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

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.