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

‘Now we go to Taher’s office,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Believe me, soon you will have camels and then you will leave Ghadames.’ Ned and I exchanged glances – would it be so easy? – and followed Mohammed to the office, a whitewashed hole in the wall run by Taher’s younger brother Ibrahim. He could hardly have looked less like his brother in Tripoli. Where Taher was slim, well-dressed, alert and enjoyed handsome, aquiline features, Ibrahim was a dozy mountain of a man, shambolically clad in a voluminous jalabiya which hung off him like a tent. Overweight and unhurried, he contemplated his surroundings with a lazy air of equanimity. Everything about him took place in slow motion. He was as laid-back as you needed to be in the sleepy town of Ghadames, where nothing much happened these days. If it had been a mistake to count on Taher to get things done, the prospect of definite assistance from Ibrahim seemed infinitely remote.

We discussed the first leg of our journey from Ghadames with him and asked if he could find a guide to take us to Idri, a little less than 300 miles south-east of Ghadames. Ned and I had already agreed that it would be better to look for the camels ourselves, rather than go through a middleman who would doubtless receive some sort of commission and force up the price. Ibrahim considered our request for a couple of minutes, talking intermittently to Mohammed Ali as he did so, and then turned back to us.

‘I find you good guide,’ he said slowly. He knew someone suitable to escort us to Idri and would talk to him later that afternoon. ‘No problem,’ he continued, ‘I arrange everything for you.’

Perhaps we looked unconvinced. Mohammed, as unswerving in his optimism as Hajer in Tripoli, was quick to reassure us all would be well.

‘Believe me,’ he confided sotto voce, ‘Ibrahim is very good man. My God, he will help you. Really, he will do everything for you. Don’t worry about a thing. Mohammed is also praying for you.’

We left Ibrahim to it and set off with Mohammed to explore the old city of Ghadames, one of the most evocative oases in the Sahara. From the searing noon heat and light that bleached everything in sight a painful white we stepped into the deep shade and delicious cool of its covered streets. The contrast was intense. We plunged into a labyrinth of streets and zinqas (alleys), through gloom penetrated every few metres by strong shafts of sunlight shining through the openings between houses. In and out of the light we walked, sometimes emerging into the open air alongside gardens of date palms and vegetables. We climbed up on to one of the roofs and looked down on the tattered maze of paths running between walls of dried mud that sliced through this lush growth. To the south the mosque of Sidi Bedri loomed above the shadowy streets.

The columns and capitals of its interior are thought to have been removed from the Byzantine basilica that stood here during the time of Justinian, the sixth-century Roman emperor, when Ghadames was an episcopal see. A deathlike stillness lingered over the place, broken occasionally by the bleating of sheep and goats and the hum of a few small farmers tending their plots of land. Against the drab beige desert that pressed in on all sides, Ghadames was a bright emerald splash of life.

Until recently, these whitewashed rooftops had been the entire world of the women of Ghadames. Only on three occasions in the year – including the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed – were they allowed to descend to the streets and make their way to one of the town’s seven squares to celebrate their return to earth. The rest of their lives they led in airy seclusion on the interconnected roof terraces of the town, surrounded by date palms, passing from one housetop to another to gossip, exchange presents or buy goods such as scarves, silk sandals, brooches and coloured leather slippers from their neighbours.

‘It is a very old city – 2,000 years old or 5,000 or 12,000,’ Mohammed said definitely, as we surveyed Ghadames from this lofty vantage point. Ten thousand years seemed to be a wide enough range to cover all the options. ‘I have been on government tourist course,’ he went on. ‘This is what they told us to tell the tourists – 2,000, 5,000 or 12,000 years – but believe me, it is very old city.’ And, then, as an afterthought, he added: ‘There are only six guides in Ghadames but only Mohammed Ali can speak English.’

Richardson met with little more success in his attempts to establish the exact age of Ghadames when he visited the town in the mid-nineteenth century. Rais Mustapha, the Turkish governor, told him then it was 4,000 years old. ‘The people of the town, I suppose, have told him so,’ the Englishman wrote sceptically, ‘but where is their authority?’

