Gaddafi's Fixation on Condoleezza Rice

When rebel fighters broke into Muammar Gaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli on August 24, 2011, they found plenty of evidence of the Libyan leader’s eccentric tastes: a golden mermaid-shaped sofa modeled on his daughter Aisha, a merry-go-round built from oversized teacups, and, tucked among the debris, a photo album devoted entirely to Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state. Page after page held pictures of her, many of them close-up shots, in what journalists covering the compound’s fall described as one of the odder personal artifacts of the collapsing regime.

The fixation was not new, and Gaddafi had never been shy about it. In a 2007 interview with Al Jazeera, he described Rice in strikingly personal terms, saying “I support my darling black African woman” and adding that he loved and admired her, and was proud of her as “a black woman of African origin.” The comments drew attention at the time as an unusually intimate remark from one head of state about a sitting foreign minister of a country his own government had spent decades in conflict with.

That conflict had only recently begun to thaw. The United States and Libya restored full diplomatic relations in 2006, part of a broader rapprochement following Gaddafi’s 2003 decision to abandon Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programs. Rice’s visit to Tripoli on September 5, 2008, made her the first US secretary of state to set foot in Libya since 1953, and the trip carried real diplomatic weight beyond the personal color that later surrounded it. The two shared a lengthy meeting and a late dinner at Gaddafi’s residence, during which, according to accounts from Rice’s own staff, he pressed her on a range of international topics and, separately, played her a video montage set to a song titled “Black Flower in the White House,” composed in her honor and built entirely from images of her.

Rice later addressed the episode directly in her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor, and in interviews promoting the book. She described Gaddafi’s attention as “weird and a bit creepy,” while noting dryly that at least it was not raunchy. She also recalled that he had asked, with apparent genuine puzzlement, why his “African princess” had not visited him more, treating the diplomatic relationship as something more personal than the professional courtesy Rice herself extended.

Gaddafi’s overthrow followed within weeks of the compound raid. He was captured and killed near his hometown of Sirte on October 20, 2011, amid the chaos of the Libyan Civil War, ending a rule that had begun with his 1969 coup against King Idris and lasted 42 years. The photo album, discovered as his government fell apart, became one of the more widely circulated human details of that collapse, a strange coda to a diplomatic relationship that had briefly tried to normalize relations between Washington and Tripoli after decades of hostility. It offered a glimpse of a leader whose public image, carefully constructed over four decades of rule, had always mixed real geopolitical calculation with theatrical, sometimes baffling, personal flourishes.