Sadat, despite his later involvement with the revolution that deposed King Farouk in 1952, was useful to the palace. He became the contact point for the hitman Hussein Tewfiq, who had graduated from killing drunken British soldiers to assassinating highly placed pro-British politicians in the Egyptian parliament. That Sadat should end his days with an assassin’s bullet, or bullets, in his body seems karmic retribution for having been an assassin’s pimp in former times. The British were not despotic: during one attempt Sadat was smuggled out of his poorly-guarded prison to help during the hit, then returned to his cell.
Sadat never made a secret of his assassin’s past. In his autobiography he relates how he handed over two grenades to Tewfik as back-up for the murder of the politician Amin Osman; he mentions boastfully how Tewfik could easily have got away after the killing (he was caught instead). When it was Sadat’s turn four grenades would be used in addition to the bullets; one of the assassins could, too, have escaped being caught . . .
4 • Lawrence on the Blue Nile
Drinking coffee requires a snack, talking with a King requires a gift.
Ethiopian proverb
Let’s go back a bit. It’s 1941 again. Imagine the credits rolling on one of those Pathé newsreels – all churning tank tracks and saluting soldiers. ‘Hitler’s steel battalions sweep into Mother Russia while in Africa hope is all but extinguished . . .’ For months it looked very much as if the British would be driven from Egypt by the might of the Axis armies. If Rommel could keep up his momentum the Germans and Italians would reach the Nile and seal the fate of the Suez Canal. As we have already mentioned, the British had so little faith in their own defences that the Embassy began burning its documents. The smoke pouring from the grounds of the British residence was so great it was believed, at first, an incendiary bomb had been dropped.
Further south not a dog barked against the British in the Sudan; the Sudanese preferred British masters to Italian ones. The British could send a force down the Blue Nile and into Khartoum, squeezing Egypt from both sides. No wonder they were burning documents in Cairo.
In Europe things did not look any more hopeful. The British had been driven from Dunkirk. There had been failed campaigns in Norway and Crete. The allies needed a victory, anywhere.
Enter Orde Wingate, one of the strangest generals of the Second World War, a man who gave his briefings in the nude while combing his pubic hair for lice with his toothbrush. Wingate, who had coincidentally spent time in the Egyptian desert looking for the same lost oasis of Zerzura as the Hungarian Almásy (though one imagines he would have sneered at being called a member of something as insignificant as an explorers’ club), was given the job of securing the other end of the Nile – the source of the flood, Lake Tana. By securing Ethiopia the Nile would be secured. The back door into the Sudan and Egypt would be closed. Even if Egypt fell, at least the British could perhaps effect what the Italian rulers of Ethiopia had been promising for six years but had so far failed to do: turn the Nile off and bring Egypt to its knees.
The Italian plan had the diverted water, instead of flowing out of Lake Tana at the Tis Abay or Tissisat Falls, travelling down a giant thirty-mile-long tunnel (aptly enough a scheme rather like this, bar the bringing of Egypt to its knees, is at last being built by an Italian contractor). The planned pipe would deliver water to the arid plains which could be sown with all manner of crops – perhaps with something of the success shown by Rassam with his giant vegetables.
Grabbing Abyssinia was a very long shot. The basis of Wingate’s army was tiny, barely a hundred men, divided into action groups of a single officer, five NCOs and a nucleus of Sudanese Defence Force soldiers. The plan would work only if these men would be able to recruit and lead the thousands of Ethiopians who had a grudge against their Italian masters. In short, it was Lawrence of Arabia on the Blue Nile.
In Egypt the British were suffering in the oppressor’s role; further upstream on the Nile they gambled on playing the opposite role, as liberators. Wingate had been successful in Palestine raising a Jewish defence force against Arab incursions. He became a staunch Zionist, if not a bigot, urging Israelis to bayonet the ‘dirty Arab’. Wingate was a great believer in the fear-inducing effect of eight inches of cold steel in your stomach.
