Three Years in Benghazi: Libya 1982-4
“Societies in which the existence and unity of the family are threatened, in any circumstances, are similar to fields whose plants are in danger of being swept away or threatened by drought or fire, or of withering away.”
“All that is beyond the satisfaction of needs should remain the property of all the members of society … Individuals only have the right to save as much as they want for their own needs, because the hoarding of what exceeds the needs involves an encroachment on public wealth …”
Muammar Gadaffi, The Green Book Part 3, The Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory
The old Arab souk in Benghazi consisted of two long roofed-in streets on either side of an open square, with short side streets going off at right angles. Everywhere the buildings bore marks of deliberate vandalism, where, we were told, the revolutionary forces had gone through the trading quarter tearing down signs and ripping out electric wires. As elsewhere, most of these shops seemed to be permanently closed. Walking through with my husband and a colleague, we remarked that the few that were open seemed to be closing as we looked at them. “Let’s test that,” said our colleague, and walked up to a brightly lit shoe shop, putting on an interested expression. “Ma fi’ish,” growled the shopkeeper (“We haven’t got it”) and lowered the blinds.
As private trading was illegal in Libya, the shopkeepers were salaried government officials with no direct interest in making sales, and the aim of most shops was to open for five minutes when no one was looking. The other reason for the shops not opening much was that they did not have much to sell. The paradox of Gadaffi’s manifesto was that the economics of a fundamentally conservative, family-based society were to be Marxist. In Part 2 of the Green Book, subtitled The Solution of the Economic Problem, he explains that when the satisfaction of needs (“food, housing, clothes and transport”) has been taken care of, the individual works to produce a surplus for society which he does not need for himself. In other words, the traditional incentives to conservatism are to be removed. But, tellingly, “In the new socialist society differences in individual wealth are only permissible for those who render a public service.”
This is, says Gadaffi, “the theory of the liberation of needs in order to emancipate man.” Once emancipated, man is free to develop a truly democratic way of life.
What, according to Gadaffi, is democracy? Certainly not representative government by political parties. “The people’s authority … can be realised by only one method, namely, popular congresses and people’s committees. No democracy without popular congresses and people’s committees everywhere.” With stunning optimism he adds: “In this way … the people are the instrument of governing and the problem of democracy in the world is completely solved.”
Did the people think it was completely solved?
In the 1980s I spent three years, with my husband, teaching at the University of Gar Younis outside Benghazi, where revolt finally broke out against Gadaffi in 2011. Yet by the 1980s every Libyan was entitled to free or assisted housing, free education and medical care, and an allowance of 140 Libyan dinars a month. Every student got free accommodation and 25 LD a month. According to the international exchange rate when we first arrived in Libya, 140 LD was worth £350 and 25LD about £62.50. In comparison with the Sheikhdoms, these allowances were not princely. In Kuwait at that period every citizen could live comfortably whether or not he chose to work. The Libyan both needed and was required to work, and the new graduate was given a shortlist of jobs in his field for which he could apply. He could refuse them all, but he could not apply elsewhere.
Like most commodities, cars were hard to find in Libya, and for our first year we used taxis, which were relatively cheap. One of our taxi drivers had been an engineer who had trained in Holland. Back in Libya, he had been sent to work on oil installations in the desert. “After one, two years I apply for transfer, but the government say no. I can work only in desert. In desert more than two years is very hard. There is work here also in city for engineer, but I cannot apply for this job. So I come back to Benghazi and work as taxi driver.”
Even school leavers with more than one option could be directed to study certain subjects. One of my students had been partly educated in Europe and spoke excellent English, but was obliged to study economics and attend the elementary English courses in her faculty. “I would prefer to study only English,” she told me, “but you know how it is. We cannot always do what we want.”
