The people seemed to think that it was fine. Nevertheless, the junta’s High Committee continued to meet secretly in twos and threes at odd hours, keeping the names of the members’ identity quiet, and their real leader remained out of the limelight. It turned out that Nasser’s caution was entirely justified, but in the meantime Cairo was bewildered. Ali Maher was premier again, by order of General Naguib. Obviously there was a lot more to it than that, however, and everyone was guessing at the true character of the shadowy committee.
Some thought the Moslem Brotherhood was running everything. The chief reason for this was that one of the three regents appointed to sign papers for the new king, Farouk’s tiny son, Fuad II, was a colonel Rashad Mehanna, a brotherhood member with an impressive record in the 1948 war. One of the Free Officers tried to explain the true nature of the High Committee to Hassan el Hodeiby, a quiet former judge who was the leader of the Brotherhood, but it turned out that the officer didn’t understand it very well himself. He thought the committee was Communistic. His wife was a Communist, which may have been responsible for his delusion; in all events, when word of this exchange reached Nasser, Hodeiby’s informant was spirited out of town, and the committee became one man smaller. The Communists were largely an unknown force, in Egypt as elsewhere, because it was hard to tell just how many people were making all that noise. It soon became clear, however, that they were out to embarrass Naguib and the junta.
Apart from a few obvious political reforms, such as the abolition of the titles of pasha and bey and the proclamation of a minimum-wage law, most of the new government’s early work was devoted to cleaning up inefficiency. It is small praise to say of a dictatorship that it makes trains run on time, unless you happen to live in a country where they never have in the past. In Egypt it had sometimes seemed to be a remarkable locomotive which got away from the station at all. Naguib changed all that. He and the junta started with the army, giving Farouk’s favorites the sack. Apart from Sirry Amer and a few other grudge victims who probably had it coming to them, the erring were allowed to depart in peace. In governmental agencies, improvements were spotty. Under the new administrators you could clear customs in five minutes without a bribe, but you could still spend five hours getting an exit visa. The most impressive early reforms were in the ministries, where the new work day started at eight sharp. There was a story going the rounds in Cairo then of an undersecretary who showed up a little late and found a captain sitting at his desk and studying his watch. “Good morning, Mr. Secretary,” said the captain. “What time do you have?” “Eight-twenty,” the startled diplomat answered. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the officer said. “I had hoped my watch was fast.”
***
At first Ali Maher was permitted to run the show. Naguib announced that he planned to abolish all censorship, issued pious messages urging the people to cooperate with Maher, and suggested that the Wafd clean its own house, which it fervently promised to do. But three weeks after the coup, 6,000 textile workers rioted in a village south of Alexandria, and the Wafd’s dirty fingerprints were all over town. At the same time, Maher, under pressure from landowning relatives, was resisting the general’s proposals for land reform. On September 8, therefore, Naguib reluctantly took over the premiership with the junta’s approval and retired Maher to write his memoirs. Then the general set out on a tour of the Wafd stronghold: lower Egypt.
Instructions went out to all government workers in the Nile delta, forbidding, under penalty of dismissal, the organized demonstrations which had always marked Nahas’ trips there. This was just after it became generally known that Naguib was planning land reform, however, and no organization was necessary. The fellaheen, after generations of loving the land and not owning any, saw the man who promised to give them a little, and they almost tore him to pieces. American observers retired after the tour’s first day, nursing bruises, but the general kept right on going, and when he reached Samanoud, the village where Nahas was born, with no slackening of the mob’s enthusiasm, he knew he had the old man licked. He returned to Cairo and demanded that the Wafd get a new chief, which it speedily did. When the party’s executive council told Nahas that he was through, he wept. Within six months he was senile and had developed a disturbing habit of falling into a deep sleep in the middle of a conversation. Zuzu hovered near, but her voice had become so soft, and she used it so rarely, that she no longer kept him awake. Wisely, she had decided that it was not a good idea to remind Egypt’s new rulers that she was still around.
