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

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