“We cannot do what we want”. One of the more striking contradictions about life in Libya was that Gadaffi claimed to have abolished “government”, and yet a lively awareness of “the Government” was everywhere apparent. Libyans in general dislike being organised, and there were consistent attempts to do it even though they were supposed to be their own masters. Every male and female of military age had to do regular military service during the year, for periods lasting several weeks at a time. One blazing day a colleague gave us a lift home at lunchtime. The temperature was in the high nineties, and we commiserated with him for an extra workload he had been given during this period of the year. He rolled his eyes and said, “The work in the Faculty is enough, but it is not all. Every afternoon we have to go to the Army. At four o’ clock. On the note! Sometimes we march, sometimes we do some exercises with weapons. All the teachers. Except the foreigners!” He laughed. “I have worked here four years and I have never had a vacation. Four years I am in this – desert. Yes, I can take leave, but to arrange this I have to go here and here with my application, and I am always too busy. Then I have to go to Tripoli and they must see I am not on the black list, that I am on the white list, and after all that maybe they say, ‘You can’t take now.’ Better not to start.”
Gadaffi’s vigorous military policy determined much in the ordinary life of Libyans, and it was widely felt that more of the money spent on military matters should have been made available to the people. Once during an egg shortage, a taxi driver said disgustedly, “In Libya too small eggs, too small meat, too much Army.”
This was not altogether fair. Large sums were put into irrigating the desert, and in the 1970s farmers received subsidies from 1500 to 3000 LD per family, and land grants from 5 to 25 hectares each, in the areas of Syrte, Sebha and Tripolitania. It was projected that between 1974 and 1980 a total surface of one million hectares would yield 303,000 hectares of fruit and vegetables, 640,000 hectares of forest and pastureland, and 45,000 hectares of cereals. Even Pierre Rossi, a devoted apologist, admitted in his book La Verte Libye that this was not a success. “The young people dislike agricultural labour. They prefer the university, the town, office work … We see trees dry up, rows of vegetables shrink to a plot the size of a handkerchief.” Even in Cyrenaica, a traditionally agricultural area, farm work was if possible consigned to foreigners. After Egyptian manual workers were expelled from the country in 1985, a young Libyan farmer expressed his surprise to us on finding that he quite enjoyed driving a tractor. Manual work is despised by most Arabs, and by Libyans in particular. A Palestinian social scientist told us that according to a survey done by one of his colleagues, a Libyan worked an average of one and a half minutes a day.
It was never possible to abolish commerce completely from Gadaffi’s Libya, but in our time there it kept a low profile. A ship’s officer in Tripoli told us: “Libyans are basically merchants, right? But now we have nothing to do because they don’t let us improve our lives. Fifteen years ago you could get anything you wanted in Tripoli. Now – nothing. I could afford a nice house now in Tripoli. But I’m always abroad, I don’t have the contacts anymore, so I wouldn’t find anything. Because make no mistake, the things are there, actually. You can still get a nice house, furniture, clothes, anything you want. But illegally, you understand me? If you don’t have the contacts, you find nothing.”
We suggested that nevertheless perhaps some people were better off in Libya now than in the old days. He denied this vehemently. “No, we are worse off! We are worse off because we cannot improve our lives. We are supposed to buy only what is in the shops, and then only our allowance – one fridge, one cooker, one set of tyres in a year, and we have to have letters of entitlement.” Morality, he added, had declined as a result of these conditions. “Before, if a man had a gold shop in the souk, he could leave it open when he went to pray at the mosque. If he does that today!…” He made a gesture indicating mass pillage.
But, we said, every Libyan at least had a house now, and you did not see beggars or even badly dressed people on the streets. Life might be dull, but everyone had the essentials. He shrugged. “Oh sure, you won’t see poverty. But everything was much better before.”
Others were even more emphatic about this. “I was driver for British company in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Everything good here then. Then I have British, American friends, they say, ‘What for I go home? Here is good weather, everything I want.’ But now they come, they say, ‘I want go home next week! They pay me thousand of dollars but there is nothing in the shops!’ Even if the people are paid thousand of dollars, they will not stay if they are not happy.”
