Tawergha

Population: Around 40,000 before 2011; a partial and precarious return since 2018

Location: Tawergha, 250 kilometres east of Tripoli and 38 kilometres south of Misrata, on the coastal plain

Language: Libyan Arabic

Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Semitic → Arabic

Traditional governance: A local council in exile for most of the past decade; a 2018 national reconciliation agreement provided for return, and its implementation has been partial.

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Clothing: Libyan dress; the community's dark skin, in a country where the descendants of enslaved people are still marked by it, has been the operative fact of its recent history.

Food: Libyan cooking of couscous, bazin and dates; the camps produced a decade of cooking on rations and shared kitchens.

Ceremonies: Islamic festivals, kept in the camps; weddings, which continued through displacement; commemorations of the town's emptying, held annually.

Marriage customs: Islamic marriage; the community's endogamy has been reinforced by displacement and by the hostility of neighbouring towns.

Initiation rites: Quranic school; schooling in the camps was provided unevenly and a generation's education was substantially disrupted.

Every dish the Atlas publishes for Libya, at national rather than community level — 8 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.

“They painted over the name and the road still goes there.”

Erasure that did not work.

“A whole town cannot commit a crime.”

The community's central argument against collective punishment.

“We came back to walls without water.”

The 2018 return, as returnees describe it.

Creation: Islamic cosmology, shared with the country entirely; the community's distinguishing history is one of descent and displacement rather than of separate belief.

Beliefs: Sunni Maliki Islam, identical to that of the towns that expelled them, which is part of what makes the case a matter of race rather than of religion.

Ancestors: Descent from enslaved people carried north across the Sahara is the community's origin and, in 2011, became the pretext for its destruction.

Traditional settlements: A modern Libyan town of concrete villas and public buildings, systematically looted and burned in 2011, with partial reoccupation since 2018.

Building techniques: Concrete and block construction typical of late twentieth-century Libyan development; the town's rebuilding since 2018 has been slow and largely unfunded.

Village layout: A planned coastal-plain town with school, hospital and mosque, most of which stood empty for seven years and much of which remains unusable.

1. 1800s

   Tawergha is settled substantially by people descended from those carried north on the trans-Saharan slave routes.

2. Pre-2011

   A town of around 40,000, among the poorest in coastal Libya.

3. August 2011

   Misratan brigades take the town and expel its entire population; houses are looted and burned.

4. 2011–2018

   The community lives in camps across Libya; returns are repeatedly blocked.

5. 2018

   A reconciliation agreement permits return; the town has little water or electricity and reoccupation is partial.