Justin Marozzi - South from Barbary - Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

For as long as I was behind the wheel Ned was a difficult passenger. Repeatedly, he told me what a poor driver I was and how unsafe he felt. Coming from a man whose entire driving career seemed to have consisted of writing off one car after another, this was especially irritating. I took exception to his comments and drove even faster. As night fell on us and the road became progressively harder to navigate, Ned’s warnings became ever more insistent. I told him to shut up. Moments later, to my horror, I found I was driving straight towards a head-on collision with an enormous lorry. Ned shouted something furiously, I jerked the wheel to the right, swerved across the road and only narrowly managed to keep the car on four wheels. We skidded violently to a halt and one of the tyres burst. ‘Justin, you’re a complete idiot,’ he said, fuming. I let him drive for the rest of the night.

We slept on Jerba, an island that was, according to the Greek geographer Strabo, ‘regarded as the land of the Lotus-eaters mentioned by Homer; and certain tokens of this are pointed out – both an altar of Odysseus and the fruit itself; for the tree which is called the lotus abounds in the island and its fruit is delightful’. Herodotus also mentions the islanders, ‘who live entirely on the fruit of the lotus-tree. The lotus fruit is about the size of the lentisk berry, and in sweetness resembles the date. The Lotophagi even succeeded in obtaining from it a sort of wine.’

Two hours into our taxi ride to Tripoli the next morning, we joined the languid snake of cars wriggling across the Libyan border. Our bags were searched and I was asked whether I had a camera. I was then led into a cavernous warehouse, derelict save for a rickety table that stood in an inch of dirty water, behind which sat a Libyan customs official. All around him piles of rotting debris emerged from their bed of slime and wafted up a disgusting stench. His temper appeared as foul as his surroundings. He looked me up and down, almost incredulous, as I was, that I should be referred to him for possessing a camera. Other customs officers were inspecting the boots of Mercedes saloons for contraband. I was small beer. Gruffly, he condescended to stamp my passport with the information that I was carrying photographic equipment and waved our car through. Outside, the first of many propaganda portraits of Muammar al Gaddafi welcomed us to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, or GSPLAJ for short. Sporting a hard hat and shades, he was presiding benignly over a scene of oil wells in the Sahara. The border area was an ugly scattering of buildings and warehouses and the heat was intense, but none of this mattered. We were a step nearer the desert.

Before preparing for the camel journey in Tripoli, we first had to visit the Roman ruins of Sabratha, forty miles west of the capital. With its more august sister city of Leptis Magna, 120 miles to the east, Sabratha is one of the Mediterranean’s great Roman sites. If it had been in Tunisia, the city would have been clogged with tourists. Thanks to Libya’s status as one of the world’s last remaining pariah states, we had the place to ourselves.

Sabratha dates back to Phoenician times, probably between the late fourth and seventh centuries BC, when it was established as an emporium or trading post, but is an essentially Roman creation. Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (as Romans knew Tripoli) together formed the provincia Tripolitania – province of the three cities – created by the Emperor Diocletian in AD 284. All three both grew through commerce with the Garamantes, the great warrior-traders of southern Libya, and through commercial exchange with Rome. Before the Romans set foot in North Africa, the Phoenicians had introduced agriculture to the coastline, encouraging the cultivation of olives, vines and figs. Tripolitania was, above all, a great exporter of olive oil for use in Rome’s baths and oil lamps, if not its kitchens. The Romans considered African olive oil too coarse for their palates.

After olive oil came wild animals, exported in staggering numbers to feed the bloodlust of Rome’s circusgoers. Tens of thousands of elephants, flamingoes, ostriches, lions, and wild boar were shipped to their destruction. Titus marked the inauguration of the Colosseum by dispatching 9,000 animals into the arena to fight the gladiators. Augustus recorded that 3,500 African animals were killed in the twenty-six games he gave to the people, while Trajan had 2,246 large animals slaughtered in one day. On one occasion, Caesar sent 400 lions into the arena to kill or be killed by gladiators, outdone by Pompey, who sent in 600. North Africa’s ‘nursery of wild beasts’, as noted by Strabo, could not take such wholesale decimation and its animal population never recovered.

By contrast with this northern-bound traffic, the desert trade, whose staple products would later include gold, ivory and ostrich feathers, was not yet advanced. ‘Our only intercourse is the trade in the precious stone imported from Ethiopia which we call the carbuncle,’ remarked Pliny in the first century AD. With abundant sources of slaves in both Asia and Europe, the Romans felt little need to tap the Sahara. Negro slaves, besides, could be procured from the North African coast without having to venture farther south.

We walked slowly through the Forum Basilica, where Claudius Maximus, Proconsul of Africa, had acquitted the Latin writer Apuleius of Madura of a fabricated charge of witchcraft in AD 157. Behind us the magnificent theatre, a warm terracotta in the fading afternoon sun, dominated the eastern part of the city. It was built in the late second century at the outset of the Severan dynasty, a time that would prove to be Roman Africa’s finest hour. It is hard to imagine a more romantic or dramatic spot for a theatre: the cool blue sea is visible only yards behind the three-storey scaenae frons that towers 25 metres above the stage. Gracious marble reliefs on the stage front depict the three Muses, the goddess Fortuna, Mercury with the infant Dionysus, the Judgement of Paris, Hercules, and personifications of Rome and Sabratha joining hands alongside soldiers. Intoxicated by his plans to recreate the Roman Empire, Mussolini reinaugurated the theatre in 1937, almost 1,800 years after its birth. Inside, we came across a small family of Libyans from Tripoli, the only other visitors in Sabratha that afternoon. Passing the crumbling mosaics of the seaward baths, unprotected from the elements, we headed to the easternmost part of Sabratha, to the serene Temple of Isis, smoked cigarettes and stared across at the elegant ruins of the city as a lilac sunset flooded across the sea.

Anxious to press on the next morning, we commandeered a taxi to take us the last few miles to Tripoli. Gleaming white, it rose before us, staring out across the Mediterranean as it had done for three millennia since the bold seafaring Phoenicians established a trading post here. For centuries it had been the principal terminus of the slave-trade routes of Tripolitania that penetrated across the Sahara deep into Black Africa. Today, the city steamed under a shocking noon sun, its fierce glare an unforgettable feature of arrival for as long as anyone can remember. ‘When we approached, we were blinded by the brilliant whiteness of the city from which the burning rays of the sun were reflected. I was convinced that rightly is Tripoli called the “White City”,’ wrote the Arab traveller At Tigiani during his visit of 1307–8.

Arriving by boat from Jerba on 17 May 1845 James Richardson, the opinionated British explorer and anti-slave-trade campaigner, part of whose travels in Libya we would be following, thought it massive and imposing. He admired the slender limewashed towers and minarets that rose towards the heavens, dazzling in the shimmering sunlight. But, he went on deflatingly, ‘such is the delusion of all these sea-coast Barbary towns; at a distance and without, beauty and brilliancy, but near and within, filth and wretchedness’.