We know from Pliny the town is at least 2,000 years old. In 19 BC, with war breaking out along Rome’s southern frontier, Cornelius Balbus, the Cadiz-born Proconsul of Africa, set out to conquer the Garamantes, the trouble-making confederation of tribes which then held sway over much of the Sahara. He marched first from the coast to Cydamus (as Romans knew Ghadames), one of their most vital trading centres, and made it an allied city. Two centuries later, it was garrisoned by a detachment of the Legio III Augusta, the celebrated force that for 400 years was the sole Roman legion permanently garrisoned in north-west Africa. From Ghadames, Balbus marched his soldiers almost 350 miles south-east to Garama (now Germa), his enemy’s capital in the Wadi al Ajal. The rout did not stop there. According to Pliny, apart from Ghadames and Garama, Balbus went on to subdue an area containing a further twenty-five tribes, villages, mountains and rivers. It is likely these military successes were exaggerated to emphasize the Roman triumph, but Balbus’ achievements in moving his army across such vast distances in the desert and imposing the pax Romana on a powerful enemy were prodigious. The Garamantes, who had previously enjoyed a trading monopoly far and wide through the Sahara, were soon reduced to the ignominious role of escorting Roman caravans. Balbus was given citizen rights and a triumph, ‘the only foreigner ever so honoured,’ says Pliny.

When the French traveller Henri Duveyrier visited Ghadames in 1862 he came across a bas-relief that he judged could only be ancient Egyptian in style. Ghadamsis told him then that the town dated back to the time of Abraham. Duveyrier concluded Ghadames was a sister community to the early settlements on the Nile.

The town’s precise age may never be known, but Ghadamsis tell a popular tale of how it was founded. Long ago, a group of travellers heading south stopped in the area for lunch one day before continuing their journey. One of them forgot to take his iron plate with him when he left, the loss of which he only discovered the following morning. Returning to the spot, he wandered about searching until he found it. As he did, his horse kicked the ground and out burst a fountain of water. And so the town took its name from the place where the travellers had eaten lunch (gheda) yesterday (ams).

Another legend has it that Oqba bin Naf’a, the seventh-century Arabian conqueror who wiped out the last vestiges of the Garamantes’ empire in Fezzan, arrived in Ghadames after a gruelling journey. He searched in vain for water to quench his burning thirst. Like the travellers before him, his mare then stamped her hoof, and a spring was found. It was named ‘Ain el Fars (Mare’s Spring) and, until recently, was the city’s main water supply.

Water, the most valuable resource deep in the desert, had always been measured and distributed with the greatest care in Ghadames. After collecting in the large rectangular basin at ‘Ain el Fars on the fringes of the medina, it passed beneath ground level to a vaulted grotto in which sat the gaddas, the man responsible for measuring the quantity of water passing through the canal into the town’s gardens via a network of narrow channels. The gauge was a small copper bucket with a hole in the bottom, through which the water flowed in a certain number of minutes. For each bucket emptied the gaddas tied a knot in a cord of palm leaves, before refilling the bucket and continuing his thankless job. There were three such men in charge of the water supply, employed day and night on rota. They were not paid for their pains but received a ration of barley, fruit and dates from the town.

Mohammed took us into Mulberry Square, formerly the market for male slaves. Women were purchased in nearby Little Mulberry Square. Traces of its miserable past were still evident when an English traveller visited Ghadames in pre-war Libya. ‘Where once human flesh was exposed for sale the walls are slimy and foul: the thousands of slaves have left their mark,’ he wrote. Today, there are no such signs and the square was empty. The last time I had been here, I met two refugees from Sierra Leone whitewashing the walls in preparation for the annual tourist festival.

We padded along empty alleys, kicking up veils of dust that glittered in the stabbing sunlight, past stone benches built out from the walls of houses where the town’s old men had once sat and gossiped together, past abandoned house after abandoned house, their massive doors made of date palm trunks tightly closed to the world. Some were still decorated with scraps of coloured rags that showed the owner of the house had performed the haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. The old Turkish school, built in 1835 and later used by the Italians, burnt uselessly under the sun, its roof caved in, its stairs falling ruinously apart.