He looked, and behaved, like something out of the Old Testament. He used the Bible as a tactical manual, preferring, like Gideon, to attack at night using lights and noise, as Gideon used pot smashing and torches, to give the impression of a much larger force. He called his Ethiopian army ‘Gideon Force’. A fellow officer, W. E. D. Allen, wrote, ‘His equals were inclined to bait him, and the more easy-going went in fear. But the same fervour that made him goad men to almost superhuman effort insisted later that their courage be recognized.’
To reach Ethiopia Wingate followed in reverse the route of Bruce, pushing upwards through the Sudan and along the Blue Nile. Then, for some reason, possibly to avoid their route being anticipated, he insisted on marching to strict compass bearings rather than following existing tracks. Instead of managing the thirty miles a day of King Theodore, the army beat its way through thornbush and thistle patch. And to repeat a story told earlier – repeated because it is so damn bizarre – whenever a well or waterhole was happened upon, the eccentric Wingate would rush to the head of the column, drop his trousers and pants and bathe his nude backside in the water supply. Strangely, his men followed him ardently. Allen wrote, ‘His narrow blue eyes, narrow set, burned with an insatiable glare. His spare bony figure with its crouching gait had the hang of an animal run by hunting, yet hungry for the next night’s prey. Some demon chased Wingate over the [Ethiopian] highlands . . . perhaps to what is called greatness, perhaps to that failure to integrate [the various selves of the personality] which is called unhappiness.’ Not that Wingate was well liked, he wasn’t. But being well liked and getting men to follow you are different in war and peace. One senses that men knew Wingate would win.
It was not completely straightforward. Local chiefs were canny, wanting arms without having to fight with them. Wingate split his Gideon Force into parts under different European officers, each sent to recruit the nation to his cause. He had a trump card which he played to the full. At the head of his army rode, on a mule, Emperor Haile Selassie, deposed after fighting against the Italian invaders in 1936.
Selassie, christened Tafari, which becomes Ras Tafari (ras meaning ‘head’ or ‘chief’), was simultaneously becoming a messiah to the people of Jamaica. Leonard Howell, a globe-trotting Jamaican of a religious turn of mind, found himself at the coronation of Haile Selassie (also in attendance would be Wilfred Thesiger, one of Wingate’s Gideon Force commanders – perhaps they even stood next to each other at some point). Howell was greatly impressed by this African Emperor and on his return to Jamaica started preaching the good news that would become Rastafarianism. Though his and Bob Marley’s lives overlapped (both died in 1981), Howell never adopted dreadlocks.
Selassie, then, was also a man with charisma. Together with the prophet Wingate they began to persuade the tribal factions of Abyssinia that the Italians would be beaten. Picking their way over the thorn-studded hill country with camels and mules, Wingate’s tiny force gradually accumulated local support. In the end he marched into Addis Ababa with Haile Selassie. The remnant of the Italian army in Ethiopia were harried and tailed by four or five Europeans, 140 Sudanese and a few hundred Ethiopians. The Italians abandoned a ravine of the Blue Nile that they had been trying to hold and scrambled towards the mountains in the north. One of the few Europeans with this part of Gideon Force was Thesiger, later to achieve fame as a desert explorer. He was given orders by Wingate to hold a narrow panhandle of land between two plateaux. Meanwhile Wingate attacked from the rear. In total over 8,000 Italian troops surrendered. In the end, more than 20,000 members of the Italian colonial army would be imprisoned. The Blue Nile was again in British hands. Wingate had given people at home something to cheer about, stiffening the resolve of
the rest of the allied troops engaged in the north African campaign.
