Things Aren't Always What They Seem

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You rarely saw Libyan women out in the street in Tripoli and the few that you did see all wore the barrakan. This is a white sheet that reveals only a part of a woman’s face or, if worn properly, only one eye.

Libyan women taking flights abroad generally wore the barrakan, too. Until they sat down in the plane. Then they would remove it, often to reveal much more daring western clothes, such as halter tops and hot pants.

So waiting on board a British Caledonian plane bound for Gatwick, I was not surprised when a white-clad Libyan woman sat down next to me and started to remove her barrakan.

I was surprised, however, when she spoke to me in a very west country English accent. In fact, she wasn’t Libyan at all; she was a young Englishwoman.

It turned out that she lived in Tajjoureh, a small village near where we lived and which we regularly drove through. When I expressed surprise at finding out that an English women was living there, she told me that five other young English women lived in the same small village. All of the women came from villages near a naval base in southwest England. Groups of Libyan naval cadets regularly came to live on the base in order to participate in naval training courses. Inevitably, some of the cadets met local women during their off-duty hours and some of the assignations led to romance and marriage.

I asked the woman whether she had known much about Libya before she married her husband and followed him over there. “I didn’t know a thing,” she told me. “My husband didn’t even mention about me having to wear the barrakan until we got here. It was the same with all the other English girls who live in Tajjoureh.”

I suggested that she and her friends had to be finding it really difficult to adjust to the limiting and subservient role of Libyan women, having to wear the barrakan, being ordered around by her husband, etc.

She was amused. It wasn’t at all difficult, she informed me. According to her, villages are villages, no matter which country they are in. When you’re a girl living at home in an English village, your father tells you what to wear, when you can go out, who you can see, and what you can and cannot do. When you are married and living in a Libyan village, she explained, the only difference is that it’s your husband rather than your father who controls your life.

She finished by pointing out that her new life was actually much better than her old one. Now she had money, plenty of money, and her husband let her fly back to England at least once a year to buy clothes and visit family and friends. And while she was in England, she could do exactly as she pleased!

P.S.

My father moved from a small village in Pakistan to Carlisle in northern England. He told me he felt very much at home in Cumbria. Not only did the countryside remind him of his native Kashmir but he also felt that people's attitudes were very similar.

Like Lambs ...

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Eid al-Adha is an important Islamic holiday. As it honours Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to God, families celebrate it by killing a sheep. On the day of the Eid over 350 million sheep are killed across the Muslim world. A third of the meat is eaten right away, a third is stored and a third is given to the poor.

In Libya, you could tell when the Eid was approaching, because you would see people – mainly children – walking around the streets with sheep on leashes. A very odd sight, particularly in a city.

We always spent the Eid at Ali Gibril’s house. (To be honest, we always spent at lot of days at Ali’s house, partly because our best friend, Mustafa, lived there and partly because Ali’s wife, Fatma, was an extremely good cook.) As a third of a sheep wasn't enough to feed Ali's family of 15 plus Mustafa, us, etc., we used to pay for Ali to buy a second sheep.

I found the way Ali’s children behaved towards each year’s Eid sheep quite surprising. For several weeks they would treat the sheep as pets, playing with them and taking them for walks. They seemed quite attached to the animals.

Then, on the day of the Eid, they would stand by totally untroubled while Ali cut its throat, removed the fleece and then butchered it.

I can’t imagine most British or American children being so unmoved by the death of an animal that they knew. I remember my cousin Jeanette throwing a positive fit as a child when her dad killed Archibald, one of several chickens that the family kept in the backyard.

In fact, now that I come to think of it, even some British adults found the Eid rather difficult to deal with. Polly was a case in point.

We would sometimes take new teachers around to Ali’s for the Eid. One year, we took Polly, a rather highly-strung young woman who had just arrived from England. I think I might have forgotten to mention in advance some of the details of what was going to happen, because I have never seen anyone look as horrified as she looked when Ali grabbed the sheep and cut its throat. Then, when he cut a hole in its skin and started blowing hard to separate the fleece from the carcass, she totally freaked out.

She made me drive her straight home, where she locked herself in her room. She didn't come to work for the next three days. Ali's family couldn't understand what they had done to upset her. When I told Ali that she was upset by seeing him kill the sheep, Ali was still puzzled. "She eats meat," he said. "Where does she think the meat comes from?"

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Stories of the Revolution

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The Ghadaffi regime was brought to power by revolution of September 1, 1969. As anyone who knows Libya might expect, this revolution was not without its dramatic – and its funny – moments.

Here are some parts of the inside story that I heard from various Libyan friends. I can’t swear to the accuracy of these stories but I heard each one from several different sources. Also, I think anyone who has lived in Libya will feel the stories have a ring of truth about them.

The revolution was actually born, not in Tripoli, but in England. Muammar Gadaffi and several other young Libyan army officers were attending an English language school in London. One night, a friend invited Ghadaffi to go with him to a night club. There the young officer watched in disgust as a Libyan prince gambled away over one million pounds. Ghadaffi turned to his friend and said, “When we go home, we’re going to plan a revolution.” He was as good as his word.