This was the sad silence of decline and fall. For centuries Ghadames had been a great trading city whose fame and influence stretched thousands of miles across the Sahara. From Bornu to Timbuctoo, Ghadamsis had held sway commercially and had their own affluent quarters in far-flung southern cities like Jenne and Kano, now northern Nigeria. The Ghadamsi quarter of Timbuctoo was the most flourishing of the entire city, a visitor noted in 1591. Not so long ago, the streets of Ghadames had been filled with the hubbub of commerce, the cries of slaves and slave-buyers, children reciting their lessons in school and the muaddin’s mellifluous call to prayer. Now, all that had gone. The houses were empty. No-one lived here anymore, and the city sat in the heavy stupor of the desert.

Of the half dozen historic trade routes running from the Mediterranean coast across the Sahara, three were in what is now Libya, and Ghadames had sat astride the richest. Caravans from Tripoli, southern Tunis and Algeria assembled here before taking their goods farther south in three separate directions. Some went south-west via Tuat to Timbuctoo, others south to Ghat and Kano, and a third group travelled south-east through Murzuk to Bornu. For hundreds of years, until the mid-nineteenth century at least, the caravan trade was the bedrock of the town’s economy and most of the trading enterprises, bankers and wholesalers operating in the interior were headquartered here.

In the twelfth century, Venetians were bringing arms, textiles, glassware and exotic products like Arabian spices, Indian gems and Chinese silks to Tripoli, carried off by local merchants into the desert. By Leo Africanus’s time, four centuries later, European cloth was still a staple of the Saharan caravan trade. Together with clothes, brass vessels, horses and books, it was exchanged for gold, slaves and zebed (civet). This olfactory delight was procured from civet cats, which were kept in cages and periodically harangued and taunted until through intense perspiration they secreted a perfume from glands beneath the tail. They were then secured, the goo was scraped from their nether regions, preserved in small boxes of hide and sold at great expense as a scent-fixer for perfumes (did Victorian women know what they were dabbing onto their necks?). ‘A savage old cat will produce ten or twelve dollars’ worth in three heats,’ noted Lyon in 1819 (at the ripe age of twenty-two and without consulting anyone he had promoted himself from lieutenant to ensure a more respectful reception from the natives). ‘Their price is enormous, some being sold for three or four slaves.’

Lyon provided one of the most comprehensive accounts of the goods traded along Libya’s second trade route running south from Tripoli to Murzuk, Bilma and Kukawa, west of Lake Chad. It gives an idea of what the caravans were trading with Ghadames at the same time. From the coast came horses, beads, coral, needles (‘four of which purchase a fine fowl’), silks, copper pots and kettles, looking-glasses, swords (‘very long, straight and double edged; bought greedily by the Tuarick’), guns, carpets from Tripoli, Venetian glass, muslins and woollen cloaks. Among goods brought up from the south, slaves still predominated, accompanied by civet, cottons, gold in dust and small bars or rings, leather, ostrich skins and feathers, ornamental sandals, gerbas (water skins made of goats’ hides), honey, pepper, elephants’ teeth and gooroo nuts, a luxury that went at the rate of four to the Spanish dollar. ‘It is said, that in certain years when the nut has been scarce, people in Soudan have given a slave for one of them,’ the indefatigable Lyon reported. Ghadamsi merchants meanwhile brought swords, guns, powder, flints, lead, ironware and clothing to Murzuk for the annual spring market.

By the time Richardson arrived, Ghadames had passed its apogee. Turkish rule, with its capricious system of extortion, was hurting. During the Karamanli dynasty, the city had paid an annual tribute of 850 mahboubs to Tripoli. Richardson learnt that when the Turks took control of the city after their reconquest of Tripoli in 1835, they had demanded a forced contribution of 50,000 mahboubs, stripped women of their gold and silver, ransacked houses, and instituted an annual tribute of 10,000 mahboubs from the city. To make matters worse, Tripoli had just demanded an extraordinary levy of 3,200 mahboubs, which the beleaguered merchants said they were unable to pay. Richardson, who was soon on friendly terms with the Turkish governor, listened to him explaining the essence of Ottoman colonial policy in the territory. ‘You know Arabs to be very devils,’ he told the Englishman.

