The Guard: A Tale of Two Lives

By V. Noble

The Guard: A Tale of Two Lives is a story about a girl with no freedom to choose. She is made a guard, and her story is the story of the lives of millions of girls in Africa who travel from crib to grave with no control over their lives. Reva the Guard takes us on a journey from humble beginnings that ultimately result in dramatic changes in the political scenario of Libya with characters in the highest echelons embroiled in her story.

It is a gripping and reflective story of a woman who embarks on a journey of self-realization and is caught up in the turmoil of powermongers. Lust, jealousy, powerthe ancient vices are dominant throughout the story. The book also takes the reader right to the beginning of history when Libya was in its nascent stages, and it also gives the reader an insight into the culture, history, and religion of the people of Libya.

This story has stemmed from the experience of the author who is a frequent visitor to the mysterious continent. The author was a professor in English (20082009) at Al-Fateh University, Tripoli, Libya. On her second visit to Africa, she visited Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar in 2013. In 2016, she visited Egypt. Most of the incidents/events that are written and recorded in this book happened during these years. She has witnessed, as well as visited, the places mentioned in the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524561024

V. Noble

Veena Noble Dass, Professor of English retd. Former Vice Chancellor of Sri Padmavati Women's University, India is an academician with four decades of teaching and administrative experience. She has taken up the cause of women's education and as such contributed her entire career to moulding, evolving and creating opportunities for girls in the field of higher education. This has resulted in scores of her students leading meaningful and resourceful lives in a society and culture where for years women have been deprived of such opportunities. She has participated and presented papers at international conferences. To mention a few Oxford Round Table, Oxford University - 2005. 2. ASLI conference at Bangkok, Thailand - 2005. 3. University Industry Interface, Malaysia. 4. Executive Head of Commonwealth Universities- Adelaide -2006. For her contribution to higher education, she has been awarded the following: 1. Lifetime Achievement Award 2. Bharat Jyoti Award 3. Woman of the Year 4. Best Teacher's Award She is a published author with the following works to her credit. Books: 1. Modern Indian Drama in English Translation 2. Theatre Performance Theory and Social Sciences- an interdisciplinary approach 3. Changing global economy and the future of English teaching. Edited: 1. University Future - Proceedings of the conference at Adelaide 2. Universities for Women - Challenges and perspectives 3. Feminism and Literature 4. Fiction of the Nineties Written and published 23 Research papers in refereed Indian and International journals. The Guard is her first creative work of fiction.

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Copyright © 2017 by V. Noble.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction inspired by true events. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously except where names of real people are mentioned - citations for which are provided in the references. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/13/2017

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

757103

Contents

Prologue

Chapter I – Circle of Love

Chapter II – Training

Chapter III – Training in Religion and History

Chapter IV – The Inner Circle

Epilogue

References

Dedicated to millions of voiceless women of Africa.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following:

The students and staff at Al Fateh University

at Tripoli for sharing their experiences as well as materials in their libraries.

My daughter Hepsibah for enabling my adventures

in Africa

My daughter Shireen for being a critic and

sharing this journey with me

My grandchildren Shrey and Ela with a hope that

they will enjoy and appreciate the freedom their country of birth gives.

Prologue

Altegani

From his travel book of the 14th century:

Back comes the cry from a neighbouring mosque and yet again little farther off this time Allah il Allah Mohamad Rasul il Allah with one last long look we turn down the winding stairway back from the city of dreams to the busy life below.

Ethel Braun:

Whatever it may have been Tripoli was a city of enchantment which as dreams of Paradise fringed by palms and olives and steeped in memories of the centuries.

So little was known of Africa for so long that the 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift could write:

So geographers in Afric maps with savage pictures fill their gaps and oe’r uninhabitable downs place elephants for want of towns. But with a rush of exploration in the 19th century the Africa of imagination gave way to an Africa of reality, stranger by far than any fantasy had ever made it.

When the early explorers began to open up Africa it was mostly the waterways they travelled: the Nile, Niger, Zambezi and Zaire rivers and the hundreds of lesser streams and the great lakes of the eastern plateau regions.

After the explorers came the hunters. Some were merely ruthless, tempted by the abundance of the game to get as big a bag as possible. As wild Africa began to disappear, driven back everywhere, some men were moved to preserve as much of it as possible in parks, in zoos, on film and in museums.

