Hip-hop came to Libya last month, courtesy — improbably — of the British Council, introducing a novelty to a country hungry for contact with the West after its long isolation. This was light years away from the council’s fusty old image of Shakespeare and morris dancing, and a measure of just how much Moammar Gadaffi’s Jamahiriya — the world’s only ‘state of the masses” — is changing as it comes in from the cold.
The hip-hop was showcased at the National Theatre in Tripoli and there were workshops for DJs and dancers, thanks to the cooperation of the Libyan students’ union. That’s the sort of local partner foreigners must have to do anything under a regime which, in some areas, is now allowing a slow transition out of step with the famously austere colonel’s Green Book. Not so long ago, Western music was officially banned, as alcohol still is.
It was a sign, too, of how the opening-up is providing opportunities for British cultural diplomacy in a conservative and still fairly repressive Muslim country just south of Europe — ‘a complex and still sensitive operating environment”, as the council puts it. This fits its remit of helping to build trust between the UK and the Islamic world, to stop disaffected youth heading for extremism and terrorism. Earlier this year, in a major shift, it announced that operations in Europe were being scaled down, saving £7,5-million to expand in the Middle East, Asia and north Africa.
‘We don’t do piano concertos,” laughs Carl Reuter, the country director, ‘though if there were a hip-hop version of Shakespeare, I suppose we might look at it. Our target audience is young Libyans and what they are interested in. And what they are interested in is young Britain. My predecessors at the council would be turning in their graves.”
Despite the efforts of Billy Biznizz and Urban Classicism hip-hop director Robert Hylton, English-language teaching is where the biggest advances are being made — for both sides. That was evident one recent weekday evening when the council’s classrooms in an upmarket area of Tripoli were packed with youngsters hunched over textbooks as the sun sank into the sea and the muezzin called.
Total enrolment is 550, a figure as impressive as the motivation of the students (most turn up at the end of a working day). All courses are full, and demand is so great that the 700-strong waiting list has had to be closed until new classrooms can be built. The only complaints are that the students want more hours than the centre can currently provide — and that the courses are expensive compared with lesser-known providers.
‘Nowadays you need English for everything,” say Muhammad, a self-employed accountant. Ibrahim, a manager with the Libyana mobile phone company, is, like many others, being sponsored by his employer for 38 hours of tuition spread over two months. ‘The problem is that our generation missed out,” he says, adding: ‘It was a political decision.”
Fayrouz, unemployed but ambitious, did study English at school but, by her own admission, never got very far.
From 1986, the year US planes bombed Tripoli after a Berlin terrorist attack on United States troops was blamed on Gadaffi’s agents, foreign-language teaching was banned, resuming only in the mid-1990s. Hence the twentysomethings working to catch up with the language of globalisation.
Eighteen months ago, English was recognised as the country’s second language. All this delights Reuter, who faced what seemed a daunting task when he arrived to reopen British Council activities in 2003 after an almost 30-year gap.
Even after the restoration of diplomatic relations and Gadaffi’s landmark decision to give up his Weapons of Mass Destruction arsenal, there was some heavy baggage around:
Tripoli’s support for the IRA and Palestinian extremists; the shooting dead of police officer Yvonne Fletcher from the Libyan People’s Bureau in London; Margaret Thatcher’s backing for Ronald Reagan; and the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 (which was resolved only when the two Libyan suspects were handed over for trial — one was convicted — and compensation paid to relatives of the 270 victims).
The move from a few cramped rooms at the British embassy to the council’s spanking-new seafront premises in Siyahia last autumn set the seal on what Reuter counts as the most successful and satisfying posting he has had in a 27-year career. Lord Kinnock, the council’s chairman, turned on his best Welsh bonhomie and wowed the locals at the gala opening, though Gadaffi himself did not turn up.
The Libya operation is one that council administrators in London call ‘mission critical”. ‘That means we are after impact,” says Reuter. ‘We are expected to break even, not to generate a surplus. There’s an emerging middle class in this country because of economic reforms that are generating disposable income. We are meeting a need for young aspirational Libyans who want to become employable.”
The English courses attract significant numbers of young women, many in headscarves, like Fayrouz and Ibtisam, a magazine illustrator, who come unchaperoned but with parental approval.
This is a British rather than an Anglophone success. Tough visa requirements and the rigours of homeland security have restricted the number of Libyans going to the US. Even in the bad years, Libyans came to study in Britain, and it remains the country of choice for graduates, with an estimated 3 000 Libyan doctors working in the UK’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS). That is another reason the council has cornered the market for English-language teaching, with 30 staff running teacher-training courses at universities across the country.
‘Despite strong reservations concerning current UK foreign policy in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, and widespread concern about perceived discrimination against and demonisation of Muslims in the West, Lib-yans exhibit a generally positive attitude towards the UK and its people,” is the council’s assessment.
‘Libyans really want to learn English,” confirms Reuter’s colleague, education manager Initssar Rajabany, who spent a year studying international relations on one of the UK Foreign Office’s Chevening scholarships at Warwick University in the UK. ‘They know it opens doors to the future. And we’ve put the British on a pedestal.”
It’s now more than 40 years since another young Libyan, then an obscure army officer, studied in the UK, spending a month learning English and another three on a tank-training course — and then went home to overthrow the pro-Western monarchy in 1969. It seems right that a new generation, cheering on changes once inconceivable in the Jamahiriya, is benefiting from what the old imperial power has to offer. —