Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  Toshka vegetables reach rich folk’s supermarkets such as Metro and Carrefour. Some are even exported abroad. Only private agricultural companies can make the land pay. The smart money is not made by feeding the Egyptian poor but by lining the pockets of the already rich. Which would be OK-ish, if the money trickled back into Toshka – but it doesn’t. No sane Egyptian would want to live there if they had the choice. In 1997 we heard all about the schools and hospitals that would be built – but so far, none have been.

  The ‘second phase’ of the plan was quietly dropped seven years ago – in this phase two million acres were supposed to have been snatched back from the desert as prime agricultural land. The quantity of reclaimed desert is controversial. Some claim 16,000 acres have been cultivated. Others declare it is as shockingly low as 1,000 acres.

  In short, it’s a mega-project disaster. According to the US State Department, which has, through various forms of aid, funded some of Toshka, the budget for the whole fiasco is an incredible $87 billion. But the publicly available figures for the Egyptian budget don’t even mention the Toshka project.

  The Nile deceives. The Nile gives dictators grand ideas and then refuses to let them come true. The bankruptcy of Mubarak’s vision for Egypt becomes the literal bankruptcy of the grand plan. The new President, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Morsi, brought to power by the revolution, soon turned his back on Toshka, partly because of its association with Mubarak, but partly because it’s the sane thing to do. The Brotherhood have said, ‘The answer to our problems is not in big projects. It’s about simple things . . . affordable housing and investment that leads to jobs.’

  The year 2005 was when the Toshka dream died. It was about this time that Mubarak handed over a lot of the decision making in Egypt to his son Gamel. From 2005 onwards I noticed Egyptians getting gloomier and gloomier. The rich got richer through corrupt construction deals (Gamel’s version of a big plan) and the poor scurried around in a world that was speeding up and getting poorer at the same time.

  12 • Revolution on the Nile

  The blade of the axe does not cut stone. Egyptian proverb

  This is how it happens: a country comes into existence because of the bounty, the sheer good luck, of a flood, a summer flood that makes it easy to grow a surplus of grain. The country becomes rich, waxes and wanes, is invaded and repulses invaders. Then important people decide, like the proverbial farmer and his golden goose, to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. They dam the river. This means, at first, that more food is grown, more people can be supported, and, very easily, the population increases. So the river is dammed again and even more people can be fed. But the cycle cannot go on for ever. What has happened is that the dynamic of the river has been replaced by a static model of economic growth – a model that is clearly unsustainable in such a country as Egypt. More and more people have nowhere to live; they migrate to cities and attend school and have no jobs. These are the people of the revolution. They will bring down the leader of the country, the spiritual successor of the man who dammed the Nile. It is a poetic revenge by history, perhaps.

  It starts with something you don’t believe. All wars and revolutions and disasters have this moment of disbelief. It can be monstrous – when I saw the Twin Towers collapse I thought at first I was seeing a movie, having accidentally been switching across channels. Or it can be a minor disbelief, nothing out of the ordinary. I was round at my pal Roland’s house. He’s an artist and so is his wife Lucy, who teaches at a big international school with many rich Egyptian kids in attendance. She came home from school that Monday and said, ‘All the kids are saying tomorrow’s protest will be a big one.’

  I hadn’t given it any thought and my wife Samia – she’s a journalist and should know, it’s her job after all – turning to speak from her glowing laptop that night said, ‘It’ll be nothing. It’s all talk.’

  It was the biggest demonstration in Egyptian history.

  It was then I knew that things were not going to go away. If a Tuesday could bring out that many people, a Friday would be, had to be, enormous.

  Again, you don’t believe it even as you are watching it. But you believe the sounds of your neighbourhood, you believe the sight of young lads running past your house holding iron bars and sticks and bottles half full of petrol.

