Visit the world’s worst capital city

Nouakchott, Mauritania, is often called the “worst capital city in the world.” That may be a bit harsh, but… audience Nouakchott is recommended to readers as a must-see destination. The heat is oppressive, poverty is widespread, corruption is rampant, and this West African country is one of the few on earth where hereditary slavery still exists. That’s why I’m here. The problems start as soon as I arrive. Three police officers interrogate me, one after the other, at the airport: why did I come to Nouakchott, who do I work for, who am I going to meet, why, what are my phone numbers, what will I talk about, where will I stay? They are stumped by the word “historian.” I would be better off not telling them I came to study the final chapter of the history of slavery in the Islamic world. The government here routinely denies that slavery still exists, and persecutes and imprisons those who speak out against it.

One person who is regularly harassed is Biram Dar Abeid, a charismatic anti-slavery activist who has been a thorn in the government’s side for years. “I’ve been imprisoned five times,” he told me, once for protesting a court decision to drop charges against a man who had raped a 15-year-old slave girl. In a classic example of Mauritanian justice, the pregnant girl was later charged with having sex outside marriage, a crime under current Sharia law.

Habi Rabah is waiting for us in her tiny breezeblock and corrugated steel house on the edge of town. It’s a muggy, no-man’s land littered with plastic trash and the occasional stinking carcass of a donkey, and the sand piles are so deep that even a four-wheel drive vehicle can’t get through. Raised as a child slave, Habi was raped and beaten regularly by her master and her owner from the age of nine. She would tend goats all day in the desert, returning exhausted to look after the family’s children. Freed in 2008 by Biram Dar Abeid’s anti-slavery group, she hasn’t looked back. She has run for parliament twice, but has so far been unsuccessful. “I realised that I hadn’t lived before,” she says. “For the first time I started to taste life. Before that I was just an object, not a human being. Now, thank God, I’m free.”

Next stop in Kyiv Siren of HopeThe book is a tribute to the Ukrainian doctors of MOAS, an incredible charity that has saved over 45,000 lives on the medical frontline.
Lieutenant Oleksandr “Biker” Vozhny was leading his platoon during an attack near Zaporizhia when an artillery shell exploded two meters away from him, severing his lungs, spine and limbs. He lost a lot of blood and suffered seven cardiac arrests, and his comrades were sure he wouldn’t survive. But MOAS medics Stanislav and Volodymyr thought he had a chance, and performed desperate CPR. 25 milesHe is now on the mend, undergoing intensive rehabilitation treatment and determined to return to his unit on the front line. When he was introduced on stage for the first time to the soldiers who saved his life, he cried, his wife cried, we all cried. “Every life saved propels Ukraine forward in the fight,” he said. Readers who would like to support this extraordinary life-saving charity can find out more at moas.eu.

I am in love with Italian publishers. After toiling in Nouakchott and Kiev, it is only natural that I should receive invitations to lecture on Herodotus in Rome, Siena and Calabria. Edizioni Settecolori usually publishes translations of now-deceased authors, such as Ernst Jünger, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Wilfred Thesiger. I am the first to apply. Within a few days, my publisher, Manuel Grillo, spent more money treating my wife and me than he did on books. Six days passed in a whirlwind of well-oiled lunches and dinners, the highlight of which was u morzeddu catanzarisa, a remarkable veal offal dish from Catanzaro. Manuel and his colleague, Stenio Solinas, literate men dressed in tailored linen shirts with collars in the style of the 1930s Italian Riviera, drove us halfway across Calabria to see the magnificent bronze statues of Riace, life-size figures of naked, bearded warriors dating to around 450 B.C. This embarrassing level of Italian hospitality is reflected in Thesiger’s ” Arabian Sands“I have sadly wondered what Arabs who grew up in this tradition thought when they visited Britain, and hoped that they would realise that we are as unfriendly to each other as we seem to them.”

Years ago, while writing a book on Herodotus, I imagined Atossa, wife of the Persian king Darius I, performing oral sex on her husband as, the Greek historian alluded, she was firming up his resolve to invade Greece. The highlight of that evening at the Certosa di Maggiano, a 14th-century Carthusian monastery-turned-hotel just outside the walls of Siena, was a raucous encounter with the irrepressible historian, Professor Duccio Balestracci, who spent a few minutes retelling the oral sex story. Wherever I go, national and regional media are covering the events of the book in a way that would be unimaginable in the UK, unless you’re J.K. Rowling, perhaps. The joke was well received. Corriere di Siena: “Marozzi, Balestracci and Solinas enthralled the audience.” Suddenly I feel very Italian. That’s my people,These are my people!