Twelve days in hell How I played basketball for Gaddafi and almost died – Nigerian caught up in Libyan crisis
When US basketball
player Alex Owumi signed a contract to play for a team in Benghazi,
Libya, he had no idea that his employer was the the most feared man in
the country. Nor did he guess the country was about to descend into war.
Here he tells his story, parts of which some readers may find
distressing.
It was a beautiful flat. Everything was
state of the art and it was spacious, too. It had two big living rooms,
three big bedrooms, flat screens everywhere. The couches had gold trim
and were so big and heavy they were impossible to move. The door to the
apartment was reinforced steel, like on a bank vault.
It was 27 December 2010 and I had just
arrived in Benghazi, Libya’s second biggest city, to play basketball for
a team called Al-Nasr Benghazi. I had stayed in some nice places
playing for teams in Europe, but this seventh-floor apartment in the
middle of town was something else. It was like the Taj Mahal.
I didn’t immediately notice the
photographs dotted around the place – of Libyan leader Col Muammar
Gaddafi and his grandchildren.
When I did, I phoned the team president –
we called him Mr Ahmed – and he told me how it was. “The apartment
belongs to Mutassim Gaddafi, the Colonel’s son,” he said. “Al-Nasr is
the Gaddafi club. You are playing for the Gaddafi family.”
Gaddafi! When I was a young kid growing
up in Africa – I was born in Nigeria – Gaddafi was someone we all looked
up to. He was always on the news and in the paper, helping out
countries like Niger and Nigeria. I thought of him as one of the faces
of Africa – him and Nelson Mandela. As a kid I wasn’t really aware of
any of the bad things he was doing. Maybe I was too busy playing sports.
In my first practice with my new
team-mates there was a weird atmosphere. I asked the other international
player on the team, Moustapha Niang from Senegal, “Why does everybody
look so depressed?” And he explained it to me. “We’ve been losing,” he
said. “They haven’t been getting paid, some of them are getting
physically abused. If we don’t win our next game, some of these kids are
going to get beat.”
A lot of the players had scratches and
banged-up bruises on their arms. One had a black eye he was trying to
conceal. Gaddafi’s security goons would push them up against lockers,
things like that – and some of these guys were not big athletes like me
and Moustapha. During practice you could see some of them were just
scared to make mistakes. But in any sport you’re going to make mistakes,
you’re going to make bad plays. I can’t go into a game and trust people
who are scared.
The next day, we travelled to a game in
Tripoli on a private jet like we were a team playing in the NBA [the
National Basketball Association in the US]. That’s how it was with
Al-Nasr and the Gaddafi family – they got extra funding, extra millions
of dollars. But the deal was we were supposed to win – and when we lost,
it was a problem.
Col Gaddafi was at that game. Before the
start I saw him sitting with his military personnel up in the stands in
a white dress uniform. Walking on the court was his son, Saadi Gaddafi,
the man in charge of sport in Libya. We spoke and honestly, he seemed
like a nice man who just loved sport.
As we were talking, I looked into the
stands at his father and we locked eyes. It lasted just a moment, but my
team-mates saw it and my fans saw it. We won that game by 10 points and
afterwards, in the locker room, Mr Ahmed handed out envelopes, each
containing about $1,000 (£600) in dinars. “From our leader,” he said.
After that game I started to get a lot
of special treatment around the country because I had been personally
acknowledged by the Gaddafi family. I never had to pay for food at the
markets or in restaurants again. Everything from socks to a new TV and
laptop – I got it all free or on a sort of open-ended loan. I never had
to pay anything, not a dime. And after that game, we just kept winning
and winning. I was the point guard – the captain, the conductor of the
orchestra. We just kept winning and my team-mates weren’t scared any
more.
But we noticed that our team coach,
Coach Sharif, was often sad during practice. He was Egyptian and was
worried about the situation back home – by this time, the revolution
there was in full swing. There were rumours that there would be an
uprising in Libya, but I never really took them seriously. We’re talking
about a country where the leader had been in power for 42 years. Who in
their right mind would cross that kind of leadership, that kind of
army?