The problem with the new leader the Wafd got was that he was Serag ed Din; he immediately began planning a counterrevolution, and he convinced Colonel Mehanna, the regent, that there wasn’t anything the junta was doing that the Wafd couldn’t do better. Mehanna wasn’t a member of the High Committee; he had been given a spot in the new government largely because Farouk hadn’t liked him, and he was deceived by Naguib’s simplicity and Nasser’s obscurity. The Communists volunteered to help, and the coup of the bizarre coalition was scheduled for January 12, 1953. On that day, however, Naguib took a page from the Wafd book and snubbed the British ambassador at a social function. It was a minor maneuver in renewed negotiations over the future of the Sudan, but it forced a postponement of Mehanna’s plans, and before he could pull his people together again, Nasser had found out about them. Over two dozen officers and civilians were arrested, and both Mehanna and Serag ed Din were sent off to bake in the desert sun at El Tor, a notorious Frontier Corps concentration camp on the Red Sea.
Four days after Serag ed Din and Mehanna were jailed, Naguib outlawed the parties in a midnight broadcast, designated the High Committee as his parliament, or Revolution Command Council (RCC), and appointed fifty civilians to draft a new Egyptian constitution. The RCC extended his powers for a year. On January 23, six months after the coup, the date he had originally set for his retirement, a quarter-million howling Egyptians packed Liberty Square, where the cream of Britain’s East African troops once barracked, to honor him. He announced the birth of the Hayet Al Tahreer, or Liberation Rally, with himself as chief and Nasser as secretary-general, and invited monthly subscriptions of five piastres, or fifteen cents. Three weeks later 2,000,000 had joined.
***
It was widely assumed in those days that Naguib, like Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, wanted to create a single-party state, with himself as president. In practice, he turned aside supporters of a republic with vague talk of a plebiscite to determine the future of the monarchy. He didn’t seem to know what to do with the royal family, but his intrigue with Farouk’s mother-in-law, which resulted in the return, alone, to Egypt of former Queen Narriman, suggested that he was toying with the idea of developing the regency. Farouk had no intention of letting his small son go, however, and the value of the former queen without the little king was something of a puzzle. It was a puzzle that Naguib intended to play with for quite a while all the same, for despite his popularity, he didn’t want an election just then—not with Egypt’s sterling balance growing smaller and smaller and bankruptcy looming ahead. For the revolutionary leader of a xenophobic people, he was making extraordinary overtures to capital abroad, repealing a Wafd statute restricting foreign ownership of Egyptian stock, encouraging Anglo-American oil prospectors to explore the Gaza strip, and even talking about special tax privileges for foreign firms. He was doing everything he could to buy time for his sick economy, but he wasn’t having much luck getting what he needed most—customers for his cotton.
Egyptians had once called cotton White Gold. Now they were using ruder names. Every warehouse in Alexandria was jammed, and the bales were overflowing into desert depots. Naguib gave the most desperate merchants a $158,000,000 subsidy, but that merely transferred part of the debt from private to public ledgers. The country had unsold cotton worth $432,000,000. There were three reasons for this backlog—Zuzu’s corner, a worldwide textile slump, and what amounted to a British boycott after the abrogation of the 1936 treaty. The Briti
sh denied this, and said that they had heavy inventories, but they were buying long-staple stock from Brazil, and there was nothing in Brazil’s cotton that wasn’t in Egypt’s.
Behind all this was the fact that Egypt grew too much cotton and too little grain. The British bore a heavy share of the responsibility for that; empires like to have colonies and protectorates where they want them—dependent—and one way to promote dependency is to encourage one-crop economies. There weren’t many customers for Alexandria beyond England; she could sell a little to the Dutch and the Germans, but the Arab League was angry at West Germany for agreeing to pay Israel reparations, and the prospect of an Arab boycott of Bonn accounted for Naguib’s rather desperate trade agreement with the merchants of East Germany, whom Egypt didn’t even recognize. American Point Four technicians were trying to encourage the development of other crops, but Naguib’s land-reform schemes, however desirable in other ways, made that difficult. Wheat and rice required a lot of farm machinery and irrigation equipment; they were practical only on large estates. A tractor wasn’t economical on a little farm, and the general intended to cut the big plantations up into pieces of five feddans each. Nasser was thinking in terms of communal ownership, a form of collectivization; that came much later, however.
