TRIPOLI, 1973

It was Friday, so we were going to the beach as usual. As in most Muslim

countries, the weekend was Friday and Saturday – and we were none of
us so devout that we objected to working on Sunday. But Friday of course
was the big one, the Muslim holy day.

One was very conscious of Friday in Libya; the place I lived was called
Suq-al-Juma’a – Friday Market. Once a sleepy little village with a large
square where camels and goats were traded, it was gradually being
absorbed into the city: white concrete villas like mine springing up among
the prickly-pears and the old mud-brick courtyard houses. Next to our
house was a small mosque; the call to prayer went out five times a day,
every day, starting at 6:00 am in the summer – but it was on tape. The elderly Hajji who owned the dusty little store
opposite our house and doubled as the imam was no longer expected to drag his old bones up those steep, narrow
stairs.

Anyway, back to the beach. I and the other two young unmarried male teachers (we had little else in common, but
Libya had thrown us together) had planned to meet at the school as usual with our swimming and snorkelling gear
and pile into my yellow Renault for a day at the ‘40 km beach’. I never did find out what the locals called it, but it was
a popular spot; a long bar of sand with a low grassy bluff a couple of
hundred metres back from the sea, on which stood a small shrine to a
local wali (saint), a low white structure made of whitewashed daub with a
dome and crescent on top, like a miniature mosque.

But I don’t recall seeing many of the numerous Libyan families who flocked
to the ‘40 km beach’ on Fridays and Saturdays paying their devotions to
the wali. Instead they would all gather on the beach, the men in their
bathing trunks and the women in their thick blanket-like barrakans that
covered every part of their bodies, leaving only a Cyclops-like hole around
the bridge of the nose to squint through. While the women took care of the
young children, the men and older boys would barbecue immense quantities of lamb in between dips in the sea,
before finally piling into their Datsuns or Toyotas to drive back to the city.

On the way to the beach we stopped, as we often did, at a small café-cum-

gas station to get a coffee and to buy some Fanta. On the television – there
was of course only one channel, and it was in black and white – the
country’s new young leader Colonel Gaddafi was holding forth in his usual
elaborate, ritualised, impassioned and rhetorical style. The few customers in
the bar were watching, respectful and slightly baffled.

My Arabic wasn’t good enough to understand most of what he was saying,

but I guessed that, like most of his speeches, it was about the unequal
relation of the Arab world with the Western powers, especially the British and the Americans: the history of Palestine,
oil, Saudi Arabia etc. Plus, of course, the history of Libya itself, a backwater Italian colony up till World War II, and an
Anglo-American protectorate from then till 1969. The Italians never found the oil, but the Brits did in, back in the
1950s: with its pro-Western puppet monarch Libya had been a safe haven for BP, Shell, Esso and the rest – and the
Americans even had a huge air force base right on Tripoli’s corniche, a mere 8 km from the city centre. The West had
taken the place for granted, and it was almost undefended when that unknown 27-year old junior officer staged his
military coup. Almost the first thing he did, of course, was to kick out the Americans.
We drank up our coffee and left fairly hurriedly – the atmosphere was never too friendly during Gaddafi’s speeches,
and spent a pleasant day frolicking on the beach. On the way back I stopped for gas, and when I went in to pay he
was still speaking – which made six or more hours non-stop, outdoing even his great hero Nasser. (The Egyptian
revolutionary leader nationalised the Suez canal, provoking the disastrous Anglo-French invasion of 1956; his many
hour-long speeches were broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers all over the Arab world, causing grown men to stop in
the streets and burst into tears of pride and passion.)

Over the year and a half or so that I was there, Libya gradually became less
and less hospitable to Westerners, as the populace got to know more of the
history that they’d never learned in school (those who’d even gone to school).
There was a huge amount of natural grandeur and beauty to the place:
incredible Roman and Greek ruins, awe-inspiring desert landscapes, and of
course those astonishing, endless, largely deserted, sandy beaches, but I was
glad enough to leave all the same. This wasn’t primarily because of the politics
but the enforced celibacy and the lack of alcohol and merry-making – the lack
of pretty much anything, in fact, in this vast country three times the size of
France, with a population then of less than 3 million. I had my life to get on
with, and I went back to London to get on with it.

That was more than half a lifetime ago: then I was a young man in his early 20s, and now I’m an old geezer heading
for retirement age. And Gaddafi is still there, madder, crueller and more despotic than ever. Who else was in power in
1973, and is still there now? Not even Robert Mugabe, or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni; in 1973 the unshiftable Silvio
Berlusconi was crooning ballads on cruise ships.

Come to think of it, there is one head of state who’s lasted even longer. When I came back to London Queen
Elisabeth II’s face had already adorned Britain’s coins and banknotes for 22 years – and, like Gaddafi, she’s still there
now. I wonder, if the Brits tried to overthrow the Queen, and she was hunkered down in Buckingham Palace
surrounded by tank traps and anti-aircraft guns, would Gaddafi send his air force to support the Republican cause?

An idle fantasy – next year (let’s hope) Gaddafi will be gone, but the Brits will be throwing garden parties to celebrate
the Queen’s 60 years on the throne; little paper flags will be waved all over the country, and hardly a protest will be
heard.