As the missiles pound the Libyan capital and Qaddafi retreats further & further into the depths of his compound, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this city. Each time I visited over the last six years I found endless material for features and thought. I’ve always experienced warm often quirky encounters – so throughout this post I’ll drop in pics of Tripolitanians themselves – the people that matter far more than Qaddafi’s henchmen.
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Cool dude at one of Tripoli’s great fish restaurants
Ironically the last piece I wrote on Tripoli was kept on hold for over a year after the fiasco of releasing the alleged Lockerbie bomber, Al-Magrahi, from Scotland. It finally did appear five months ago – see http://www.howtospendit.com/#/articles/2879-the-smooth-guide-tripoli. But my encouragement to visit this offbeat place has obviously become obsolete yet again. Tourism is momentarily dead – along with a lot of citizens.
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Bliss: shisha + TV
During these days of high tension and standoffs, I realised it’s a country that is historically misunderstood. Yesterday, finally, I heard a news item actually spell out the fact that Libya only became a united country under Italian colonial rule (pre World War II). At last. Before that it was three separate entities, including a vast swathe of desert in the south, where Qaddafi comes from. His bedouin tent is just one reminder. This historical fact is fundamental in the clash between the liberal-minded ‘rebels’ in Benghazi (former Cyrenaica) and the handful of pro-Qaddafi hardliners in Tripoli (former Tripolitania).
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Mosque caretaker.
Nor does it mean that everyone in Tripoli supports the dictator, far from it. Many people I met regarded him as a bit of a joke – the fact that his billboard image (and outfit) changed annually pointed to a degree of vanity and his speeches… well we saw the one of him under the umbrella. But political repression has always existed, beautifully and painfully described in Hisham Matar’s semi-autobiographical book, In the Country of Men.
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Watch & clock repairer
We’ll see where this war leads us. Personally I’m never happy about foreign intervention and I demonstrated against the Iraq war. This time though, there is a huge section of the population fighting desperately for survival and they need our support.
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ps if you want to know more about Tripoli’s day to day life before the missiles, see my book Medina Kitchen or North African Kitchen.
