By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Tuesday, February 15, is the 11th anniversary of a significant African event that will hardly be marked on the continent. On February 15, 2011, what later came to be known as the Libyan Civil War began as a series of protests and later evolved into a widespread uprising against strongman Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule.

Various forces, including North Atlantic Treaty Organisation powers, got involved on the side of the armed protesters and, on October 20, 2011, Gaddafi met a grim end. In flight, he was cornered hiding in a drainage pipe full of rubbish, and lynched.

Libya definitely became a freer country, but it has lived out that freedom in hell, mired in war and sectarian violence.

Libya has become a cautionary tale about taking the West’s hand in effecting regime change at home.

That tale, though, is just one of many. Admired and reviled in equal measure, the anti-imperialism-spewing Gaddafi splashed his country’s vast wealth on infrastructure, monuments, and threw it like confetti to his African clients.

One of Gaddafi’s most spectacular projects is the so-called “Great Man-Made River,” the world’s largest irrigation project, completed in 2002. It’s an impressive underground network of pipes that are 2,820 kilometres long, consisting of more than 1,300 wells.

It’s a network of pipes that pumps water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System from south Libya to cities in the populous northern coast, including Tripoli and Benghazi. In typical fashion, Gaddafi described it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World."

In this razzle-dazzle of Gaddafi, a friend and amateur poet visited Libya months before the Arab Spring. Despite the Gaddafi-era repression, a small lively community of intellectuals, writers, poets, and artists existed on the margins of Tripoli and Benghazi.

On this visit, my friend went to a small dinner event at the house of a professor of literature in a Tripoli university.

The professor was out of favour with the Gaddafi government over his involvement with literature that was condemned by the state. Nearly all the intellectuals who came for the dinner lived nearby.

On the way there, my friend noticed that her drive took her abruptly off the wide lit streets of the wealthy Tripoli suburbs to narrow rutted streets with no street lighting, in stark contrast to the abundance nearby.

Later, she learnt that this was the punishment the intellectuals who lived in these parts of Tripoli received for embracing ideas not favoured by the “Brotherly Leader”.

My friend’s experience shines a light into how the treatment of writers and intellectuals by governments that, on the outside, might have a pass-grade record and shiny monuments to show for it, often build it all on treacherous quick sand.

In recent weeks, these pages and media around the world have been full of stories on the arrest and horrid torture of Ugandan author Kakwenza Rukirabashaija.

On Wednesday, Kakwenza fled into exile, fearing for his life. A few days earlier, Uganda’s equivalent of Gaddafi’s “Great Man-Made River”, the 1,444km-long oil pipeline to the Tanzanian port of Tanga, got off the starting blocks.

Now, Uganda’s good men and women have to ensure that it doesn’t end up like the Libyan story.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. - Twitter@cobbo3