Arthritis and near blindness didn’t stop Mubaraka Maadani from registering her name in the voter rolls.  The 108 year-old from the Najeela, Qwarsha neighborhood in Benghazi, geared up for local council as well as General National Conference elections last month.

With the help of her grandchildren, Maadani happily got two voting slips to participate in the democratic process for which she had been waiting a lifetime.

Arthritis and near blindness didn’t stop Mubaraka Maadani from registering her name in the voter rolls.  The 108 year-old from the Najeela, Qwarsha neighborhood in Benghazi, geared up for local council as well as General National Conference elections last month.

With the help of her grandchildren, Maadani happily got two voting slips to participate in the democratic process for which she had been waiting a lifetime.

“Where are you taking me? It is dark, I can’t see anything,” Madaani kept repeating to her 65-year old granddaughter on her right and her 45-year old grandson on her left. She wearily dragged her feet, her back curved and her eyes drooping.

“Around fifteen years ago,” said her grandson Emrajea, “I asked her about her age and she replied, ‘When the Italians came to Libya (1911), I was herding sheep and I was as old as your daughter’ and she pointed to my daughter who was then seven years old.” Emrajea estimates that she was born in 1904 in Misurata.

Throughout the era of the Italian occupation, Mubaraka lived in Misrata until England defeated Italy in 1943. Her husband and three sons were killed after an English raid on a market in the city, forcing her to raise her grandchildren.

In 1960, she and her grandchildren, along with some of her other family members and many people in the city, emigrated to the east of Libya, after drought hit Misrata and its surroundings. Since then, she has been living with her grandchildren, their spouses and children in Benghazi.

In an attempt to tell us something about her history, she could only remember some photos of the massacres committed by Italians against Libyans during the time of occupation. She recalled her stories with signs of anguish and pain in her face.

Despite her weak memory, fragile bones and laboured movement, Maadani insisted on voting. The new freedom entitled her to choose the kind of future she aspires to both at the level of her town and her country, she said. She hopes to be a catalyst for passive people and be a role model to her grandchildren that people must be active as long as their hearts are beating and their blood is flowing.