Egypt is deceptive on a map. It looks much bigger than it is. About 95 percent of it is bleak desert, and 99 percent of the people live on what is left, a 6,000,000-feddan strip that clings lushly to the winding Nile. Until the early nineteenth century, Egyptian farming depended upon what is called basin irrigation; at the peak of the river’s annual flood the land was fed by rich alluvial water, and the fellaheen sowed. In 1820 Viceroy Mehemet Ali introduced the concept of dams, or barrages, as the nilologists call them, and started perrenial irrigation, permitting two, and in some places three, sowings a year. During Farouk’s reign a feddan that produced three crops a year was, when the country’s economy was sound, worth as much as $4,500 a year. That was the source of the pashas’ wealth. Some 2,000 landowners, one tenth of one percent of the population, owned 1,200,000 feddans, a fifth of the arable land. A man like Serag ed Din had feddans in the tens of thousands and a vast multitude of peasants working them. Naguib began reform by expropriating all individual holdings over 200 feddans and parceling them out for sale on the installment plan in little lots. The landowners were given bonds, redeemable in thirty years, and the fellaheen had even longer to repay the government. One ironic feature of the expropriation law was that in determining how much compensation a landowner got for his property, the new regime used the tax assessment records of the old, which meant that the more pull a pasha had with the Ministry of Finance, the more he lost.
Over 272,000 feddans were in the process of redistribution, and the program had created about 350,000 new landowners before Naguib left office. But there still wasn’t enough land, not in a country where 2,000,000 fellaheen owned less than a feddan each and there was an average of a third of a feddan available for every Egyptian. When Mehemet Ali started his irrigation program, it was an interesting experiment, but it wasn’t vital to the economy. By the early 1950s it had become absolutely essential, even though some observers thought that the multiple sowings would eventually exhaust what was once the richest land on the globe. Egypt’s population had quadrupled since 1820, and when the Free Officers toppled Farouk it was increasing at a steady rate of two percent a year. Both Naguib and Nasser disapproved of birth control, claiming that its practice would violate Islamic principles. As a consequence, the country’s population continued to grow inexorably under them. The most interesting demographic study carried out when I was there was run by a team from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. They picked an area with the highest reproductive figures in the delta, showed outdoor movies there every evening for a year, and cut the birthrate in half. But when they ran out of funds and left, the impregnation ratios started to climb again, and the Nile valley remained the most densely populated region in the world.
Naguib’s Ministry of Public Works reclaimed about 1,500,000 feddans in the upper Nile, thereby assuring maintenance of the status quo between the growing population and the amount of usable land into the mid-1970s, but anything beyond that was a matter of conjecture. There were plenty of imaginative schemes for improving the fella’s food supply. A progressive landowner named Hafez Affifi dumped a stew of chemicals into 200 feddans in the desert and created an oasis, but the formula didn’t work elsewhere. Dreamers suggesting extracting the salt from Mediterranean water and pumping millions of gallons into the Qattara Depression, the big hole of quicksand and salt marshes in the desert which squeezed Rommel against El Alamein in 1942, but the idea was unfeasible. Naguib exempted desert land from his land-reform program for twenty-five years to encourage reclamation. The only project to prove practical, however, was concocted by Americans. Point Four agents found land once fertile under the Romans and now buried under two to four feet of sand. They fenced in several thousand feddans, sowed them with reseeding grasses, and reclaimed them for grazing. That was fine for farm animals, but it didn’t help the fellaheen much. The outlook for the millions of tubercular peasants, crowded 2,300 to the square mile, living from day to famished day on their diet of black bread, rice, and leaf soup, remained very dark.
***
The Nile was Egypt’s silent motive in negotiations over the future of the Sudan, just as Kenya, then still a British colony, was Whitehall’s. Both Naguib and Sir Ralph Stevenson, the English ambassador to Cairo, droned out about the right of the Sudanese to self-determination, but all Stevenson wanted was a buffer for the British base in East Africa, and all Naguib wanted was water. It almost never rains in Egypt, and so the agriculture depends on the river, flowing from where it comes down in buckets, high in the green rain forests of interior Africa, 2,450 miles away, outside the country. Since better than nine out of every ten Egyptians are engaged in cultivation, the agriculture is the economy. Without the Nile there would be no fellaheen, no Cairo, no Naguib, no Nasser; just empty sands.
