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

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.

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.