  Egyptians had never risen against their own leader before. Nasser had ridden an anti-British wave, not an anti-royalist one. Before that it had been, since Cleopatra’s time, just a succession of invasions, one taking over the country from the last, while the fellahin kept managing the canals and irrigation ponds and shadoufs and worrying about the flood. Clever Egyptians had always managed to rise to the top, and Egypt has a way of making anyone who stays there into an Egyptian.

  As for the Egyptian people themselves: ‘You can’t keep them out,’ mused Professor George Scanlon to me one evening at the Italian Club shortly before the revolution happened. He meant it in the broadest possible sense: not just the pressure of an increasing population demanding its share, but a kind of Egyptian safety valve. Egypt has a way of bending the rules so that a kind of institutional inclusivity always develops. When too many poor relations have wangled their way into somewhere exclusive, rich people move on and start another club, school, beach resort. But it’s temporary; the process is inexorable and works to level the country and iron out what might be constricting and damaging differences in another less flexible culture. Scanlon, Professor of Islamic Art, had excavated the ruins of Fustat, the first site of an Islamic Cairo, and had lived in Cairo since the late 1940s. Now he had just retired after the American University moved their campus from Midan Tahrir to way out past the ring road in a reclaimed bit of desert. Ironically a bigger, uglier campus, for more students, further reducing its exclusivity.

  It seems that Egyptians have managed to find some sort of accommodation with their rulers since the beginning of time. Now it looked as if they were changing their tune and going for a knock-out blow.

  Before the revolution we’d moved away from our Nileside apartment, though I was still writing there. Our new place was in New Maadi, a good half-hour’s walk from the river. Quite close to where our apartment block was built were found remains of ‘Maadi man’, a prehistoric ancestor of the ancient Egyptians who built the Pyramids. Maadi man had lived off the bounty of a stream that fed into the Nile, now called Wadi Digla. Symbolically, perhaps, the dry streambed is being laid with giant pipes to function as a sewer for the new towns being built in the desert. Walking to work I can follow the sewer to the river, which sounds worse than it is.

  When the revolution happened, you could hear from our apartment (which is on the third floor) the guns firing on the Corniche. My wife had wanted to join the protests as she’s Egyptian, and sympathised with the idea of removing Mubarak. That he was gangster, a reasonably benign one, but still a gangster, I knew. It was obvious. In a gangster state the poor and the weak are victimised by the police. In a healthy police state like Morocco it is the rich who are targeted for tips and small traffic bribes. In all my time in Egypt, driving a high-status 4x4 I had been stopped only once by a policeman – and then it was to ask for a lift. In Egypt, if you had a big 4x4 or a Merc and possibly a BMW, then life on the road was one long green wave . . . but not for much longer.

  I was in two minds. I knew Mubarak and his rich cronies were corrupt, but I had benefited, a bit, from their corruption. I had written travel brochures for the Egyptian Tourist Board, which derived its money from revenues in Sharm el-Sheikh – which was built up with Mubarak money and favours. I used the fast internet in Cairo that was a direct result of decisions taken by the Prime Minister – a creature of Mubarak. As had many of the rich kids currently protesting against him. It was all confused in my mind. I saw then that it is always young people and angry or retarded older people who make revolutions. A normal person, as they get older, sees how incredibly complex the ecosystems of politics and reform are. Everything depends on every
thing else. Mubarak may have ripped off the Egyptian people in one sense, but he had kept them out of war for thirty-eight years. In the Middle East that was quite an achievement. I had benefited from the high-speed internet this Prime Minister, a tech head, had brought in. It was faster to log on in Cairo than in Oxford, I found. I had benefited from the ATMs and the ludicrously cheap gas – 10p a litre, less for diesel. That gas had fuelled cheap desert holidays when we burned over the dunes with ten jerry cans in the back to be refilled without even thinking. Ten jerries in the UK would cost about £300 to fill. I had benefited, but I had also lost out. The new rules allowing lax lending had driven up the new-car population and the overall car population by about 300 per cent in many areas. The road along the Nile was heaving night and day with cars. The accidents were horrendous. In rich areas like ours everyone’s kids had cars too. An empty street I used to walk along was now impossible to park in. To walk along it was like striding against the madness of crowds, mechanical crowds. I’m whining about the traffic and there’s a revolution happening outside my window.

