he encountered another slave caravan and was deeply moved by the misery of these
poor little children – child-slaves – crawling over the ground, scarcely able to move. Oh, what a curse is slavery! How full of hard-heartedness and cruelty! As soon as the poor slaves arrived, they set to work and made a fire. Some of them were laden with wood when they came up. The fire was their only protection from the cold, the raw bitter cold of the night, for they were nearly naked. I require as much as three ordinary greatcoats, besides the usual clothing of the day, to keep me warm in the night; these poor things, the chilly children of the tropics, have only a rag to cover them, and a bit of fire to warm them. I shall never forget the sparkling eyes of delight of one of the poor little boys, as he sat down and looked into the crackling glaring fire of desert scrub.
Since the slave drivers were paid per capita to deliver their charges to their destination, they saved expenses by giving them as little food as possible. As a result, they were kept on survival rations consisting of barley meal mixed with water. Richardson’s attendant, he noted, ate more for dinner than a slave’s entire daily ration. By the time they got to their destination, they would be no more than ‘living-skeletons’.
Richardson stayed in Ghadames for three months, spending much of his time dispensing medicine to treat the most common illnesses – ophthalmia (inflammation of the eye), diarrhoea, dropsy, smallpox and syphilis – telling his unsuspecting patients it came from the Queen of England, ‘which, I have observed, heightens its value in their eyes’. He was something of a chameleon, at one moment the impassioned liberal, the next a Christian bigot, sometimes a patriotic British imperialist, at others the vitriolic anti-slave trade campaigner. But whatever his mood, he was a consistently – perhaps unintentionally – entertaining observer of his surroundings. The discovery that some men wore kohl to blacken their eyelids, for instance, completely threw him. ‘I confessed I was surprised at this monstrous effeminacy,’ he fumed.
More importantly, his investigations led him to conclude that two merchants under British protection were providing credit to slave-traders. He promptly wrote a letter to that effect to Colonel Warrington in Tripoli, asking him not to publicize this information until he himself was safely out of the desert, for fear of reprisals. The correspondence must have made Warrington squirm:
We may expect one of these days to see some American President coming forward in the Congress of the United States, as the late Mr Slaveholder Tigler, or some French Deputy in the Chamber with a statement to the following effect: ‘that whilst the British Consuls of Barbary, and the agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society are labouring for the suppression of the Slave Trade in Northern and Central Africa, the traffic in Slaves between Soudan and Tripoli is principally carried on by the means of British capital’.
Worse still was the news that Richardson had tactlessly conveyed his allegation (‘I do not believe one word of it,’ Warrington wrote London) to the Anti-Slavery Society in England, thereby undermining the British Consul’s own position. The diplomat’s response was equally direct. A public notice was put up announcing ‘the strictest inquiry’ into the affair and threatening a tribunal. Richardson, meanwhile, was pressed by Warrington to provide evidence to support his controversial claims, ‘or I apprehend you will be subject to an action’. Furious with the British Consul for revealing his allegation and jeopardizing his safety in Ghadames, and unable, he claimed, to procure hard evidence, Richardson retreated to his journal and vented his spleen there instead.
The whole affair, which was still occupying Warrington seven months later when Richardson returned to the coast, caused a great scandal both in Tripoli and Ghadames and was illustrative of the changing climate. From the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of the official prohibition of slave-dealing and mounting international opposition made life increasingly difficult for the illegal traffickers in human flesh. By the turn of the century, new economic realities had added to the slavers’ troubles. Transportation costs from Black Africa to Europe had been reduced with the advent of a train link from Kano to Lagos and the introduction of steamers from the African coast to Liverpool. It cost £3 to transport one ton of goods from Liverpool to Kano in 1905 and more than double that just to send the same consignment from Tripoli to Kano. The Saharan caravan trade was under threat as never before.
For Ghadames, the accelerating demise of the slave trade, on whose back the city had grown so prosperous, was the first calamitous setback. With fewer and fewer slaves available to irrigate the gardens and keep back the ever-encroaching sands, the city started shrinking, and emigration started apace. After the middle of the nineteenth century, the decline proved irreversible, but Ghadames lived on, propped up by the Italian Fascists in the early twentieth century through improvements to the water supply. It was in 1986, however, that Gaddafi’s government dealt the age-old medina a potentially fatal blow. All the inhabitants were ordered to vacate the Old City and move into newly constructed houses outside the city walls, equipped with the usual modern conveniences. These houses, unimaginative squares of cheap concrete, are already deteriorating fast. Those inside the medina, though they did not have such luxuries as running hot water, had lasted hundreds of years. Since this forced relocation, the Old City, quite unlike anything else the length and breadth of the Sahara, has been crumbling away steadily. If its oldest houses remain empty, Ghadames’s days are surely numbered.
We still needed camels. That afternoon, we mounted Mohammed’s battered Peugeot 404 pick-up, a clattering veteran of eighteen years of erratic driving, and drove off to see Haj Jiblani, an elderly Touareg who several months before had taken me for an introductory ten-mile camel ride. We sat on the ground and chatted above a depression in which his two white Mehari camels were being fed. Next to the old man, two young boys amused themselves by piling large stones on a tiny helpless puppy. They were toying with the animal as though it was the most normal recreation in the world.
In 1995, at the age of seventy, Jiblani had performed his haj by camel, from Soloum – on the Libyan border with Egypt – to Mecca. We asked if he was interested in selling us his camels and accompanying us as guide on the first leg to Idri. He replied softly, from beneath the shroud of white cloth that covered most of his head and face, that these camels were all he had so he could not part with them. As for guiding us, he would have liked to but could not leave Ghadames because he had a sick relative in the hospital. We should find someone younger and fitter. I had already spoken to another local Touareg called Okra, a man whose main claim to fame was that he had played Sophia Loren’s youthful lover in a film shot around Ghadames many years ago. He had said he was not fit enough for the journey. We did not seem to be making much progress. Even Mohammed, the most optimistic of our trio, seemed to agree.
‘Really we are in bad condition,’ he lamented. A selfless man, he was entering whole-heartedly into the spirit of our quest for camels and guide. ‘You will be the first to do this trip for 1,000 years,’ he enthused with a questionable degree of historical accuracy. ‘Really, we are not used to this. Everyone in Ghadames is surprised by you.’
For most of Gaddafi’s three decades at the helm tourism has not fitted comfortably within the regime’s broadly anti-imperialist mindset and a foreign policy that has led inexorably to isolation. It was only in the early nineties that a faltering programme of encouraging tourists to the country began and tourist visas were issued in greater earnest. For many Libyans we met, the whole notion of a long camel trek by foreign travellers was simply incomprehensible.
Mohammed suggested what was beginning to appear inevitable: ‘I think you must go to the Mehari Club of Ghadames.’ This was an organization that owned several riding camels and hired them out for special occasions.
‘If we do, it’s not going to be cheap,’ I said to Ned.
Abu Amama, its head, had previously offered to sell me five camels at a rate that seemed murderously excessive. We were a captive market in a nine-camel town. The collapse of the slave trade, followed decades
