South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

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

‘Really We Are in Bad Condition’

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.