Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

One of my new journalist friends said that “the event” was about to start, so we went over a knoll and into a polygonal structure with exposed rafters, which bore some resemblance to a rec hall at a summer camp. Hanging on the walls were sayings of the Leader’s in huge Arabic and English type (“The United States of Africa Is Africa’s Future” and “One African Identity”), flanked by poster-size photographs of Rosa Parks. It was the fiftieth anniversary of her refusal to move to the back of the bus, and that, we finally understood, was the occasion for the gathering. At the front of the room, on a dais, stood a gigantic Naugahyde armchair with three microphones beside it. A man in medical scrubs came out and swabbed down the chair and the microphones with gauze pads, to protect the Leader from infection.

Some African-Americans were seated in the row in front of us. I introduced myself to one, and he dourly explained that he was Minister Abdul Akbar Muhammad, the international representative of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who had been in Tripoli earlier but had returned abruptly to the United States for health reasons. Qaddafi has long been one of the Nation of Islam’s funders.

Then the speeches began. The speakers stood at a lectern off to the side, keeping the dais free for Qaddafi. The first was a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. “We Libyans cannot accept the prejudice of Americans against Africans,” he began, to applause. “Those who were seven or eight when Rosa Parks was being shoved to the back of the bus are now fifty-seven or fifty-eight and are leaders of the United States. They still carry this mentality. The new generation inherited this, and it is still going on.” He worked himself up into rhetorical paroxysms, as though Jim Crow laws were still in effect. “We must fight the hatred of America for Africa.”

When he stepped down, Abdul Akbar Muhammad took the lectern to speak about American racial injustice, mentioning that, under segregation, blacks and whites had had to use separate hammams, or public steam baths (a detail previously lost on me). “We cannot count on the Zionist-controlled American media to tell our story,” he said. “Zionists in the US won’t show how the leader of the Al-Fateh revolution is in sympathy with us and us with him.”

The Leader never emerged, apparently having decided that, if Farrakhan wasn’t making an appearance, he wouldn’t, either. Still, the event reflected his fixation on establishing Libya as more an African than an Arab country (even though most Libyans are contemptuous of black people, who do the manual labor that Libyans disdain and are blamed for all crime). Qaddafi’s early dream of pan-Arab unity fizzled, and when other Arab nations observed the UN sanctions against Libya in the nineties, while many African countries did not, he turned southward. By African standards, Libya seems wealthy and functional; Arab nations, even North African neighbors, have little affection for Qaddafi. He has backed groups opposed to the Saudi regime, and Libyan agents were implicated in a 2003 plot to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (Saif suggested to me that the Libyans were hoping, in his coy phrase, for “regime change” but didn’t necessarily know that their Saudi partners intended physical attacks on the royal family.)

Qaddafi always sleeps in a tent, true to his bedouin roots. When he went to Algeria recently, a local cartoon showed a tent pitched at the Algiers Sheraton. One man is saying, “Let me in, I want to go to the circus!” The other says, “There’s no circus here.” The first rejoins, “But I was told that there’s a clown in that tent!”

For modernizing reformers such as Shukri Ghanem, Libya’s major problems are poor management and isolation, and the solutions are better management and global integration. “The world has changed,” as Ghanem put it, “and, like other socialist states, we recognized that we had limited means and unlimited needs.” The Internet and satellite television—the dishes are so ubiquitous that landing in Tripoli is like descending on a migrant storm of white moths—have brought further pressure for reform by making that larger world visible. “The change has been inevitable since Oprah came on our televisions,” a leading Libyan poet said to me ruefully. What Libyans mainly relate to, though, is the standard of living in other oil-rich states, as displayed on Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern channels. Libya seems dusty and poor in comparison, and they wonder why.