There are two ways to consider Arabs, but whichever way they are robbers and assassins. When they are famished, they plunder in order to eat; when their bellies are full, they plunder because they kick and are insolent. Now we (Turks) keep them upon a low diet in The Mountains; they have little, and always a little food. This is the Sultan’s tareek (government) to manage them. Their spirits are kept down and they are submissive.

Having mulled over his own ambitions as an explorer, Richardson now rediscovered his ‘humane mission on the behalf of unhappy weak Africans, doomed by men calling themselves Christians, to the curse of slavery’, and set about his investigation of the trade. It did not take him long to realize the scale of the challenge facing the abolitionists: ‘Slave-dealing is so completely engendered in the minds of the Ghadamsee merchants, that they cannot conceive how it can be wrong. They are greatly astonished that slavery is not permitted among us.’

One day, he watched a caravan of forty slaves arrive from Bornu. ‘They were as much like merchandize as they could be, or human beings could be made to resemble it,’ he recorded. ‘They were entirely naked, with the exception of a strip of tanned skin tied round the loins. All were nearly alike, as so many goods packed up of the same quality. They were very thin, and almost skeletons, about the age of from ten to fifteen years, with the round Bornouse features strongly marked upon their countenances.’ As the Turks had taxed Ghadamsis with such ferocity, there were few merchants in the town who could afford to purchase the slaves, and Richardson had to fend off repeated attempts by the Touareg and Tubbu slave owners to get him to buy these hapless creatures himself. The merchants had hoped to sell them for forty to fifty Spanish dollars a head, but were reduced to disposing of them for twenty, of which half went to the government in duty.

Later, he encountered another slave caravan and was deeply moved by the misery of these

poor little children – child-slaves – crawling over the ground, scarcely able to move. Oh, what a curse is slavery! How full of hard-heartedness and cruelty! As soon as the poor slaves arrived, they set to work and made a fire. Some of them were laden with wood when they came up. The fire was their only protection from the cold, the raw bitter cold of the night, for they were nearly naked. I require as much as three ordinary greatcoats, besides the usual clothing of the day, to keep me warm in the night; these poor things, the chilly children of the tropics, have only a rag to cover them, and a bit of fire to warm them. I shall never forget the sparkling eyes of delight of one of the poor little boys, as he sat down and looked into the crackling glaring fire of desert scrub.

Since the slave drivers were paid per capita to deliver their charges to their destination, they saved expenses by giving them as little food as possible. As a result, they were kept on survival rations consisting of barley meal mixed with water. Richardson’s attendant, he noted, ate more for dinner than a slave’s entire daily ration. By the time they got to their destination, they would be no more than ‘living-skeletons’.

Richardson stayed in Ghadames for three months, spending much of his time dispensing medicine to treat the most common illnesses – ophthalmia (inflammation of the eye), diarrhoea, dropsy, smallpox and syphilis – telling his unsuspecting patients it came from the Queen of England, ‘which, I have observed, heightens its value in their eyes’. He was something of a chameleon, at one moment the impassioned liberal, the next a Christian bigot, sometimes a patriotic British imperialist, at others the vitriolic anti-slave trade campaigner. But whatever his mood, he was a consistently – perhaps unintentionally – entertaining observer of his surroundings. The discovery that some men wore kohl to blacken their eyelids, for instance, completely threw him. ‘I confessed I was surprised at this monstrous effeminacy,’ he fumed.

More importantly, his investigations led him to conclude that two merchants under British protection were providing credit to slave-traders. He promptly wrote a letter to that effect to Colonel Warrington in Tripoli, asking him not to publicize this information until he himself was safely out of the desert, for fear of reprisals. The correspondence must have made Warrington squirm:

We may expect one of these days to see some American President coming forward in the Congress of the United States, as the late Mr Slaveholder Tigler, or some French Deputy in the Chamber with a statement to the following effect: ‘that whilst the British Consuls of Barbary, and the agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society are labouring for the suppression of the Slave Trade in Northern and Central Africa, the traffic in Slaves between Soudan and Tripoli is principally carried on by the means of British capital’.

