FACTBOX: Key facts about Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi

(Reuters) - Condoleezza Rice will meet Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Friday when she makes the first visit to the north African Arab country by a U.S. secretary of state in a more than a half century.

Following are facts about Gaddafi, the Arab world's longest serving leader but who has no official government function and is known as the "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution".

* Born to a Bedouin herdsman in 1942 in a tent near Sirte on the Mediterranean coast. Abandoned university geography studies for a military career that included a short spell at a British army signals school.

* Embraced the pan-Arabism of the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony.

* In 1977 he changed the country's name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (State of the Masses) and allowed people to air their views at people's congresses.

* U.N. sanctions, imposed in 1992 to pressure Tripoli to hand over two Libyan suspects for trial for the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing over Scotland, crippled oil-rich Libya's economy, dampened Gaddafi's revolutionary spirit and took the sting out of his anti-capitalist, anti-Western rhetoric.

* Gaddafi, shunned internationally for much of his rule because the West accused him of terrorism, abandoned his program of prohibited weapons in 2003 to return Libya into international mainstream politics.

* In September 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush formally ended a U.S. trade embargo as a result of Gaddafi's scrapping of the arms program and taking responsibility for Lockerbie.

* In August 2006, Gaddafi made a series of speeches scolding his nation for over-reliance on petroleum, foreigners and imports and telling them to start making things people need.

* His showmanship is most on display on foreign visits when he sleeps outdoors in a Bedouin tent guarded by dozens of female bodyguards. Crowds of attendants accompany him abroad and he has even been known to take camels along for their milk.