From the roof of my apartment in
Benghazi I could see the whole of the city. I liked going up to the
roof, especially when I was homesick and missed my family. I could
really clear my mind up there.
But on 17 February 2011, at about 09:15
in the morning, I go on to the rooftop and see 200, maybe 300 protesters
outside a police station across the street. A military convoy is coming
closer and closer. Then, without warning, shots. People running, people
falling. Dead bodies all over the ground. I’m praying, praying that
this is a dream, that I will wake up sometime soon.
With these bullets flying everywhere,
I’m hugging the floor of the rooftop. I am so frightened. So many things
are running through my head and I just can’t think straight. After 10
minutes or so, the shooting stops and there is only wailing and
screaming.
I go back to my apartment and close the
door. I call Coach Sharif. It takes a long time before my call is
connected, but eventually he picks up. He tells me that he’s on his way
out of the country, back to Egypt, but that I should stay in my
apartment and that somebody will come for me.
I try calling Moustapha but there is no
connection. Over and over I punch the numbers on my phone, but the
networks are down. The internet is down. I sit huddled against a big
metal bookcase, praying.
Every now and then I peek out the
window. The crowds of men have dispersed. Instead, I see kids, kids I
played soccer with on the street. They have turned into rebels now, with
their own shotguns and machetes. Regular life is over – it’s every man
for himself.
I watch as a little girl tries to drag
her father back to their house. He’s so heavy her mother has to come and
help her. I can see the blood leaking from his head. His eyes are just
gone, popped out of his head. And they can’t move his body. They just
sit by the road, wailing.
There is a bang on my door. I open it
and two soldiers ask me, “American or Libyan?” I show them my American
passport and they let me go back in. I shut the door. About 15 minutes
later I hear a commotion in the hallway – yelling and scuffling. When it
dies down a little, I open my door to see what’s going on and I see a
man, my neighbour, lying in the doorway to his apartment. He’s covered
with blood and isn’t moving. For a moment I think he’s dead.
I know this man and I like him. He has a
daughter, about 16 years of age, and sometimes after practice I sit
with her in the hallway and help her practise English.
I hear these noises coming from around
the corner of the hallway. Strange noises – crying and heavy breathing. I
creep slowly around the corner and see an AK-47 on the ground. I creep
further round the corner and see one of the soldiers on the stairwell
with his pants down raping that little girl.
There’s so much anger in me. I reach for
the gun, but then the other soldier steps out of the shadows, and pokes
me with his own AK-47. I think he might just pull the trigger and blow
me away.
But he doesn’t. He just shoos me back to
my apartment, jabbing at me with his gun. I’m yelling at him in
English, calling him every name under the sun, but I don’t have it in me
to take him on. There’s nothing I can do. He closes the steel door on
me and I sink to the ground, weeping, banging my head against the door. I
can still hear that poor girl on the stairwell. I can’t do anything to
help her.
As a Christian, it’s hard for me to say
this, but there were many times I questioned my faith in God. That first
day I just sat on the ground, crying and praying, trying my phone again
and again.
There was a group of women next door who
had a baby who was crying with hunger. Libyans don’t tend to keep much
food in the house – they buy fresh groceries every day. So I gave them
most of what I had – just a couple of slices of bread and some cheese –
thinking that in two or three days this would be over.
But it carried on – the screams, the
sirens, the gunshots. Non-stop, 24 hours a day. My apartment was in a
war zone. It was all around me, I was just a dot in the middle of the
circle of the bull’s-eye. I told myself that I would be rescued, that at
any moment Navy Seals would come crashing through my steel door. I kept
myself ready to go at a moment’s notice. I didn’t go to bed, but just
took short naps throughout the day and night.
The police station on the other side of
the road was set on fire. The policemen climbed on to the roof, which
was the same height as my apartment building. I stared at them across
the street and they stared back at me.
I had no power and no water. The food I
had left over was gone in a day or two. I rationed the little water I
had for four or five days, then it was gone. So I started drinking out
of the toilet, using teabags to try to make it more palatable. When I
needed to go to the toilet, which wasn’t much, I would urinate in the
bathtub and defecate into plastic bags, which I tied up and left by the
door.