We would say, “But aren’t some Libyan people better off now? Don’t they have better houses now than they did before?”
“Better house now? No! Now, if I have nice house, I have to pay tax! Before was better!” At the other end of the scale was the museum director in Benghazi who complained that his family had once owned twenty-five houses. Now he consoled himself with one beautiful flat and a collection of over a thousand foreign films on video. “The sufferings of our people,” he said, “are too great to be borne.”
And yet nothing was supposed to happen in Libya that the people did not want. Popular congresses and people’s committees existed at every level of life. The congresses were supposed to refer the will of the people from the basic level through their secretariats and “people’s committees” for discussion, until the people’s mandate reached the level at which it could be implemented. Votes were taken at every level, and every committee was a battleground between the ordinary members who transmitted the various wills of the people, and the “Revolutionary” members who were there to carry out the will of Gadaffi. This meant that every point was interpreted and fought over in the light of Gadaffi’s “revolutionary theory”, from which it could be dangerous to be seen to deviate. From time to time Gadaffi appeared on television and issued directives which everyone took to be his own, despite his claim to be no more than a mouthpiece of the people. In this way he presided in 1986 over a total ban on foreign imports, the expulsion of foreign manual workers, the setting up of local industries and the removal of English teaching from State education
The first two of these amounted to a desperate remedy, with the aim of forcing Libyans to implement the third. Local industries had existed before, notably to produce jam, soap and Pepsi-Cola, and even when staffed by foreign workers their contributions had been small and infrequent. But the immediate result of banning imported rival goods and putting the factories in the hands of Libyans was that jam, soap and Pepsi-Cola vanished from the scene. For six months in 1985 the population of Benghazi washed its clothes in shampoo. Then shampoo vanished from the scene.
The last of these innovations, the ban on English teaching, was a response to the American bombing of 1986. It was in a different category from the others, and made considerably less sense. Half the subjects taught in the universities, including the vital medicine and engineering, depended on a knowledge of English to acquire, because so few textbooks existed in Arabic. In the university world this move was received with incredulity rather than anger; but it reflected a growing tendency. Permission to study abroad, or indeed to leave the country for any purpose, was already only granted to those “on the white list”. Financial measures taken in 1984, which included the cutting of the transfer rate for foreign staff, were later extended to severe restrictions on the foreign currency that could be taken out of the country by Libyans. Economic problems, due to over-ambitious financial commitments and the falling price of oil, were no doubt behind some of these controls. However, between 1984 and 1986 we saw increasingly paranoid measures taken to protect Libyans from the outer world. Most of these measures were unpopular, and it was widely believed that such things were presented as “the will of the people” only by means of astute committee management and the control of a secret police force.
Our intimations of the police state, as of everything else in Libya, were contradictory to a bemusing degree. Someone told us that our friends the taxi drivers were often secret policemen. We did not believe it, but after we had managed to buy a car it was stolen and we told a taxi driver the number, hoping he might spot it on his travels. “I am secret policeman,” he told us. “I will find it.” In fact the regular police did, in ten days. But who informed them? Yet would a secret policeman really announce his function, even to a foreigner?
If we ourselves were supervised by the secret police we did not feel it much. Occasionally visitors would come to our classes, looking like students, and politely ask to sit in. Sometimes these turned out to be nothing more nor less than students. A boy who sat in on a basic English course in the Economics faculty, claiming to be from the English department, aroused my husband’s suspicions when his English proved worse than that of the basic English class. But when we ourselves transferred to the English department, there was the same young man in both our classes, lawfully enrolled; and we found that the English of most of his specialist colleagues was not much better than his. However, some of these visitors did not account for themselves, and were generally believed to be checking for seditious content.
