Zuwayya Erotic

The Zuwayya are a Bedouin Arab tribe of eastern Libya, and their identity is bound to a place most Libyans never see: Kufra, a chain of oases deep in the Libyan Desert, far south of the Mediterranean coast. The tribe took Kufra from the Tebu in the nineteenth century and has held it and fought over it ever since. Their other anchor is Ajdabiya, the market town near the Gulf of Sidra where desert tracks meet the coast road to Benghazi. Zuwayya families move between the two, and much of the tribe's story is the story of the long, empty corridor that connects them.

That corridor mattered because Kufra sat on the caravan route between Benghazi and Wadai, the sultanate in what is now eastern Chad. Ivory, ostrich feathers and enslaved people moved north. Cloth, firearms and manufactured goods moved south. The Zuwayya profited as guides, protectors and traders. They are Sunni Muslims, and in the same era they became close adherents of the Sanusi order, the Sufi revivalist brotherhood that organized much of Cyrenaica through its network of desert lodges. When the Sanusi leadership moved its headquarters to Kufra in 1895, the Zuwayya oasis became a center of religious authority for the eastern Sahara. Italian forces took Kufra in 1931, closing off one of the last refuges of the Sanusi resistance.

The Zuwayya speak eastern Libyan Arabic, the Bedouin speech of Cyrenaica, a dialect whose range continues across the border into Egypt's Western Desert. In Kufra their neighbors the Tebu speak languages from an entirely unrelated family, and relations between the two communities are still the central fact of local life. The British anthropologist John Davis lived among the Zuwayya in the 1970s and wrote a study of how they understood Muammar Gaddafi's revolutionary state through their own ideas of tribe and authority. That question became urgent again in February 2011, when a Zuwayya leader, Faraj al-Zuwai, publicly threatened to cut oil exports to the West unless the crackdown on protesters stopped. Since the revolution, Kufra has seen repeated armed clashes between Zuwayya and Tebu over control of the town, its borders and the smuggling routes toward Sudan and Chad.