I realised that if I didn’t do these
things I wouldn’t survive. Three or four days after the massacre I had
seen from the roof, a building across the street collapsed. The next
day, the Libyan Air Force started dropping bombs all over Benghazi as
they tried to retake the city.
I thought – I have those couches with
gold trim but I can’t eat this gold. These flat screens are not going to
feed me. Everything in this apartment is worthless. The things that we
take for granted as human beings – water, a bit of cheese, a slice of
bread – suddenly these things felt like luxuries, luxuries I didn’t
have. I was getting weaker every day, slowly starving.
When the hunger pains got really bad, I
started eating cockroaches and worms that I picked out of the flowerpots
on my windowsill. I’d seen Bear Grylls survival shows on TV and seemed
to recall that it was better to eat them alive, that they kept their
nutrients that way. They were wriggly and salty, but I was so hungry it
was like eating a steak.
I started seeing myself, versions of
myself at different ages. Three-year-old Alex, eight-year-old Alex, at
12 years, 15 years, 20 years and the current, 26-year-old version. The
younger ones were on one side, and the older versions on the other. I
was able to touch them and I talked to them every day.
And I noticed that the younger Alexes
were different, happier somehow, than the older versions, who seemed to
have lost their direction. I asked the younger Alexes: “What happened?
How can I get back to that happiness? How can I get my life back on
track?” I asked them, “What made me make bad decisions?”
Twelve days after I shut myself away in
my apartment, my mobile phone rang. It was Moustapha. “My brother, how
you doin’?” he said. I told him I wasn’t doing too well. He was stuck in
his apartment on the other side of the city, too. And he told me that
my girlfriend, Alexis, had called him from the US, frantic with worry
about me.
When we spoke again the next day
Moustapha told me that our team president, Mr Ahmed, had promised to get
us out of the country. We had to make our way to his office – it was
only two blocks from my apartment, but I wasn’t sure how I would get
there. “I will see you or I won’t,” I told Moustapha. “I will make it or
I won’t.”
I was so weak that it took me about 15
minutes to climb down the seven flights of stairs in my apartment
building. Out on the street I saw the empty shell cases that had been
fired at the crowd two weeks earlier. I picked one up and thought, “Did
this go through a human being?” They weren’t like handgun bullets – they
were the sort of thing that could take a limb off.
Then I saw those same kids I had watched
from my window, the ones I had played football with – one had an AK-47
that was almost bigger than him. They recognised me and called out:
“Okocha!” They called me that because they thought I looked like Jay-Jay
Okocha, the Nigerian footballer. These kids saw my legs start to buckle
and they raced to grab my arms. Two of them took my arms and I made
them understand where I needed to get to.
They basically had to carry me for about
a mile. We went the long way, down backstreets and alleyways. Sometimes
they would break into a run, and sometimes one of the kids would shout
and we all stopped dead and looked around.
At my team president’s office, Moustapha
and I hugged, and Mr Ahmed told the two of us, “I could get you out of
here, but it’s going to be very dangerous.” He said it would mean a
six-hour drive on a long desert road to the Egyptian border. Just a few
days earlier, he had hired a car to take a Cameroonian footballer to the
border. But this footballer had panicked at a rebel checkpoint and made
a run for it across the desert. He had been gunned down.
Moustapha didn’t want to do it but I
managed to convince him. And all the time we were talking it over, I was
stuffing my face with cakes and drinking bottles of water. It gave me
enough energy to get back to my apartment on my own two feet,
accompanied by my band of miniature warriors.
I packed a small suitcase and at about
02:00 a car horn beeped outside. It was our car to Egypt – a tiny
vehicle with Moustapha – all 6’10″ (2.08m) of him – already jammed into
the front seat.
Fifteen minutes outside Benghazi we got
to our first checkpoint – rebels searching through our stuff, throwing
our clothes on the floor, looking for our passports. As black men, we
were suspected of being Gaddafi mercenaries trying to escape the
country.
