giulio petrocco
2 Freetown spreads up from the port, slums slowly creeping into the hills. In the 1980s, these areas were still bush, and it was here that one found the potes – places where students from the nearby university could come to smoke marijuana, read books and discuss politics. Communism no longer offered much in the way of revolutionary support, and for the young intellectuals who would later go on to found the Revolutionary United Front, ushering in ten years of brutal civil war, Qadhafi’s Green Book was a central inspiration. I picked up a second-hand copy when I was in Sierra Leone; one of many English-language editions circulated by the Libyan government. Someone has furiously underlined page 108, which is titled ‘The Blacks Will Prevail in the World’. Africa was Qadhafi’s last great stage. As his dream of Arab nationalism burned out, he transferred his energies south, trying to install himself as the head of the African Union and sponsoring a series of violent civil wars on the continent. It would be unfair to Qadhafi, however, to say that it was only his money that talked. Elsewhere in West Africa, I remember acquiring a slim pamphlet, written by a Ghanian revolutionary who had trained in Libya during the 1980s. He wrote with awe about Libya’s popular committees and its road network. Most surprising was his enthusiasm for the ideology of the Green Book : here, he wrote, was a creed that was not an imperialist imposition; it understood the tradition of direct democracy to which all of Africa is heir. Deluded or not, his words are a tribute to a book that circulated throughout Africa, and at a time when the Communist era was closing, managed to get thousands of people thinking about the relationship between the rural and the urban in a different way.
3 It is often said that newly independent former-colonies are ‘not really nations’. In the case of Libya, such a statement has the advantage of being true. Prior to the arrival of the Ottoman empire, strong alliances, both tribal and peasant, organised the country. In Cyrenaica, the Sanusiya built an order based on trade and informal institutions, while around Tripoli, cosmopolitan Tripolitania emerged. In 1922, a new fascist government in Rome abrogated its treaties with the two states that then existed in Libya – the Sanusi Emirate and the Tripolitanian Republic – and began a colonial war that in Africa is only bested by Algeria and Congo in its brutality. At the cost of at least 500,000 lives, Italy subdued the rural hinterland of Libya, the site of the fiercest resistance to colonialism. At the end of World War II when Libya was given independence and the British were establishing military bases in the country, there was little to bind the nation together, other than a wish to be left alone by the colonial powers and a strong history of anti-urban sentiment in the desert hinterlands. Oil transformed this nascent state, and with it came the slow emergence of a middle class. Teachers were imported from Egypt and Palestine to teach, and they brought ideas of Arab nationalism to their Libyan students. When the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) overthrew King Idriss Al-Sanusi, they declared the birth of a Libyan Arab Republic, clearly inspired by Nasser’s Egyptian revolution in 1952. All but two of the twelve officers in the RCC were from marginal tribes. It was a revolution of the lower-middle classes from the hinterlands, who came to the richer cities of the Mediterranean coast with the promise to make it new. But how to rule? And to what end? How to build these disparate regional loyalties into something resembling a nation?
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