We know so much about the mad Wingate not just because of the fame of his bum-cooling eccentricities, but because in his tiny army (when you exclude the Ethiopians and Sudanese) there were some exceptional men who accompanied him: as well as Thesiger – Laurens van der Post and Hugh Boustead. Thesiger would go on to become the iconic explorer of the 1950s. Van der Post would write exceptional books about his time in Japan later on during the war – which were turned into the David Bowie film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence; he would also become a confidant of Prince Charles (who, in true six-degrees fashion, would later meet the former terrorist Sadat while on his honeymoon with Princess Diana). Boustead had been, with Almásy and Wingate, a member of the Zerzura Club; he had also been on two Everest expeditions.
Thesiger was described by a fellow officer as ‘donnish and shy, though with a taste for hard living that surpassed even Wingate’. Van der Post amazed everyone by his constant activity and his abilities as both vet and medic. He was the only one who did not lose camels in the stony passes above the mile-deep canyon of the Blue Nile. He was also an overt Christian, though this translated into action – helping others – rather than preaching, and was naturally welcomed.
These interesting and unusual men were attracted to, and driven by, the ultimate oddball, Orde Wingate. Wingate brought a religious perspective to war. For him every war was a holy war. If he couldn’t make it into one he wasn’t interested. In Palestine, David Ben-Gurion said that Wingate, as a passionate Zionist, taught the Jewish settlers everything they needed to seize control of the land that would become Israel. In a highly dramatic few years Wingate would go on to attempt suicide, found the Chindit army in Burma, catch typhoid from impulsively drinking water from a flower vase in Iran (this was part of the Gideon mentality he favoured – Gideon picked only men who lapped up water like animals rather than decorously using their hands to scoop it up) and ultimately die in a plane crash before the war ended.
It doesn’t always do to find out too much about your heroes. When I met Thesiger in his London flat about ten years before he died he told me that ‘Van der Post “went off”, started believing his own propaganda. Though he was a very nice man when I knew him earlier.’ Thesiger himself was the model of self-deprecation. He cooked me boil-in-the-bag curried rice and showed me the giraffe thighbone he had used to beat off a mugger in Kenya.
On another occasion I met the last-surviving member of the Zerzura Club – the ninety-five-year-old Rupert Harding Newman. When I mentioned Hugh Boustead’s name to Harding Newman (who also knew Almásy), he said, ‘Awful man. Horrible little man.’ What could one say? Explorers, war heroes, ‘great’ men, all drawn by the river for one last Nile adventure . . . oddballs, freaks, misfits who had found at last their place in the scheme of things.
5 • The high dam changes the score
The river that flows into a lake only reaches the sea by changing its nature to become clouds and rain. Sudanese proverb
And, with a little help from such men, the British won the war. Roll credits. Oh, second feature: how they lost their empire.
Had those wonderful British hydro-engineers become too bogged down in the Sudd? Lost their political nous? Or transferred their will to rule people to simply ruling water? Whatever the complex reasons, by the late 1940s the empire was being dismantled and the dwellers on the banks of the Nile were seizing control of their inheritance. And one way to do this was to build a great big dam.
I started researching this book with an undisguised hatred of the Aswan high dam. Now I am not so sure. It is almost too easy to see in the high dam evidence of hubris, of man yet again overstepping the mark. The more one studies the effort expended by the Greek Egyptian Daninos to get the thing even on to the agenda – petitioning constantly from 1912 to 1956 through three wars and a revolution – the more one begins to admire the sheer breathtaking scale of the project.
In order to be built on a gravel and sand floor the dam could not be a straight barricade of concrete, as the lower Aswan dam is. Instead it took advantage of the burgeoning discipline of soil mechanics effectively to become a false hill, a new part of the landscape. Just as the Suez Canal was an attempt to rework nature and physically change the world, so too was the Aswan dam.
Seen from the side, the Aswan dam looks like a very shallow-angled pile of gravel. It extends upstream for over half a mile, which gives the highest point a gradient of less than 1 in 5, which is very shallow indeed for a dam. By spreading itself so far back upstream the dam provides a gradient for silt to be deposited and a substantial guarantee against any kind of collapse. It had always been a concern that the dam might be blown up by Israelis during one of the several conflicts in the later part of the twentieth century (the latest coming in 1998 with a threat by Avigdor Lieberman, who later became Israeli Foreign Minister, that Israel might nuke the Aswan dam; he was later sacked for fraud). But, short of a direct hit by an atomic weapon, the sheer size of the dam beneath what is visible on the surface militates against its easy destruction by force.