The high plateaus of Africa cut away abruptly to low lying rain forest and deep rift valleys, drained by immense rivers whose tributaries and reservoirs are home to crocodiles, hippos and a peculiar assortment of fish. In the east, pelicans wing in clouds from freshwater lakes, flamingos mass in millions on an otherwise barren chain of salt lakes and rare storks hide in the tall papyrus.

Despite its enormous reaches of deserts and dry savannahs, Africa has its watery aspects. Three of the dozen largest lakes in the world lie within its boundaries as do three of the dozen longest rivers: the Nile, the Zaire and the Niger.

Although less varied than the fish life of Africa, the waterfowl - present in enormous numbers - are far more conspicuous. The series of alkaline lakes scattered along the Great Rift Valley provide feeding and nesting ground for thousands of fishing and wading birds. In some areas they have become extremely shy because of shooting. But on lakes such as Kenya’s Nakuru where the birds are protected, many kinds can still be seen feeding in their particular ways.

The spectacular diversity of the plains fauna of Africa is not restricted to the herbivores. In all the world no place can match the African savannahs as a gathering ground for meat eating animals. Ngorongora crater in Tanzania is one such gathering ground.

How the different species of bloodthirsty carnivores avoid competition among themselves and overpopulation of the plant eaters that furnish their food is a complicated question. But three generalizations may apply:

1. The killing of prey is a life function not a pastime. When hunger is satisfied the killing usually stops;

2. Despite some overlap in food preference, there is rarely complete duplication of roles among different predators occupying a given region at a given time;

3. There are in-built controls against the overkilling of prey, including the starving of the predator’s young and the forced migration of adults when scarcity occurs.

Nowhere in the world is there such a large congregation of birds of prey as on the African Savannahs. They range in size from the huge vultures that feed on dead elephants and rhinoceros down through the powerful eagles that are capable of killing small antelopes to the two ounce pygmy falcons with their diet of insects.

The most diverse and the most important ecologically of the rain forest animals are the insects. Their variety is vast and they are a predominating influence in maintaining the organization of the forest community.

The world faces a staggering loss in the waning of wild Africa and concern over the prospect of the loss has finally begin to grow.

In 1963 when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources held its General Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya there was hope that a massive effort might at least preserve the status quo. This was the most prestigious conservation rally ever held in Africa and it produced some heartening results. The complex character of the problems involved was revealed and the economic grounds for justifying the preservation of African wilderness were explored. The governments of the East African countries where much of the remaining wildlife is found were impressed by the show of world interest and came away with a new appreciation of wildlife as a national asset that could produce revenue from tourism and perhaps from game cropping as well.

That hope has now faded. The aura of optimism generated by the 1963 Nairobi conference has vanished, dispelled by a syndrome of ills including political instability and impoverishment. Strife between the governments of neighbouring African nations, a spectacular increase in poaching and, perhaps most damaging of all, the spread of people into wild places all threaten to complete the destruction of once-plentiful natural beings and surroundings.

The systematic devastation of African wildlife began in the 19th century with colonization by the French and English in the north of the continent and with the Boers heading inland from the Cape of Good Hope in the south. In both regions the large mammals were almost entirely eliminated. When the French colonised Algeria, both antelopes and carnivores were widespread and abundant. Lions had thrived there from time immemorial, supplementing their normal diet by raiding the flocks and herds of the Arabs and Berbers. Lion hunting quickly came into vogue with the European newcomers. By the end of the century the slaughter of the Northern African game animals was almost complete. Lions were eliminated from Algeria and Tunisia during the 1890s. The last of the North African lions was killed in Morocco. By that time the cheetah, the leopard, the red deer, the mountain dwelling Barbary sheep and the Oryx were virtually extinct in North Africa. All this destruction occurred in a region where the land was mostly waste and the animals neither threatened nor competed with people. Some of the last kills were made with machine guns after chases in motor vehicles.

The South African veld, once one of the richest animal landscapes on the face of the Earth, was almost wholly desolate. Even the arid vastness of the Kalahari and the Kaffir country were not spared. When elephants sought refuge there, the Boers followed. Within 75 years the incredible onslaught had stripped the fauna from the open plains, leaving a pitifully small remnant concealed in the hills and the bush country.