Planning the revolution turned out to be very tricky for Ghadaffi and the eleven other junior officers who agreed to take part in it. One problem was that King Idris did not trust his army and so the troops were allowed to have very little ammunition. The police, on the other hand, were well armed and well supplied with munitions.

Another even more serious problem lay in the fact that Libya was made up of three distinct provinces. The people in each province were suspicious of or even hostile to the people in the other provinces. So Ghadaffi realized that the revolution could only succeed if he and his colleagues seized power and broadcast news of the coup in all three provinces simultaneously.

So, on the appointed day, the plotters swung into coordinated action in the three provinces. And things at once started to go wrong.

The plotters didn’t have to worry about King Idris, because he was travelling abroad. However, they did have to worry about his nephew, the so-called Black Prince and the power behind the throne. On the night of the coup, one group of soldiers raced to the Blue Palace in Tripoli to arrest the prince. They searched the palace but found no sign of him. They were panic-stricken. Had the prince found out about the coup and was he even now rallying support against it? In fact, the officers searching the palace had somehow failed to notice that the prince was exactly where he should have been, in his bedroom. He slept through the whole episode and, luckily, didn’t wake until the coup had succeeded.

Elsewhere, another group of officers was charged with seizing the main broadcasting station and holding it until they could announce that the coup had been successful in all three provinces. This group ran into problems even before they got to the broadcasting station. They were stopped by a police patrol and arrested because the police mistakenly believed that a bottle of water in the soldiers’ vehicle was really a bottle of alcohol.

After the soldiers had managed to talk their way out of the arrest, they rushed to the broadcasting station only to find that the doors were locked. They had to sit outside and wait until the doorman turned up with the keys at the station’s normal opening time.

Still, all’s well that ends well, and Ghadaffi and his fellow officers somehow managed to bring the coup to a successful conclusion.

Footnote 1

By coincidence, a Libyan general based in Benghazi had been planning a coup of his own, due to take place a few days after Ghadaffi’s revolution. On September 1, he was awakened by loud knocking at his front door. He got up and went to the door. “Who’s there?” he asked.

“Open in the name of the revolution,” came the reply. “Go away, you fools,” the general yelled. “The revolution isn’t until next week.” He opened the door and was promptly arrested.

Footnote 2

Five of the twelve officers who led the revolution and became the Revolutionary Command Council were students at the IH school in Tripoli. They were lieutenants. A few days before the revolution, they had to take an English exam. If they passed the exam, they were to be promoted immediately to the rank of captain. As the five were excellent students, they seemed certain to do well. So Ben Warren, the IH director, was very surprised when all five officers failed the exam, and failed it disastrously. He couldn't work out what had happened. He only understood later, when he learned that that well before the day of the exam the plotters had issued orders that all officers with the rank of captain or higher should be arrested on September 1st.

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The Road to Ghat

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There were 7 of us in my 4-wheel drive Nissan Patrol: myself, Sue, Emma (18 months old), Ali and Mustafa Gibril, Grant Thompson and Trina Keyes. We were heading for Ghat, an isolated oasis village in the far southwestern corner of Libya. We had covered the 500 miles of road from Tripoli through Sebha to Ubari, and now we were bumping along on a desert track 50 miles west of Ubari.

Ali looked worried even before we ran into trouble

There was a terrible grinding noise from the left front wheel. Then the Nissan pulled sharply to the left and we jerked to a stop.

A wheel bearing had gone! We didn’t have a spare and there was absolutely no way we were going to get the Nissan moving again without a new bearing.

Grant and I talked about trying to walk the 50 miles back to Ubari but Ali reminded us that the first, second and third rule of desert breakdowns is to stay with the vehicle. So we all sat down on the sand in the hope that another vehicle would come by before too long.

Waiting for rescue

We needn’t have worried. Within half-an-hour a dot appeared on the horizon. It got closer and bigger. And closer. And bigger. It was just like the scene in “Lawrence of Arabia” when Omar Sharif makes his first appearance. Except in our case the dot resolved itself into a large truck and trailer rather than Omar Sharif.

The truck drew up, the driver’s side window opened and a smiling black face looked down at us. In perfect British-accented English the driver said, “Good afternoon. May I help you ladies and gentlemen?”

It turned out that the driver, who was Sudanese, lived about six houses away from us in Tripoli.

This kind of thing happens only in Libya!

Our rescuer gave Ali and me a ride to Sebha, where our luck held and we found a suitable wheel bearing. The next day, he drove us 150 miles back to where the others were patiently waiting by the Nissan.

Unfortunately, our breakdown and the repairs had taken up two days and now there was not enough time left for us to visit Ghat. This was a disappointing ending to the trip – but not as bad an ending as we could have faced.

P.S.

Ali Gibril looked anxious throughout the trip and he told us not to mention his and Mustafa's last name to anyone we met. After we got back to Tripoli, he told us why. His grandfather had been a traditional Touareg man in the Ubari-Ghat area: that is, he made a living by robbing travellers and killing those who resisted. (This was the only type of work permitted to men under the Touareg code of honour.) Ali was afraid that local people might still remember this and be bound by blood feud laws to seek revenge on Ali and Mustafa.