War, resistance, and memory in Libya’s oral history project

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Libyan Oral History Project, an archive created in the 1970s to record the memories of mujahidin involved in anti-Italian resistance in Libya. Though it was not the original intention of the archive, this article argues that the memories of the mujahidin contribute to an effort among historians to reconceptualise the global significance of the First World War. A careful reading of the accounts of the mujahidin reveals a chronological continuity from the initial struggle against the Italian occupation to armed warfare against European forces throughout the region in the interwar era. By interpreting the First World War from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, we gain new appreciation for the significance of the war not just as a conflict among empire, but also as the beginning of a longer struggle between imperial forces and anti-imperial resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Libya
• Italy
• first world war
• oral history
• mujahidin

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Massimo Zaccaria for his helpful comments on early versions of this piece as well as the immensely valuable comments from the anonymous reviewers at The Journal of North African Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a similar perspective: Jarboe and Fogarty (2014). For a useful overview of the literature challenging Eurocentric interpretations of the war, now a decade old: Liebau et al. (2010); Strechan (2010).

2 This scholarship built on earlier work, especially that of Lunn (1999); Omissi (1999); Omissi (2007); Fogarty (2008).

3 https://www.iwm.org.uk/research/research-projects/whose-remembrance. The Great War in Africa Association recorded a number of similar efforts. See Samson (2022).

4 Wyrtzen’s recent monograph offers a notable exception in that his project decentres European imperial interests in his exploration of the struggles that led to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East and North Africa after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

5 Moyd has further developed this approach to the war in a more recent article (Moyd 2018).

6 The Centre’s website describes the development of the archive as a process involving four major steps. ‘Al-Riwāyāt al-Shafawiyāt,’ Markaz al-Lībī lil Maḥfuẓāt wa al-Dirāsāt al-Tarīkhiyya, accessed July 15, 2023, https://lcahs.ly/oral-narration.

7 A first wave of Italian historians made the twin objectives of pointing out the silences of Italian archives while also trying to scratch beneath their surface to reveal the hidden acts of violence. See in particular the vast scholarship of Angelo Del Boca and Giorgio Rochat. Del Boca provides a useful overview of the silences of the Italian archives in ‘The Myths Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism, in A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, edited by Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 17-36.

8 Di Pasquale (2017) traces the restrictive effects of deliberate underfunding for cataloguing the state archives. When I was conducting research in Tripoli in 2007, for example, the state archives were closed to researchers for ‘restructuring,’ a project with no clear end date – much to the consternation of Libyan and non-Libyan researchers.

9 For an overview of the archives prior to the 1969 revolution: Bono (1967). On the position of the Libyan Studies Centre during the Qaddafi regime: Dumasy and Pasquale (2012); Di Pasquale (2017); Baldinetti (2016). For an account of the collaborative process of cataloguing the Libyan archives: Baldinetti and Palma (2002).

10 WorldCat lists twenty libraries in its database that hold one or more volumes: https://firstsearch-oclc-org./WebZ/FSQUERY?format=BI:next=html/records.html:bad=html/records.html:numrecs=10:sessionid=fsap01pxm1-1680-lkb8a4u8-lg47bu:entitypagenum=2:0:searchtype=basic

11 Al-Barqa in Arabic

12 For an important starting point, see Anderson (1986).

13 For a more detailed exploration how the politics of remembering resistance in Qaddafi’s Libya might have shaped the accounts in the Oral History Project, see Ryan (2018), especially the ‘Essay on Sources,’ pp. 173-182.

14 Further to the west, the port of Misurata served as another important entry point for supplies to Tripolitania. Anderson (1986, 48).

15 It is unclear how many volunteers from Egypt fought in the Libyan resistance. Arabic sources estimate up to 70,000 at the beginning of 1912. See Baldinetti (1992, 269). On supplies via the Egyptian Red Crescent: Baldinetti (1991); Akhḍar (2007).

16 In other parts of the former Ottoman sphere of influence, infrastructure also proved valuable in the struggle to assert the right to self-determination in the 1920s. Wyrtzen (2022, 189) points to the Rif Republic as one example.

17 Wrigley (1980). Besides sending German businessmen and engineers to the Ottoman Empire, German efforts to increase their cultural influence in the region included a programme to send children from the Ottoman Empire to Germany for work training programmes, a precursor to the Turkish workers’ programme in Germany after the Second World War. See Maksudyan (2015).

18 For a full examination of the debate over German influence in the late Ottoman Empire, see Zürcher (2016).

19 Salah Muhammad al-Faqih al-Masmari referred to a German gun known as ‘Budza’, perhaps a reference to the so-called Buzzsaw gun in use during the Second World War. This was in the context of the later Sanusi resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar in the late 1930s. al-Faqih al-Masmari (1995, 34).

20 The question of who could or should lead the Sanusiyya involved complex questions of precedent and doctrine withing the ṭarīqa. Federico Cresti has suggested that followers of the Sanusiyya interpreted the transition from Ahmad al-Sharif to Idris al-Sanusi in various ways. For some, Idris represented a temporary delegate to help resolve the wartime crisis. For other, he represented the rightful leader as the direct descendant of the previous head of the Sanusiyya. See Cresti (2018, 304).

21 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Carte Luigi Pintor, b. 6/4, fasc. 23 Luigi Pintor to Minister of Colonies, 2/4/1922.

22 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Carte Luigi Pintor, b. 6/4, fasc. 23 Luigi Pintor to Minister of Colonies, 2/4/1922.

23 Many prominent figures from Tripolitania likewise left for exile after the collapse of the Tripolitanian Republic in 1923 (Anderson 1986, 60).