From My Notebooks In 1973: Libya

On the road to Benghazi.

Wednesday, October 31st, Marsa Bregha

Oil refinery and tankers. Aircraft parked in the desert. No houses. Eerie. On to Benghazi. Run dry within sight of it. Fortuitous. Two good young men. Give me petrol. Take me into Benghazi. Buy me a tankful!! Take me for coffee. Help look for elusive Sabecol. [The Sunday Times had a point of contact in a business called Sabecol.] Help me find hotel. Offer to help with phone call – through brother in PTT. [Post office] Lend me a pound. Stupendous hospitality and generosity.

Meet man with garage in the same road. Freedom of the house. Eat beans, tripe, peppers. 10 piastres. Walk round Benghazi and fall in love with it. Squares with parks and fountains. Women in streets. Shops and arcades. Fascinating markets. Poles away from Tripoli. Shoes at six or seven pounds. Watches everywhere. Backscratcher for Jo. But insides are all ugly. Thought is beginning to form. Beauty at price of personal ugliness. Kindness flourishes on barren soil. Streets are paved with potholes. As though a tank regiment had just fought its way through.

Wednesday 31st

I am living in a community virtually created for me. The hotel. Opposite the small restaurant, white tiles, oil cloth, odd smell but you get used to it. Clean, cheap. Just 30 yards down, the motorcycle workshop, put entirely at my disposal by the owner, Kerim Ali.

Kerim Ali and his workshop. Tremendous help and enthusiasm.

And opposite him an amazing scrapyard come general engineering shop run by Mustafa, a skilled engineer where I can get anything made, welded, etc. But the mysterious Sabecol still eludes me. Kerim has been given six different telephone numbers. Every time he rings directory, another number. He grins disarmingly. Tomorrow, he says, we will drive there. Sa’ad passes by and starts working with me on the Triumph. I clean it, reset timing, tappets, clean out carb. Change chain, change oil, change plugs. Tomorrow grease and oiling.

Sa’ad worked on the bike with me, and invited me to his home.

Walk around with Sa’ad. Everything stops at 9pm. Except the café on the sea front. Veery pleasant though. Gold market. Fishing with dynamite. Another tedious banking scene. Dollar down to 2.50 to pound. Bad business. Surfeit of one dollar bills.

Thursday November 1st

Another day. But Sabecol has been penetrated. The omnipotent Kerim drives me out of city on Tripoli road where he says all big businesses have moved. There is very little “traffic” (business) in Libya these days, he says. The people have money, but they keep it. Afraid to invest. Sabecol is an empty space.. Used to do British cars and bikes – now only get spare parts. Letters there from ST. Another, to P.O.Box 217, has got away. Back to Kerim’s shop. Sa’ad arrives. More work on bike, fixing the recorder input lead. Talk to Mustafa the welder. Specialises in cast iron and aluminium alloy welding. Oldest welder in Cyrenaica. Amazing workshop – a jungle of scrap metal. Rusted corrugated iron overhead. He limps. Has a soft, fastidious expression.

On the way to Sa’ad’s home I disgraced myself in a pool of wet clay.

I drove Sa’ad to his house across a wasteland of rubbish, craters. Old World War II US airfield, with £25 million university rising out of it. Around it – then swoosh, squelch – into wet mud, clay – over we go. Come up like figures ready for firing. Pic of bike. And all that time spent cleaning it. Cameras encrusted. So Sa’ad drives while I palpitate on back. No harm. Very funny incident. But I hope I see it next time if I’m going faster.

Two pictures of Sa’ad’s home.

Is Sa’ad on his mobile phone?

Sa’ad’s home a long, square plot by the beach. Those ‘date’ palms, are either unripe dates or something similar. They have sheep in a pen built of old doors, planks, windows. Profusion of parts. Vegetables, onions, cabbage, tomatoes (on ground) Donkey. Dogs ( 3 ) Cat and kittens and endless brothers. Also pigeons, small turkeys – or guinea fowl? All within yards of the beach. A great stack of sandstone blocks (inhabited by a rabbit) waits to be added to the house (hewn from that same quarry). Sa’ad has two shacks of plank strewn with motorcycle parts and machines in rusty dilapidation. A Triumph Trophy, a Guzzi, a Yamaha. Advertisements for cars, motorcycles, and a British shower manufacturer from Birmingham contributes his two pennorth of titillation with banal lady under shower with nipples showing. The shack nearest the shore is on stilts and has a Cannery Row feeling about it.

