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 – though 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 two other 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 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: 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 still crooning ballads on cruise ships.

But 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.