The sources of the river are many, and they vary from year to year, but before they get to Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, they are chaneled into two—the Blue Nile, coming out of Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, and the White Nile, crawling down from Lake Victoria and Lake Albert, in Uganda. They join at Khartoum. From that point onward there is just the one stream, winding toward the Mediterranean with extraordinary languor. It takes nine months for a drop of water falling in the Ugandan jungles to reach Cairo, where the river, at its mightiest before it splits up in the delta, is crossed by wedges of low-flying egrets and feluccas, the lovely Egyptian sailboats that tack between the eucalyptus banks. Because it is so slow, nilologists, studying their nilometers, can telegraph the river’s strength downstream months ahead, and their colleagues at the Egyptian dams north of the Nubian Desert can decide how much water must be released to feed the next season’s crop. A nilologist is a highly respected engineer, and nilometers have an honored place in Egyptian history. The oldest is at Roda, south of Cairo, near the spot where Moses is said to have nestled in the bulrushes. It goes back to 641 A.D., and though its accuracy is extremely questionable, no one has ever suggested that it be scrapped.
After January 26, 1885, when howling dervishes slaughtered British General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon at Khartoum, Englishmen convinced one another that they had a tremendous emotional investment in the million-square-mile Sudan. The fact that a great many Egyptian soldiers had died with Gordon—Naguib’s maternal grandfather among them—was ignored in London. After Anglo-Egyptian troops led by Lord Kitchener retook Khartoum fourteen years later, the Egyptians were generously treated in the basic water agreements, but there remained an abiding fear that the Sudanese might siphon off more than their share. The Wafd exploited this fear endlessly, refusing to discuss the future of Suez until the Sudan was Egyptian. Farouk’s rallying cry, his one appeal to his subjects, was, “Unity of the Nile valley—Egypt and the Sudan as one!”
/> England was in an excellent position to combat this sort of thing, for Egyptian imperialism had as little appeal to educated Sudanese as British imperialism, and the British civil service was doing a good job there. Their eight hundred administrators were highly popular with the jungle tribes in the southern Sudan, near Kenya, while in the north, among the native Moslems, they played the two religious leaders, Abdel Rahman el Mahdi and Ali el Mirghani, against one another in the great imperialist tradition of divide-and-rule. Both were knighted and wooed, though the Mahdi, posthumous son of the Mahdi who killed Gordon and his men, was much closer to Whitehall, chiefly because Mirghani’s loyalty became suspect during World War II and the English decided that he was becoming altogether too temperamental. Sir Robert Howe, governor-general of the Sudan, would make occasional statements about Sudanese independence in twenty years or so. This wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing, which was what Farouk was promising.
Naguib startled Khartoum, London, and most of Cairo by reversing the Egyptian position. He presented himself as the champion of either sovereignty for the Sudan or union with Egypt—the choice was up to the Sudanese—with the decision to be made within three years. In the autumn after the Free Officers coup the British asked the Mahdi to stop in Cairo en route home from his latest visit to London and straighten Naguib out. Instead Naguib converted the Mahdi, who came out of their conference to announce that the general had the right idea. Mirghani, already angry at England, came over immediately, and on November 2 Naguib formally presented Sir Ralph Stevenson with the new Egyptian government’s plan for the Sudan. Then the general sent Major Saleh Salem, a dashing young member of the High Committee, into the tribal area. On December 31 Anthony Eden, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, got his first stunning intimation of what Salem had been up to. A petition, signed in blood by several key tribal chiefs, arrived on Eden’s desk in Whitehall. The chiefs had declared that Naguib’s proposals had their enthusiastic approval. Ten days later the Egyptian major had a signed agreement with the Sudan’s four political parties, threatening to boycott any pact that didn’t follow the Naguib plan. A couple of weeks later a photograph was released in Cairo showing one of Salem’s unorthodox diplomatic tactics. The picture was of him and several chiefs. They were dancing in the buff.
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