Worse still was the news that Richardson had tactlessly conveyed his allegation (‘I do not believe one word of it,’ Warrington wrote London) to the Anti-Slavery Society in England, thereby undermining the British Consul’s own position. The diplomat’s response was equally direct. A public notice was put up announcing ‘the strictest inquiry’ into the affair and threatening a tribunal. Richardson, meanwhile, was pressed by Warrington to provide evidence to support his controversial claims, ‘or I apprehend you will be subject to an action’. Furious with the British Consul for revealing his allegation and jeopardizing his safety in Ghadames, and unable, he claimed, to procure hard evidence, Richardson retreated to his journal and vented his spleen there instead.

The whole affair, which was still occupying Warrington seven months later when Richardson returned to the coast, caused a great scandal both in Tripoli and Ghadames and was illustrative of the changing climate. From the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of the official prohibition of slave-dealing and mounting international opposition made life increasingly difficult for the illegal traffickers in human flesh. By the turn of the century, new economic realities had added to the slavers’ troubles. Transportation costs from Black Africa to Europe had been reduced with the advent of a train link from Kano to Lagos and the introduction of steamers from the African coast to Liverpool. It cost £3 to transport one ton of goods from Liverpool to Kano in 1905 and more than double that just to send the same consignment from Tripoli to Kano. The Saharan caravan trade was under threat as never before.

For Ghadames, the accelerating demise of the slave trade, on whose back the city had grown so prosperous, was the first calamitous setback. With fewer and fewer slaves available to irrigate the gardens and keep back the ever-encroaching sands, the city started shrinking, and emigration started apace. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline proved irreversible, but Ghadames lived on, propped up by the Italian Fascists in the early twentieth century through improvements to the water supply. It was in 1986, however, that Gaddafi’s government dealt the age-old medina a potentially fatal blow. All the inhabitants were ordered to vacate the Old City and move into newly constructed houses outside the city walls, equipped with the usual modern conveniences. These houses, unimaginative squares of cheap concrete, are already deteriorating fast. Those inside the medina, though they did not have such luxuries as running hot water, had lasted hundreds of years. Since this forced relocation, the Old City, quite unlike anything else the length and breadth of the Sahara, has been crumbling away steadily. If its oldest houses remain empty, Ghadames’s days are surely numbered.

We still needed camels. That afternoon, we mounted Mohammed’s battered Peugeot 404 pick-up, a clattering veteran of eighteen years of erratic driving, and drove off to see Haj Jiblani, an elderly Touareg who several months before had taken me for an introductory ten-mile camel ride. We sat on the ground and chatted above a depression in which his two white Mehari camels were being fed. Next to the old man, two young boys amused themselves by piling large stones on a tiny helpless puppy. They were toying with the animal as though it was the most normal recreation in the world.

In 1995, at the age of seventy, Jiblani had performed his haj by camel, from Soloum – on the Libyan border with Egypt – to Mecca. We asked if he was interested in selling us his camels and accompanying us as guide on the first leg to Idri. He replied softly, from beneath the shroud of white cloth that covered most of his head and face, that these camels were all he had so he could not part with them. As for guiding us, he would have liked to but could not leave Ghadames because he had a sick relative in the hospital. We should find someone younger and fitter. I had already spoken to another local Touareg called Okra, a man whose main claim to fame was that he had played Sophia Loren’s youthful lover in a film shot around Ghadames many years ago. He had said he was not fit enough for the journey. We did not seem to be making much progress. Even Mohammed, the most optimistic of our trio, seemed to agree.

‘Really we are in bad condition,’ he lamented. A selfless man, he was entering whole-heartedly into the spirit of our quest for camels and guide. ‘You will be the first to do this trip for 1,000 years,’ he enthused with a questionable degree of historical accuracy. ‘Really, we are not used to this. Everyone in Ghadames is surprised by you.’

For most of Gaddafi’s three decades at the helm tourism has not fitted comfortably within the regime’s broadly anti-imperialist mindset and a foreign policy that has led inexorably to isolation. It was only in the early nineties that a faltering programme of encouraging tourists to the country began and tourist visas were issued in greater earnest. For many Libyans we met, the whole notion of a long camel trek by foreign travellers was simply incomprehensible.