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

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      ‘No-one do anything like this since Second World War,’ he declared. Excitable and warm by nature, he launched into a passionate recommendation that we extend our desert crossing into Sudan. ‘If you are British and you have money, you can do anything in Sudan,’ he promised. ‘We like the British too much.’

      I told him Ned was a farmer in England.

      ‘Then you must invest in Sudan agriculture,’ was the unhesitating reply. ‘You will have a letter from the government and then you can do anything. ANYTHING.’ His eyes grew large with enthusiasm. ‘You want farm? You can buy farm. You want camels? You buy camels. No problem in Sudan. You do ANYTHING you like.’ He spoke in an excited, breathless staccato, a patriotic investment adviser in overdrive. There was no stopping him. ‘Sudan is VERY, VERY rich country. We have EVERYTHING in Sudan.’

      For years Sudan had been one of the poorest countries in the world, crushed by civil war, famine and corrupt, xenophobic governments. None of this had dented Hajer’s boundless optimism.

      ‘You must see it. Not for one month or two months. No,’ he went on emphatically, ‘you must go for nine months.’

      ‘First we must talk to Taher,’ I said, trying to steer the conversation around to the present.

      ‘The government will help you too much if you like Sudan agriculture,’ he went on, looking meaningfully at Ned.

      ‘Perhaps we can discuss this a little later,’ I suggested. ‘But could you tell us where Taher is. He should be expecting us.’

      Hajer looked upset. He had not expected to be diverted from his talk on Sudanese agriculture. ‘He will come,’ he said stubbornly.

      Taher did not come. We waited several hours and still there was no sign of him.

      ‘Do you think he’s reliable?’ asked Ned over lunch in a semi-derelict hotel opposite our own. Like most swimming pools in Tripoli, this one was empty and looked as though it had been for years. Ned looked bored. I was, too, but was used to waiting for appointments in Libya.

      ‘As reliable as you can expect in Libya.’

      ‘Well, it doesn’t look like he’ll come today. Shall we go to Leptis Magna?’ he went on. We waited another couple of hours and returned to the office.

      ‘Taher come tomorrow,’ said Hajer, as though he had known this all along.

      ‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Ned, who had waited long enough.

      We called a taxi and drove to the stately ruins of Leptis Magna, Libya’s most imposing Roman city.

      Leptis owes its greatness to its most famous son Septimius Severus, the first African Roman emperor. He seized power in AD 193, after the murders of the emperors Commodus and Pertinax in quick succession. Elevated to greatness in Rome, Septimius never lost sight of his African origins and Leptis rose to the height of imperial grandeur, becoming one of the foremost cities of the empire. Architects and sculptors descended in droves from Rome and Asia Minor to create monuments such as the two-storey basilica, overwhelming in its sheer scale, gorgeous in its design, paved with marble and ruthlessly decadent, with soaring colonnades of Corinthian columns embellished with shafts of red Egyptian granite. Up went the Arch of Septimius Severus, built in AD 203 for the emperor’s visit to his birthplace, an immense testimony to Rome’s mighty sway, with marble reliefs detailing triumphal processions, naked winged Victories, captive barbarians and a united imperial family. A new forum was erected, the circus was enlarged and the port rebuilt to accommodate 1,000-ton ships guided into the harbour by a 100-foot lighthouse. Leptis had never known such glory and would never again. When Septimius died campaigning in York in AD 211, the city embarked upon a long decline from which it did not recover. Fifteen centuries later, Louis XIV had many of the city’s treasures exported to Paris.

      For the art historian Bernard Berenson, Leptis was unforgettable. ‘We went on to the Baths, the Palestra, and the Nymphaeum,’ he wrote to his wife in 1935. ‘Truly imperial, even in their ruins, for one suspects that ruins suggest sublimities that the completed building may not have attained. In their present state they are evocative and romantic to a degree that it would be hard to exaggerate.’ Today, we wandered along the shore and clambered undisturbed over these neglected buildings, past piles of fallen columns and discarded pedestals lying strewn under the wide African sky. The hot silence of the place was overpowering. Deep in drifts of sand and choked by spreading trees and plants, Septimius’s city slept.

      Through his encouragement of camel breeding on the North African littoral, the African emperor had provided a huge fillip to Saharan trade. The merchants of Leptis are thought to have been the first to benefit from the introduction of this animal. The days of the horse, used for centuries to great effect by the formidable Garamantes, were numbered. The camel offered improved performance in the desert, was economical to run, and comfortable to ride. The Romans wasted little time in increasing the numbers of this versatile beast. By AD 363, when Leptis was invaded by the Austurians, a group of tribes from the central region of Sirtica, Count Romanus, commander of Roman troops in Africa, demanded 4,000 camels from the townsmen as his price for intervening on their behalf.

      We met Taher in his office the following morning. He appeared taken aback by our arrival, like a burglar caught in the act. Sheepishly he confessed that nothing had been arranged.

      ‘I thought maybe you would not come to Libya,’ he said feebly.

      ‘But Taher, I told you exactly when we were going to arrive,’ I replied, exasperated. My previous trip to Libya seemed to have been for nothing.

      ‘We have too many problems in Libya,’ he said, as though this explained everything.

      ‘Well, it’s a great start,’ I said, turning to Ned. He was phlegmatic about this first upset to our plans. I should have been, too. Planning anything in advance in Libya was a lost cause. The country didn’t work like that. You had to be there on the ground to get anything done.

      ‘Now you are here I will go to talk to my friend,’ Taher said more hopefully. ‘Maybe you can buy your camels in Tripoli.’ It seemed unlikely.

      We headed into Tripoli’s Old City and threaded our way through Suq al Mushir, the gateway into the medina, to drink tea, smoke apple-flavoured tobacco in shisha pipes, and mull over our situation, which did not seem particularly promising. On the outside of the old British Consulate on Shar’a al Kuwash (Baker Street) was a plaque put up by the Gaddafi regime describing the building’s history. Reflecting the leader’s distrust of western imperialism, it referred to the pioneering nineteenth-century missions into the Sahara that left from here as ‘the so-called European geographical and explorative scientific expeditions to Africa, which were in essence and as a matter of fact intended to be colonial ones to occupy and colonize vital strategic parts of Africa’.

      Built in 1744, it served first as a residence for Ahmed Pasha, founder of the great Karamanli dynasty. Turkey had administered Tripoli since 1551, when Simon Pasha overcame a small force of the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, who until then had been maintaining the city as ‘a Christian oasis in a barbaric desert’. The Karamanlis themselves hailed from the racial mix of Turkish soldiers and administrators who had married native women.

      From the second half of the eighteenth century, the building became the British Consulate, from where successive consuls kept London up to date on the Saharan slave trade, various measures to suppress it, and the continued obstruction of such measures by the Turkish authorities. Local officials СКАЧАТЬ