  The word itself vouchsafes the experience. What exactly is a revolution? Do the means of production have to change hands? Must the leaders of the ancien régime be executed? I think about this, I honestly do, as I lie awake hearing the noises of the revolution outside and the telephone ringing as friends and family call in to report what is happening outside their apartments. Not that it seems quite like a revolution on that first Friday. Some kind of crackdown is feared, must be forthcoming. The hysteria mounts and we watch amazed to see police cars and trucks burning, on TV, all over Cairo.

  I wake to hear the doorbell ringing: it is Umm Sabrine, who comes every Saturday to clean our flat – come rain or . . . revolution. Umm Sabrine, the mother of Sabrine, has crossed the city from her neighbourhood in Sayeda Zeinab, a poor area where, she tells us, the locals have torched the notorious police station, one famous for torturing and abusing suspects. Many of the attackers came from the slaughterhouses in that area and the police ran away, she said, after a short battle. I don’t even know Umm Sabrine’s name, no one seems to, though I’ve met Sabrine her daughter who isn’t half as nice. Umm Sabrine must be about seventy; she complains of her health but she keeps working every day of the week. She’s always early and has no fear of heights – often you’ll see her leaning right out of window like a rock climber, keen to get it clean on both sides. She is illiterate, and has the gift of the gab and good timing. She is humble but assertive – a good combination. She tells me in all seriousness that her daughter has seen the Suzanne Mubarak Library on fire and the shops of Nasre Street looted and destroyed. The coward in me vied with the curious soul. I set out to investigate.

  Everywhere was quiet, though in the distance there was the occasional sound of gunfire, which you get to be an expert on very quickly because, when people are free to fire guns, they do so much of it that the nuances of the noises made by each weapon become burned into your consciousness. I used to be a little disbelieving of war-movie lines in which ‘incoming’ was dissected with skill, both type and direction. I now saw it was a lot easier than bird watching, there being far fewer species of gun and their reports all so distinctive. The workaday metallic flatness of Kalashnikov fire. The resonant firework boom of a howitzer. The backfire sound of a shotgun. I’m not sure if I heard any pistol fire. I congratulated myself on these observations, this coming up to speed with weaponry and war.

  I encountered very few people at first but passed more and more as I approached the roundabout in Nasre Street – where a day later a policeman would be murdered, a policeman who had long been reviled for taking money from people, it was said, a man whom I had driven past many times without wearing my seatbelt (an offence in Cairo only since the rise of Mubarak’s son Gamel). Certainly a revolution is a time for settling scores. But right now there were no police about. None. In a police state that’s a strange experience. It felt unexpected and full of possibilities; it reminded me of waking up as a child in England and finding it had snowed in the night. The police had left their vehicles, abandoned them. Many were burned. They had given up the little pit-stops they favoured, with the spiky anti-drive barricades and a tin roof to provide shade. All these huts had been destroyed, often down to the foundations. One place I had always rather resented having to step off the pavement to go round, resented the cocksure officer who sat in his black Toyota pickup with a raised covering for troops in the back – his little place was completely destroyed. It felt mighty good to see that, and, I noted, without police everyone was much more polite. Much more.

  In the only supermarket I could find open there was a great queue for food. A woman, well dressed, well made up, the type who would have pushed in or been haughty and rude, was self-effacing and polite – normal actually, fear had made her normal. I thought now why revolutions are so intoxicating. The social order is reversed. The last shall be first and the first shall be last.

  13 • Roland and the jets

  Wood that is wet from the river must be forced to burn.

  Ethiopian proverb

  I am at Roland’s enjoying the view from his balcony. I am not sure why he is living in Cairo, maybe to get better views than you would living in England. Like me, he’s after the material. He mainly paints landscapes of the desert and sometimes cityscapes, which he makes look like views of desert cliffs and escarpments because often they include such features, the Moqattam Hills blending into the Citadel and north Cairo quite effortlessly. Roland is a big beefy bloke, painter as welder would be the type, not uncommon. In fact he told me he used to earn money as a welder before his art began to sell.

