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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