Benghazi always had a seditious reputation, and the university staff at Gar Younis could not all have inspired confidence at government level. We had thought it said something for the flexibility of the regime that some university posts were held by Libyans from “good” families, powerful under the old order, whom we were surprised to find in such positions. The head of the accountancy department introduced himself as “Dr Beit Al Maal, it means Moneyhouse. It is an old title which my fathers held under the Turks when they were in charge of the money.” The oldest member of the English department had been an ambassador under the Italians. Their dossiers, however, must have been impeccable. Discipline was subtle but effective. A brilliant student in the Department of Urban Planning, the son of an architect, allowed his dissatisfaction with the system to be known. He was repeatedly failed in his final examinations.
The staff of the English department were articulate, outspoken characters, who had of necessity travelled in Western countries and were often highly critical of the Libyan regime. Nevertheless, criticism was not always what it seemed. There was a bearded bandit in the department whom I will call Hamid. I once collaborated with him and a group of foreign teachers on the devising of multiple choice questions for the basic English paper. His suggestions grew increasingly irreverent and pointed, encouraging ours to be the same. “Complete the following sentences:
Is there/are there/some/any steak in the shops/eggs in the fridge/bread on the table in Benghazi? No, there isn’t – (answer: ANY)!”
Later a young Irish teacher became the girlfriend and confidante of another Libyan colleague. “You know Hamid?” She told us. “He’s the department Revolutionary. He’s the one who keeps tabs on all the others.”
All the same, our Libyan colleagues in the English department did not seem to creep about in fear. In the economics faculty they were less forthcoming. We knew a couple whom we visited at home and invited to our flat. We saw their family photographs, back to the grandfather on the country estate who had lived to be a hundred and twelve; and I attended a cousin’s wedding. But we never knew what they thought of the regime, until perhaps one day when I visited the wife in her office. She was telling us the latest rumour of an assassination attempt on Gadaffi. There was one of these every few weeks, and this one had been pinned, as they not infrequently were, on the Egyptians. “At least,” she added, “that is what the Government says.”
The Egyptians were at that time public enemy number one and the inference was plain. “You think perhaps the attempt never happened?”
My friend darted to the door and peered up and down the corridor. “You don’t know. Sometimes there is somebody listening.”
At the wedding party to which she invited me, a Libyan guest, a young married woman, arrived very late and became at once the centre of a group near me, telling a long story in vehement Arabic. At last she and the others fell silent, and my friend explained to me in English that the girl’s husband had been picked up by the police and held for two and a half hours. “There is no reason. In the end they let him go. They don’t like people to be out after eight o’ clock, that’s all.”
Western expatriates loved to frighten each other with tales of the secret police and its doings. However, these stories hardly ever involved foreigners, and even those involving Libyans usually went no further than several hours’ detention of citizens on suspicion of being drunk. In many respects Gadaffi’s Libya did not appear to be a bloodthirsty place. Libya had no death penalty for crime, only for political offences. This was one of Libya’s many differences from other Moslem states. I was surprised to find that my students in the Faculty of Arts were almost solidly against the death penalty for crime: “Perhaps it is not the fault of the criminal. Perhaps he have something wrong with his life.” Thieves did not lose their hands. In the summer of 1984 the English tabloids were full of the case of an English wife who had married a Libyan and had undergone a prison sentence after being accused of adultery by her husband’s family. My graduate students laughed and refused to believe it. “Such a thing could never happen in Libya. It could never happen in any Moslem country! In Islam as in Christianity, adultery is not a civil crime. It is not punishable under the law. If a wife commits adultery her husband can divorce her. If she wants to she can divorce him, too.” Sunni Moslems are proud of the fact that a woman who divorces her husband is allowed to take back all her property, including the gold she receives from her husband on marriage, and to marry again if she wishes. Such freedom for women is opposed by fundamentalists. But fundamentalism at least seemed to have little hold in Libya.