  Like many artists Roland has an interest in the military, in planes especially, but tanks will do. He tells me about a battle between looters and the army he watched yesterday from his balcony. The wall of the satellite area opposite (one of Egypt’s major telecom centres with giant satellite dishes angled up to the universe), which the looters tried to breach (usually defended by policemen dozing in prison-style watchtowers, now by the army, but for three days by no one), is pockmarked with AK74 rounds and quite a few holes from the heavy machine gun on the tank – maybe 12.7mm, Roland speculates. The holes are big, but even the 5.54mm rounds can make a hole in concrete if they hit at the right angle. So the message is: don’t expect to be safe behind a solid concrete wall unless it’s more than three inches thick, maybe a lot more. The looters, or ‘thugs’ as everyone calls them (from the direct translation of the Arabic word baltagi), were armed with AK74s too. The army killed two of them and hauled one other away. The rest escaped.

  ‘Killed them?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep, they certainly looked pretty dead from up here.’

  This is both good and bad news. Good, primarily. When the main source of trouble is the thugs, which it is, then any deaths are a relief. If you have a family at home behind a barricaded door armed only with a headhunting dao I picked up in Nagaland and a couple of kitchen knives and a wooden sword, then any deaths among the bad guys are welcomed. We know they are the bad guys because they are attacking protesters whose only crime is to sit down in Tahrir Square. A bunch of kids mainly, some of whom I know quite well like Amr, who was there the night they were charged by horses and camels and said it was a lot more frightening than it looked. He said the government would have won if only they hadn’t been so stupid as to close off all the exits. Intent on a total slaughter, they missed victory and ended up defeated.

  The army are considered the good guys because, though they aren’t arresting Mubarak, they are stopping the thugs from attacking ordinary people away from Tahrir. In the square they just watch and wait.

  The thugs are armed gangs recruited by businessmen over the previous decade to protect their interests. When a shop has a dispute in Cairo with another shop, they send round a few blokes with iron bars to break up the shop front and dish out a few beatings. They also throw stones and even plant pots. Our plant pots on one occasion when the internet caf
é below us was targeted by the furniture store above it for hanging a sign too low and thus blocking the internet café sign. The fight was thick and furious, but no real bloodshed despite the mean and deadly-looking iron bars everyone was wielding. That’s the thing about fights, wars, struggles – the number of injuries seems disproportionately lower than the armaments would suggest. Except the First World War, the Hutu–Tutsi massacre and a few other counter-examples. I suppose I am talking about war as a means and not war as extermination.

  The thugs have been swelled by prisoners let out of Tora Prison, which is just over the autostrade from where we live. Over the concrete flyover and down about half a mile of leafy suburban streets and you’re at our house. Gangs of thugs were repulsed by homeowners on Saturday night, the biggest night of battles for our neighbourhood. On Sunday morning the army put a tank on the crossroads a hundred yards from our street. A big khaki tank. The people carried sticks and knives to defend their shops and homes and set up roadblocks. This is a posh neighbourhood. I always spoke English at the roadblocks and usually someone smiled. Egyptians have a great sense of humour, possibly the world’s best, when they are not scared. When they get scared they lose their sense of humour totally. I once drove through a checkpoint without permission in the Sinai and dared crack a joke to the fuming officer who stopped me. Normally he would have laughed, but in the Sinai they are scared and it was only because I had my son with me that I wasn’t arrested and given a hard time. As it was, he shouted a great deal at me. Nervous. Scared. No sense of humour. I tell Roland as we look out and we agree that the English sense of humour, though vastly overrated, is not allowed to disappear when the shit hits the fan. It’s supposed to flourish. You put a brave face on it. Actually I can think of several Egyptians who were cracking jokes the whole time, so maybe I am completely wrong.