You drive fifty miles of barren road and ee a triumphal arc across the road, usually sky blue and apparently made of plywood and plaster board. At the foot of the arch is usually a policeman or a soldier, and often they will stop you for your papers. After this the road generally deteriorates and widens out to be about three times the width with rough asphalt or mud. Theen, on either side a row of single-storey, open fronted spaces of brick and plaster, used variously as café, a general store, living rooms, a garage, etc. Because no particular style has evolved to differentiate between premises for, say, a builder or an ironmonger, my western eye has difficulty seeing through the general jumble. On either side a row of pumps, sometimes new, sometimes rusted. It’s hard to tell which are working. They all carry the sign of the government oil company although I gather they are serviced, as before, by different companies, Shell, Esso, etc. But you don’t know or care what you’re getting since its half the British price.

Parked by the pumps are likely to be: A Peugeot 404 estate taxi, nose and tail painted white, mid-section black with a group of sombre men packed inside wrapped in white shawls and topped with fezzes, often clasping cushions or pillows in plastic bags; a row of buses containing a mixed cargo of soldiers and civilians and driven by either; any sort of private car as long as it’s German, French, , Italian or Japanese; a Datsun or Toyota pick-up truck. Buses and most taxis have tarpaulin bundles of luggage on top. In October, November the area is a sea of mud.

I have never seen an Arab manifest impatience or throw rank (except within the family).

Monday November 5th

And I have been here too long. Or rather I have been here long enough to feel time weigh on me. Clearly, I am impatient to get on, frustrated by the delays and still uncertain about a plan to get across, so I feel the time pass. But for the ordinary young man in Benghazi time is scarcely less of a burden. There seems to be little else to do here but work or speculate. The streets are crowded in the evenings by groups of men talking. There would seem to be literally nothing for them to do except go to the cinema. Some go every night. The arrival of a new film is a major event. Much of the audience is acquainted, and they react to breaks in the reel with esprit de corps – like an army audience.

Much lip service is paid to the evils of war but the only convincing sentiments are those deploring its economic effect. Kerim says the price of timber has gone up from £30 to £50 per cubic metre. I don’t think anyone actually wants to fight, but many are impressed by the idea of fighting. Violent films are popular, and there seems to be a karate craze on here. Twice I’ve seen a youth in the street play at a karate blow and it’s been mentioned casually several times. Benghazi itself was designed for more frivolous times. It has several squares with palm trees and fountains, formally laid out with pools geometrically pattered among tiled areas and flower beds. Sharia (road) Omar Mukhtar has arcades running its full length – modern, including the post office, giving way to 19th century. Virtually every ground floor opening onto most streets is a store of some kind. And invariably steel rolling shutters come clattering down at 9pm giving the town a bleak, dead look. Road works everywhere, pumps ins continuous operation provide Benghazi its characteristic background noise, like the cicadas in other places. Yet in spite of the bombed sites (are they really still from the war?) and the shattered roads, the city promises a sophistication and variety which it cannot deliver.

Undoubtedly the current regime has flushed out many babies with the bathwater, filthy as they may have been. With alcohol and tourism gone there are no clubs, no luxury restaurants. The West is represented only by its hardware. A parade of watches, transistors, cars, domestic appliances. No live music at all, except for religious festivals and marriages. Apparently, no theatre, and little demand for it. A ‘bloc’ mentality, faintly reminiscent of pre-war Germany, but without the economic hardship. Libyans have money. The State shares out its oil income with allowances. £5 a month for every child. A £40 pound allowance for married men. £20 for single men. Young people seem healthy, bursting with vitality. Slim. None of that Western obesity. But all heavy smokers. Older generation frequently bow-legged – some squints. Older women all seem stunted and prematurely aged under their red or blue checked burkas. [I don’t explain how I saw beneath them!]

Here at least (unlike Tripoli) girls in Western trouser suits are seen in the streets going to and from work (or school). The atmosphere is less repressive. There are skins of every shade, from pale Libyan through brown Egyptian, to coal black Sudanese. The Egyptians have been brought in as cheap labour and are becoming an embarrassment, I’m told.

As well as selling goodies, there is a disproportionate number of shops dealing in paint, tools and electrical fittings and materials indicating a great preoccupation with house renovation. Police and soldiers everywhere, but not in an intimidating way, except to the paranoid foreigner who feels suspicious eyes upon him. It is considered unwise to take photographs and nobody uses cameras. Arabs are said not to like having their pictures taken. I have always found the opposite to be true however and I think the camera-shy Arab is a myth in the city.

All in all, I feel this society is off balance, and that much of what is wrong in the Middle East may be the consequence. The spiritual life of Islam has no answers for a restless new urban class, yet they cling to it. I can’t honestly say I wish them the benefits of a Western cultural life, or that they should cease to observe the customs of hospitality which I have enjoyed to a surfeit. But there is tension, and loose energy that the pursuit of technology can only exacerbate.

Sa’ad’s brothers did the clean-up.