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

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 firman s (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.