As mentioned earlier, recent studies on silt deposition have also proved surprising: far less silt has been deposited than was previously estimated. Almost certainly the slowing of the Nile before it reaches Lake Nasser causes silt to be deposited further up the river, effectively reducing the river’s gradient and speed before it enters the lake. Though it is estimated that the lake will be silted up in 500 years, the truth is that no one knows how long such a thing will take. And now, with work proceeding on an enlarged dam on the Blue Nile, and the Atbara already dammed, silt production will be reduced still further.
The engineering problems of the high dam were not just about logistics and shovelling vast amounts of crushed rock into place. A suitable curtaining method was needed to extend far below the dam to stop water seeping through the river bed and appearing on the other side – as constantly happened with the barrage, which was also built on sand (the rock bed of the Nile being miles deep in the delta, as we discovered earlier). The curtain devised at Aswan was an Egyptian engineer’s invention – a series of ‘pipes’ of grouting – cement and sand – were injected 135 feet down to the granite bed beneath the dam (a granite bed which German engineers set at eighty-five feet until their work was checked and they were fired for a sloppiness which could have resulted in a disastrous flood under the dam). The curtain of closely set vertical pipes extends down to the granite base. This forest of underground pipes spreads fully the width of the river and sixty-five-feet upstream from the dam base. Water may seep under the heaped-up sand, rockfill and gravel of the dam but it cannot penetrate through the curtain.
The Nubian people in Sudan lost half their town of Wadi Halfa. Many were relocated to a new town, New Halfa, very close to the Atbara river dam. Were they happy? Is anyone happy at losing their ancestral land? Though they had suffered before when the first dam was built, and suffered again when the dam was then raised, it appears that resignation rather than anger was their response at being moved.
The Egyptian contractors building the dam – who worked with the Russians after a purely Russian attempt with Egyptian labour had failed – claimed that fifty men a year were killed in the building of the structure. One of the most high profile who died was the obsessively driven chief engineer Amin el-Sherif. He moved permanently from Cairo and spent fifteen or more hours a day in his office at the new dam. He started a system of night shifts in the summer to overcome the heat. Powered by generators attached to the old dam, electric floodlights lit a hellish scene of excavators and dumper trucks working through the night to build the vast earthwork. El-Sherif had to report every day how much rock had been shifted, and he managed to bring the project, which had been a year behind, up to speed by the end of 1962. His job done, he took a drive to survey his work from the comfort of his black VW Beetle. When the car didn’t move, workers went to investigate and found the fifty-year-old el-Sherif dead at the wheel.
Though Germans, Britons and Russians all like to claim the credit for the Aswan high dam, it was made possible by Egyptian labour and, though this is often overlooked, by a very high level of Egyptian engineering skill.
6 • Cold War blows on the Nile
A man struggling with a brave man cannot afford to be shy.
Ethiopian proverb
The dam captured the public imagination. Students volunteered in their hundreds in 1963 to help keep the dam on target. Here was Nasser not only reclaiming the Suez Canal but giving his country a giant project in which everyone could join in and celebrate. But though it was later represented to the world as a Russian-financed Egyptian triumph, in fact this most recent attempt to control Egypt’s Nile had its roots in the broken dreams of Britain and its new competitor on the world stage – America.
The standard story is that Nasser got British, American and World Bank backing for the dam, then, when he bought arms from the Czechs, the deal was off. But this Cold War cover actually obscures the truth. For a start, the deal with the Americans and the British was made after the deal for Soviet-controlled arms. The British could live with Nasser buying weapons from the Eastern bloc as long as they still controlled the Nile.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 49