Sicily is a beautiful country, spread out in broad, sleepy grandeur beneath the towering slopes of a volcano. As I looked down from 14,000 feet I made out towns and villages, farms and vinyards on rolling hillsides, and a most incredible contrast of greens and golds.
Now, in front of me, is Tunisia, with the suburb of Carthage nestled at the north end of a large bay. Again, history slaps me in the face. Carthage would have been a name familiar to the Romans. They travelled across that sea below me, on trade routes that would have been ancient even to them. However, the Carthage that Rome knew has no direct line to us; it was sacked during the rapid expanse of the early Islamic caliphate in the 7th Century, and was only re-established as a district of Tunis 100 years ago.
No empire lasts forever.
I have never been to Africa in my life. I have never seen it. A massive continent, with such varied peoples, cultures, geography and climate. I wonder if I'll ever go. My grandad worked in western Africa for a few years after the 2nd world war, I think he didn't like it much as he gave my Dad some quite direct advice: Don't go to Africa. On the other hand, my wife's grandfather, my mother-in-law's dad, worked high up in the colonial civil service and was posted to Africa to help see one of Britain's possessions through the perilous waters towards stable independence; with a legitimate government and a constitution to guide it.
How I wish I could talk to them both now, to know what Africa they both saw.
Because here's the thing: the Africa that was shaped over thousands of years of human history was obliterated. Washed away between the start of the slave trade in the 16th Century, and the end of the scramble for Africa by the scheming European powers. The tribes, the nations, the empires, the social and cultural groupings and interactions were obliterated, and replaced entirely with a series of artificial countries; borders decided by Europeans as they vied for control of the vast nation and its resources. By the start of the 20th century, the only country in Africa to have survived the scramble for Africa was Liberia, which was itself set up to be a place African American slaves could go if they wanted to return to the land their ancestors had been taken from by force.
So what was Africa in my grandparents day? The people were real, people descended from ancient nations and empires. But the structures, the governments, the institutions... were paper houses set up by Europeans as they began to release their grip on the great continent, evoking the ghosts and the memories of names that bubble through from history.
After a stop for fuel and a faster plane (we'll be covering a lot of ground today), I'm taking off from Tunis, heading south down the coast.
The terrain is... interesting. There are some fields near the coast, and the beginnings of the Atlas mountains rising towards the west. But the majority of the landscape is filled with olive groves; grids of trees systematically planted with mathematical precision almost as far as the eye can see. My flight path has me drifting to the East as I travel south. As I approach Sfax, a strange oil painting appears to my right and I am convinced there's been some huge in-game graphical glitch. But no, this is how it looks; a large salt lake called Sebkhet de Sidi El Hani rests in greens, blues, purples and yellow beneath me.
Soon the Mediterranean replaces it beneath my virtual feet. In front of me, the coastline, until now travelling north-south, sweeps around to the left and heads due East.
This is the coast of Libya. Not a bad case study for what I was talking about above. What is Libya? The area has variously been under control of different empires - closest to our time, the Ottoman collapse psot-WW1 left it in the hands of Italy, who were, with all the kindness in the world, not very good at having an empire. In WW2 it was the stage across which vast tank battles between the Germans and British swept.
Now, look at it on a map. The borders travel right down into the middle of the Sahara. This is 100% European colonialism at play here. It's just sand. And I know that because our flight path is taking us over the coast, over the thin strip of fields, to the south and west of Tripoli, and out into lands that change into something else; the green leaches out of the fields. Open spaces start to appear between farms, and the roads thin out. I begin to form the impression that the land I see below me might once have been fertile, a welcome inheritance from one generation to the next, but now might be barely good enough to eke a living off.
Then there are no more fields. The earth in front of me is brown and yellow; bare hills, dry lake beds made out only by their shadowed contours, rock and heat. I am at 8,000 feet yet it is not cold outside.
Up until 6000 years ago, the Sahara was savannah, grassland, even forest. There were people then, who would have lived on this land. And year on year, the rain became less and less frequent. The rivers and streams slowed, narrowed, dried up, until water could only be found underground. The grass would have died back, year on year the space in which people could not live in the middle of what is now the largest hot desert on earth would have grown bigger.
And now it is a *vast* emptiness before me. It's not sand dunes I see, but bare rock, stony ground, with sand filling the spaces. I will pass onto the huge Sand Sea that spreads from western Libya into eastern Egypt, but it is still 5 hours' flying time in front of me, and first I'll have to stop for fuel. Ranges of hills as bare as you might see on Mars or the Moon slip serenely past the cockpit windows. I pass the time reading about the history and geography of the region, as this alien world slips beneath me.
I notice grid patterns laid out beneath me, stretching on for miles and miles in all directions. Convinced again that I've noticed a graphical glitch, some poor stitching together of satellite photos, I check and sure enough they are there on Google Earth too. I do some research. They are part of a seismic survey effort to find oil, using explosions to map underground. There is so much oil under the sand.
Nearly three hours after I last saw a human settlement, I am descending towards my destination; a small airfield that doesn't appear to be near anywhere at all. And as I approach and the GPS tells me it's 10 miles in front of me, it doesn't appear to be... anywhere at all .There's nothing out there. I don't have enough fuel to head back to the last airport I saw nearly 150 miles behind, so this isn't ideal. I scan the ground in front of me. Finally, with 4 miles to go, I see it. 5 small buildings, and 1/2 a mile away from them a strip of asphalt laid apparently directly onto the rock of the desert floor, with a hanger and fuel dispenser at one end. No painted centre line, nothing. But it'll do!
I roar over the field perpendicular to the runway, bring the plane about and drop it safely onto the desert. The outside air temp reads 40c. There is nothing here but fuel, but that's all I need.
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