which then held sway over much of the Sahara. He marched first from the coast to Cydamus (as Romans knew Ghadames), one of their most vital trading centres, and made it an allied city. Two centuries later, it was garrisoned by a detachment of the Legio III Augusta, the celebrated force that for 400 years was the sole Roman legion permanently garrisoned in north-west Africa. From Ghadames, Balbus marched his soldiers almost 350 miles south-east to Garama (now Germa), his enemy’s capital in the Wadi al Ajal. The rout did not stop there. According to Pliny, apart from Ghadames and Garama, Balbus went on to subdue an area containing a further twenty-five tribes, villages, mountains and rivers. It is likely these military successes were exaggerated to emphasize the Roman triumph, but Balbus’ achievements in moving his army across such vast distances in the desert and imposing the pax Romana on a powerful enemy were prodigious. The Garamantes, who had previously enjoyed a trading monopoly far and wide through the Sahara, were soon reduced to the ignominious role of escorting Roman caravans. Balbus was given citizen rights and a triumph, ‘the only foreigner ever so honoured,’ says Pliny.
When the French traveller Henri Duveyrier visited Ghadames in 1862 he came across a bas-relief that he judged could only be ancient Egyptian in style. Ghadamsis told him then that the town dated back to the time of Abraham. Duveyrier concluded Ghadames was a sister community to the early settlements on the Nile.
The town’s precise age may never be known, but Ghadamsis tell a popular tale of how it was founded. Long ago, a group of travellers heading south stopped in the area for lunch one day before continuing their journey. One of them forgot to take his iron plate with him when he left, the loss of which he only discovered the following morning. Returning to the spot, he wandered about searching until he found it. As he did, his horse kicked the ground and out burst a fountain of water. And so the town took its name from the place where the travellers had eaten lunch (gheda) yesterday (ams).
Another legend has it that Oqba bin Naf’a, the seventh-century Arabian conqueror who wiped out the last vestiges of the Garamantes’ empire in Fezzan, arrived in Ghadames after a gruelling journey. He searched in vain for water to quench his burning thirst. Like the travellers before him, his mare then stamped her hoof, and a spring was found. It was named ‘Ain el Fars (Mare’s Spring) and, until recently, was the city’s main water supply.
Water, the most valuable resource deep in the desert, had always been measured and distributed with the greatest care in Ghadames. After collecting in the large rectangular basin at ‘Ain el Fars on the fringes of the medina, it passed beneath ground level to a vaulted grotto in which sat the gaddas, the man responsible for measuring the quantity of water passing through the canal into the town’s gardens via a network of narrow channels. The gauge was a small copper bucket with a hole in the bottom, through which the water flowed in a certain number of minutes. For each bucket emptied the gaddas tied a knot in a cord of palm leaves, before refilling the bucket and continuing his thankless job. There were three such men in charge of the water supply, employed day and night on rota. They were not paid for their pains but received a ration of barley, fruit and dates from the town.
Mohammed took us into Mulberry Square, formerly the market for male slaves. Women were purchased in nearby Little Mulberry Square. Traces of its miserable past were still evident when an English traveller visited Ghadames in pre-war Libya. ‘Where once human flesh was exposed for sale the walls are slimy and foul: the thousands of slaves have left their mark,’ he wrote. Today, there are no such signs and the square was empty. The last time I had been here, I met two refugees from Sierra Leone whitewashing the walls in preparation for the annual tourist festival.
