Libya: Problems of Historical Perspective
Posted: Wednesday, July 13, 2011
by Waniss A. Otman
Department of Economics, University of Aberdeen
Libya: Problems of Historical Perspective
Dr. Waniss A Otman
Western readers and intellectuals, when examining Arab culture or institutions, are burdened by a vast amount of intellectual baggage. Descriptive terms such as “Fertile Crescent”, “Middle East”, “Orient” represent mental maps for navigation of specific regions constructed in an era in which imperialist ambition, military technology and the availability of printed modern maps had made inventing new and larger descriptive geographical ‘spaces’ a fashionable trade among politicians, geographers and journalists (Scheffler,2004).
Similarly, during the Second World War, the dynamics of emergent nationalisms could only be held in check by the overwhelming presence of Allied forces, which imposed, for the first time in history, a ‘Middle Eastern’ regime on the region: in order to coordinate military operations against the Axis powers in the Mediterranean, Africa and Southwest Asia, a large military province, the ‘Middle East Command’, was established by the British Army in 1939. With its boundaries in permanent flux, but endowed with a resident Minister of State, a military Commander-in-Chief and an economic infrastructure, the Middle East Supply Centre, the Middle East Command had authority over a vast area, including Malta, Greece, Crete, Cyprus, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Egypt, the Sudan, the three Somalilands, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Syria, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula and Iran.
These spatial mental maps of western readers and authors are usually associated with similar ideas of socio-political norms and concepts of western democracy against which Arab countries are measured in a sort of sliding scale of approval. These concepts, again, suffer from stereotyped western thinking about Islam, which has resulted in many major conflicts in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this context, the current stereotyped view of Libya, and of North Africa in general, is a desert land of nomads and sedentaries, a somewhat marginalised Arab “Maghreb” from the mainstream Arab “Mashreq” (Scheffler, op cit). In this view, for example, the vibrant economic life of the major cities of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania and their historical wealth as thriving trading entrepots in the Roman era between the whole of Africa and the rest of the Roman Empire, is conveniently forgotten.
In the conventional view, the process of “desertification” a western concept invented by the French to provide moral justification for their appropriation of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in the nineteenth century, is the result of human intervention. In this version of history, based largely on French readings of classical sources such as Herodotus, Pliny, Strabo and Ptolemy, North Africa was seen as ‘the most fertile region in the world’(Davis, 2004). The 39-volume “Exploration Scientifique de l’Algerie”, published in the 1840’s, categorically stated “this land, once the object of intensive cultivation, was neither deforested nor depopulated as today . . . it was the abundant granary of Rome’ (Lavauden,1927).
The corollary of this image of the successful exploitation of the natural fertility of North Africa by the Romans was of course the subsequent destruction, deforestation and desertification of the North African environment by hordes of Arab nomads and their rapacious herds of goats and camels. The so-called devastation wreaked by the Arabs led to the conclusion that the Arabs must be ‘immobilized and civilized’, as expressed in the French historian Verne’s brutal assessment of Algerian nomads and the “civilising” effects of French colonial civilization:
“Thus will civilization advance . . . it follows that the establishment of individual (private) property and the extension of colonization are indispensable where the Arabs are concerned; that military authority must maintain the indigene in a state of immobility which will permanently (fatally) lead to their extinction. A barbaric people can not find themselves faced with an advanced civilization without engaging in a duel to the death. Civilization must conquer barbarism or perish itself. Let us work therefore to transform this race: there lies our interest, there also lies their salvation” (Verne, 1869).
Fortunately scholars and historians are now aware of the dangers and damage caused by such traditional approaches to (mis) understanding North African nations and their development. The relatively new multidisciplinary science of historical ecology, using detailed analyses of the palaeoecological records have shown, for example, that “desertification”, far from being due to human intervention, took place because of large scale climatic changes affecting the Mediterranean and North Africa since the last Ice Age (Crumley, 1996).
Across North Africa and the Sahara, the physical evidence points to a more humid climate prevailing around 4000–3000 BC, which lasts with a few variations until approximately 1000 BC, when a much more arid and stochastic climate became the norm (Clausen et al, 1999). This humid period produced a much wetter environment in what is now known as the pre-Saharan regions, supporting such tropical animals as elephants and rhinoceros. Evidence from north-eastern Algeria shows signs of this wetter phase, with forest vegetation dominating the local landscape until approximately 2000 BC, when it began to decrease and steppe vegetation began to increase (Ritchie,1984). In the majority of these North African pollen cores, the levels of grass pollen have remained remarkably constant, with some fluctuations, from well into the Pleistocene until the present (Lamb et al,1989).The available evidence of climate change and vegetation history of the region have led to the conclusion that it is difficult to distinguish between manmade degradation and the natural trend towards aridification at lower elevations over the last 2000–3 000 years (Rognon,1987).
It is therefore important to be constantly aware of the stereotyped historical and geographical perceptions of non- indigenous writers when trying to understand the history, and come to terms with the current status, of countries such as Libya. In, for example, the “Fourth Shore,” (Segrè, 1975) the author, using impeccable primary historical research derived from the archives of the Comitato per la Documentazione delle Attivita Italiane in Africa, Rome, and the Instituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare, Florence, examines the Italian colonization of Libya which commenced with the Italo-Turkish war of 1911 and effectively ended in 1940.
His thesis is to determine whether Italy’s conquest and subsequent appropriation of Libya was uniquely different from other imperialist expansion in Africa and Asia in the 19th Century – “Can a nation conquer and administer huge blocks of overseas territory, call itself an empire, and still not be “imperialist?” is the initial question that is posed in his work. Apologists have argued that Italian colonisation of Libya was different from British colonisation of Malaya or Dutch colonisation of the East Indies, in which a thin layer of Europeans presided over a plantation economy supported by the labour of native peoples. Libyan colonization was to be a “collonizzazione demografica” or proletarian colonization, in which Italians, forming the backbone of the colony, were to form a dense network of small independent farmers who laboured in the fields alongside Libyans. Serge eventually concludes that it “it is difficult to see that the Italians were any less imperialist than the other colonial powers”. By criminalizing many traditional uses of the land, their policy of forced land acquisition (sometimes but usually not compensated when viewed as “rebel land”) and as the racial laws of 1938 and the Special Citizenship of 1939, relegating the indigenous Libyans to second class citizens in their own land, the Italian colonial regime demonstrated that it had no intention of granting social or economic equality to indigenous Libyans.
Other commentators have been less hospitable in their assessment, stating that more than half of the native Libyan population perished during the entire period of Italian colonisation. Little is said in Segrè’s book about the profound effect of the colonisation on the Libyan people themselves, which lead to the alienation of most Libyans from their land, and the pauperisation of all but a small number of elites. It is small wonder that, combined with the devastation wreaked on the Libyan people and landscape by the Second World War that Libya, when it achieved independence in 1951, was one of the poorest countries in the world.
In Libya today, Omar el-Muktar, who successfully opposed Italy’s colonisation for over 10 years, is revered as a national hero, with a major thoroughfare in Tripoli, Omar el-Muktar Street, named after him. Yet in the whole of Segrè’s book, he is only mentioned in one sentence. He states on p.79 “With the occupation of Cufra (Al Kufrah) in 1931 and the capture and execution of Omar el-Muktar, the Italians were finally victorious”. Can there be any more damning critique of the eurocentric approach to North African history?
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