At one point the rebels, guns in hand,
kicked the legs from under Moustapha. I thought he was going to be
gunned right down in front of me. The driver kept telling them, “They’re
just basketball players, they’re just basketball players.” But there
was so much turmoil, so much death around the city, that people didn’t
believe anything.
By the grace of God they finally let us
go. But there were another seven of those checkpoints, and instead of it
being a six or seven-hour journey, it was 12 hours because we had to
stop so often. We were searched and kicked to our knees so many times,
thrown in the dirt. It was rough – and if I ever see that driver again I
will give him all the money in my pocket.
We crossed the Egyptian border and after
three days in a refugee camp, I could have begun the journey home to
the US. But while I was waiting at the border for the Cairo bus to
leave, I got a call from Coach Sharif. He told me: “I want you to come
to Alexandria, stay with me and my wife, and get yourself back together,
talk to us.”
I thought about it and realised that I
needed some time – I didn’t want my family to see me the way I was. So I
said goodbye to Moustapha and took the bus to Alexandria.
When Coach Sharif saw me, he shook his
head, saying: “This is not the guy I’ve come to know. This is not him.” I
looked different – the pigment on my face was discoloured, I had hair
all over my face. My teeth were rotten brown, my eyes were bloodshot
red. But it wasn’t just that. He basically saw that my soul was gone.
And he said, the times I saw you happy were when you played basketball.
So while he and his wife took care of
me, he got me involved with an Alexandrian team called El Olympi,
coached by one of his former players. And it wasn’t about the money any
more, I didn’t care about that. The big thing was being normal again.
I had a check-up before I started
playing and I found that that fortnight without food had killed my body.
Being a professional athlete, my body was used to a high-calorie diet.
My liver was messed up, my lungs were bad, my blood was not right.
But I played anyway. El Olympi wanted me
to help them make the playoffs, but we ended up winning 13 games in a
row and taking the championship. It was amazing.
That decision to play the rest of the season in Egypt was a lot for my mum and my girlfriend to take, though.
When I went home and saw my father again
I shed tears. He was in a diabetic coma. Had he gone into this coma
because I didn’t want to come home, his youngest son? I felt very, very
guilty.
I was diagnosed with post-traumatic
stress disorder. I would shut myself at home for 15 hours with the
blinds closed. I didn’t shower. My girlfriend, Alexis, would come home
and find me like that and it took a toll on our relationship. I got a
lot of treatment, a lot of therapy. But I was raised in the Catholic
church, and I found going back to church was a way back to my regular
self.
As for my old team-mates in Benghazi,
there was nowhere for them to go, no way for them to escape. A lot of
them had to fight in the war. I am still in touch with one of them and
with Moustapha, who I speak to about once a fortnight. I saw him last
summer and gave him the biggest hug in the world. We’re partners for
life.
I have tried very hard to get in touch
with that girl who lived across the hallway from me in Benghazi. I’ve
found nothing, just nothing.
I was trying to forget about everything
that had happened to me. But my family convinced me that I needed to get
my story out there, so I wrote a memoir, Qaddafi’s Point Guard. Doing
that was hard – there were a lot of tears.
I don’t regret going to Libya. In life,
just like in basketball, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to
make bad plays. But God has a plan for everybody – you could go left,
you could go right, you’re going to end up on his path at the end of the
day.
My girlfriend and I are still together,
and after a break from the game, I am playing again, this time in
England, for the Worcester Wolves. My team-mates don’t really know how
to deal with me. I still get depressed just like that. In a minute, I go
from happy to sad. I am liable to snap at people. They just leave me
alone and I’m grateful for their understanding.
When I close my eyes I relive moments
from 2011. I see faces, I see spirits. So staying awake is my best bet. I
only sleep for four hours and by 08:00 I’m excited to go to practice.
Basketball is an escape for me. The only time I get to be calm is in
those 40 minutes of a game.
I do get really bad anxiety attacks
before games, though. My hands get sweaty and start to shake. I can’t
breathe, I can’t function. Sometimes I can’t leave the locker room.
People look at me and say, “Woah, this dude is so crazy.” But that’s
normal for me now. That’s normal life.
Source: BBC
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