The great herds held on for several decades longer in Central and East Africa. The magnificent landscapes of the lake country and the Masai land of Kenya and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) survived until the beginning of the 20th century when a new breed of hunter, the European professional, invaded the last sanctuaries. There were Boers from the south, Frenchman and Belgians who travelled up the newly explored Congo, Englishman who swarmed into Kenya and Uganda and Germans who colonised Tanganyika. Elephants were shot for their ivory. Hippos were killed for sport along the rivers that served as highways for the hunters. Ostriches were hunted for their plumes and rhinos for their horns and sold to Asians who believed that powdered rhino horn was an antidote for impotence.

In the past, two factors more than any others have retarded the ruin of the savannah landscape of East Africa. One of these is drought, which makes much of the land unfit for anything but pastoralism. The other is the tsetse fly, which carries the protozoan that causes trypanosomiasis in cattle and sleeping sickness in humans. Much of the tsetse fly country is good game and because wild animals are immune to the sickness that the flies transmit to domestic animals, they found a partial and temporary asylum wherever the flies were numerous. In the tsetse free grasslands the game were better adapted to the lean landscapes than the men and domestic cattle and friction between the two groups was negligible. However, the sheer numbers of men and cattle have made the habitat less favourable for game with each passing year.

The most difficult task of preserving an entire biological landscape begins with striking a reasonable balance between the needs of the wildlife and the needs of the human population.

For a time Kenya was a model of stability in East Africa. It recognised the economic potential of its wildlife as an attraction for tourists. It joined with neighbouring Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda to form the East African community which encouraged tourists to visit the wildlife centres of the three nations by easing travel restrictions. But in 1977, the East African community dissolved in political acrimony and Kenyan tour officers were no longer allowed to send groups across the Tanzanian frontier to visit some of the most spectacular wildlife centres of East Africa, such as the Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara National Park and Serengeti National Park.

Nature has fashioned East Africa on a most lavish scale endowing it with scenery of epic proportions and kaleidoscopic contrasts. Sprawling across equatorial latitudes which elsewhere are characterised by a green leafy sameness, this is a land of unique variety, encompassing tropical woodlands and permanent snowfields, dusty plains and Mangrove swamps, active volcanoes and thundering waterfalls. It includes snow-capped Kilimanjaro, Africa’s summit and the highest free standing mountain in the world; Victoria, the world’s second largest freshwater lake and the source of its longest river the Nile; and most dramatically the vast section of the Great Rift Valley, a fissure in the earth’s crust so large that it is visible from outer space.

Over the face of this land moves the greatest concentration of game animals on the earth: millions of zebras, wildebeest, buffalo, elephants, antelopes and giraffes attended by carnivores such as lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas and hunting dogs. Here too for millennia man has made his home adapting his way of life to fit the varied contours of nature, with the result that the region’s fifty-six million inhabitants divided into more than 200 tribes and peoples represent an extraordinary cross section of lifestyles, social behaviour and cultural traditions.

As a geographical entity, East Africa is fairly clearly defined. The greater part of its land area consists of a vast plateau bounded to the East by the Indian Ocean, to the west by the rain forest of Zaire, to the north by the deserts and highlands of the Sudan and Ethiopia and to the South by the deep trench of Lake Malawi and the virtually uninhabited Savannah country along the Ruvuma River which marks the border with Mozambique. Within these boundaries there are three contrasting independent states: Kenya and Uganda in the north; and in the south Tanzania, formed by the union of the mainland Tanganyika with the offshore islands of Zanzibar, Mafia and Pemba.

Since the East African interior was not scientifically explored until the 19th century, little is known about the early history of these tribal groups. In contrast the development of the coastal regions can be traced in detail from around the 8th century when Aran merchant-venturers arrived to establish a flourishing trade in gold, ivory and tortoiseshell. As early as 956 AD an important book about the East African coast was published in Cairo written by the renowned Arab geographer Abul Hassan Al Mas-ude. It describes the great trading wealth of the land of the ‘Zang’ (blacks), a name that lives on in Zanzibar, literally meaning ‘coast of the blacks’. A few decades later the Arabian Nights - a collection of traveller