Gaddafi’s Libya (and mine): Part Ten

Over the few days after the bombing I made my way around, taking notes on the damage that had been done, as in those days I was producing cultural journalism for the London-based West Africa magazine and thought I should branch out and report on the bombing. My editor, the renowned Kaye Whiteman, published the pieces anonymously for my security. In fact during those few days the Brits were well looked after by the authorities. We were, for example, ferried down to the central telephone exchange (private lines were highly restricted) to call our next-of-kin, to assure them we were safe and well. I received an ear-full from my mother, who was not a great fan of my choice of working environment. Later that week the situation deteriorated. There was no word from Gaddafi. It was announced that his house in Tripoli had been bombed and that some of his family had been killed, but of the Colonel’s whereabouts not a hint (it turned out he was hiding on the campus of my university’s Agric Faculty, near a town east of Benghazi). Rumours began to circulate that sections of the armed forces had mutinied and were fighting each other. Certainly for the time being my wanders around town were over. At a point my wonderful Polish friends Szymon and Roma, a husband and wife team who taught in my Department, drove from their flat to campus to take me to stay with them. Never has an act of kindness been more welcome. No curfew had been imposed, but there was a nightly blackout and on the way back to my friends’ flat the car was stopped by the military and – in the interests of the blackout – paint slapped over the headlights (green paint, of course). We managed to keep ourselves cheerful, Roma and I sharing the cooking and (at the same time) sharing our repertoire of folk songs. One of these was “Ai ai ai-ai”, to which Roma knew the Polish words and I the Spanish. Must have made quite a racket. Every few hours we tuned into foreign news reports on the radio, which made it clear – though without much in the way of specifics – that the country was in a state of turmoil. Our main anxiety was that Libya would find a way of striking back at the West and that the West would retaliate, and so on until Armageddon. We heard quite a lot of shooting across the road, where there was one of those strategically-placed buildings I mentioned earlier, a huge arsenal. Then one morning there was the sound of very loud intermittent bangs from one of the flats below us. These bangs were not loud and sharp enough to be gun-shots. Possibly the sound of doors being kicked open. Possibly unwanted foreigners were being rounded up. “If that’s the case,” said Roma, “can you pretend to be Spanish?” “Si, claro,” I replied. Then I went downstairs to investigate. The noise turned out to be from a small boy, who was practising his footballing skills by kicking the ball into the door of the family flat. As the lobby and stairs were stone, the noise was incredible. I don’t as a rule hurl abuse at children, but in this case I made an exception (in Spanish, of course). Gaddafi emerged and appeared on television and remarkably quickly things calmed down. As I wrote up my account for West Africa magazine I gave special prominence to something that had been said to me, which seemed to sum up neatly the whole Libya mess. When I visited the Rehabilitation Centre just after the bombing I met a Libyan nurse, who railed against the brutality of the regime – the arrests, torture, executions – and who then pointed to her half-destroyed work-place and protested: “look what he has brought on us now! And all for his meddling in countries we should have nothing to do with.” Then she shook her head and said “but we know, too, how much good he has done for the country. So we can’t just spit him out.” (I was reminded of an old Arabic proverb which translates as “You can’t spit and lick.”) There were various sequels to the bombing, most obviously and momentously the uprising that led to the fall of the regime and to Gaddafi’s squalid death. Amongst various upsets there was one I remember vividly. One morning on campus posters were put up by the Revolutionary Committees announcing that the next day a bonfire would be made of all English and French-language books held by the library. It was strategically unwise to put the posters up so early, because for the rest of the day queues of staff and students formed at the library to borrow as many of these books as was allowed and so save them from the flames. This effort was largely spontaneous, but clearly appreciated by the librarians, who winked at each of the borrowers, especially (I like to imagine) at students who spoke not a word of French but had suddenly developed a passionate enthusiasm for the plays of Racine. I borrowed a multi-volume edition of the journals of Andre Gide, which I had started ploughing through some weeks before. At this point I had thought I had now finished my account of my years in Libya (I’m sure my long-suffering editor thought so, too). But there are still topics I wish to cover – happy ones, I should add – so after a couple of book reviews, I’ll come back to the subject in a few weeks’ time. Chris Dunton