One possible good effect of Gadaffi’s revolution should have been the greater opportunities afforded to women. “There is so much to do for our country,” a male graduate student said, “we cannot afford to keep our women at home anymore.” The Green Book of course recognises the suitability of this area for revolutionary propaganda. “All societies nowadays look on woman as no more than an article of merchandise. The East regards her as a commodity for buying and selling, while the West does not recognise her femininity.” But Gadaffi’s statements on women are predictably flexible. “There is,” he says, “no difference between man and woman in all that concerns humanity.” He goes on to restate Moslem law on marriage, and to interpret it with impeccable conservatism: the woman must be equal in the house because the home is the “maternity shelter”. He is lyrical on this. On women’s education he is vague. “Freedom means that every human being gets that education that qualifies him for work which is appropriate to him.” Note the pronoun. One suspects that he sees the true liberation of women as freedom from the necessity to work outside the home. “There is no difference in human rights between man and woman, the child and the adult. But there is no absolute equality between them as regards their duties.”
A woman colleague who studied Libyan high school education for a PhD research project, concluded that the Libyan figures for women in higher education, and subsequently in employment, compared unfavourably with those for other North African countries or for the Gulf. The age of marriage remained very low. Another colleague was invited to dinner by a twenty-five-year-old woman student with four children; she had been married since she was fourteen. Polygamy was on the way out, but some students laid claim to twenty-five or even fifty siblings, not all of course by the same mother. Boys, too, married early; boisterous teenage lads in my classes who seemed barely old enough for university would turn out to be fathers of three. None of this made for premature maturity, at least in situations outside the home. Both boy and girl students generally seemed younger than their counterparts in the West. Two matrons sitting together in class would giggle like schoolgirls.
The lip service paid to female liberation was accompanied by the common male attitude that education and jobs are all right for women as long as they do the housework as well. A graduate student came nearer than most to explaining and justifying this. “In Islam there are a lot of duties for both men and women in the family, all laid down on each side. It is not only the women who work for the family, there are rituals men have to do, visits they must make, which take time outside their job. If the man must help in the house also, there is no time for his work and these other duties.”
Most of the girls in our classes were fresh-faced, unassuming, conscientious and polite. They claimed to spend their afternoons helping their mothers and their evenings seeing their relations or “studying”, and many said they went to bed at eight o’ clock. But at the University both boys and girls were kept busy. In addition to their studies they were allotted jobs around the Faculties, in the secretariat, in the library and the bank, even on the mini-buses. Secretarial jobs were prized as seats of potential administrative power, and a student active in the Revolutionary element of the student committees would be occupied all the time, though not with academic work: he would have a room where he saw petitioners, would attend few lectures and would expect to be passed in his examinations. But not all young people can be university students, even in Libya, and there was a growing problem of teenage idleness. You would often see youths hanging around on street corners. A popular Arab sport is dangerous driving, but in Libya where foreign consumer goods were restricted, access to this was not as easy as it is in the Gulf. When we arrived in Libya there had been no new cars allowed in the country for five years. When a consignment arrived late in 1985, it had been booked up for many months. Therefore car theft was popular and was on the increase when we left, even with our car which was stolen twice, despite its age and modest size.
Women who went out alone were greeted, groped or followed in cars about as much as they would be anywhere else in the world. I once had to be rescued from two boys who followed me into the entrance hall of our apartment building. Of course Moslem boys are sexually frustrated, even of stimulus, but equally they have a taboo which usually operates. A student said to a male colleague: “We see the girls in Nasser Street. But it’s ‘for our eyes only’. Do you know this saying?” He paused, then added, “There is nothing … Nothing for us to do.” This boy was untypical of the Benghazi bourgeoisie only in that he was still able to travel frequently outside the country. His comments on Rome, Madrid and Marrakesh were all the same: “There you can do anything.”
One of the boys who tried to attack me in my building was probably on drugs, which, like drink, did exist in Libya. I was once also propositioned, perhaps jokingly, while taking the garbage out. “Ten dinars? Twenty?” I told this story to a female colleague who said, “You lucky thing, I was only offered five.” But the incident happened during a food shortage, so perhaps what the boys had really wanted was the garbage.
