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

by Twigger, Robert

  But Roland and I are feeling like we have been in a war and it’s a good feeling until we hear shots. ‘Over there,’ says Roland – we are both getting better at this game. Roland has his binoculars but we’ve both seen the movie. The glasses may catch the light, give our position away. ‘Shall we go in?’ I say. We go in and watch from inside through the open balcony doors. Why risk it? That’s a revolution for you: you’re always asking yourself, ‘Why risk it?’ So you end up holed up at home and not going out. Except it’s perfectly safe outside, maybe even safer than before because there are far fewer cars.

  In a car you feel safer until you see a hold-up, then you feel scared, trapped; you work out how to open the car door, roll out into the dust and leg it. You understand pretty early on why war correspondents keep doing what, on the surface, looks like a shit job. They do it for the incredible sense of newness you get when a country suddenly goes from normal to unfuckingpredictable. I walked out of my house, down towards the Mubarak Library. The street was empty except for a few burned-out cars, a police truck still smouldering and a few young men taking pictures of said truck on their phones. They all looked nice enough guys. The only scare was about five motorbikes each with two up roaring by. Baltagis ride bikes usually followed by a couple of Peugeots crammed with blokes. But they are gone. The Mubarak Library is fine. No looting, no fire, even the flag is still flying, and the two caretakers are wearing their blue and yellow uniforms looking wary but reasonably cheerful.

  This incredible sense of newness, this feeling that you are an explorer in a new land, doesn’t go away because every day there are new developments, new outrages and new signs. One day the US Embassy bus is attacked by a mob – stoned, the news report says. This sounds . . . terrible, until I talk to someone who was actually on the bus: one stone went through a back window and everyone is fine. But it’s enough to convince even the diehard Americans to leave. I start to formulate a rule: if there is no local evidence of something reported then it’s an exaggeration or an outright lie. Foreigners are being attacked, comes the report. I see no evidence of it in my neighbourhood, but then all the foreigners are leaving. Every day, in forlorn little convoys of microbuses and their favoured giant 4x4s. I can’t help thinking, ‘Fucking cowards, fuck you you arsehole businessman, you oil worker, you bank scumbag. You lord it over everyone but when the going gets tough you leg it! Fuck you!’

  A day later I am enquiring about ‘the last flight out’ offered by the British Embassy, who, after they have ascertained that we are truly British, are very helpful in that understated, competent way the British excel at. If 9/11 had happened in Britain the emergency services would have got everyone out alive, one thinks on such occasions, though of course plenty would disagree and probably volubly too. The American in the airport I see blubbing is quite a sight. He is about fifty-five, as fat as a cream cake, cone-shaped in his Hawaiian shirt. ‘I been here twenty-five years. Twenty-five good years,’ he keeps blubbing. Come on, chum, put a sock in it. Obviously he loves the expat lifestyle and has made it permanent. The barbies, the big cars, the trips to the beach, horseriding round the Pyramids at dawn, getting to shout at people lower down the food chain than you. Put a sock in it, fatso, you’ll live to play another day. But that is all in the future after my capitulation, my caving in, my fleeing from the revolution.

  After leaving Roland’s I increase my range to visit my pal Matthew, a librarian at the American University. On the way I hear lots of shots quite close. When I arrive at Matthew’s he is packing up, ready to leave. I tell him things aren’t too bad, but I am interrupted by the longest burst of gunfire I have yet heard. Really loud. It’s hard to argue against in any sense. Matthew says the other American teachers agreed to defend the block by staying up all night in shifts. But they started drinking about nine and by eleven-thirty they were too pissed to do much, so they all went to bed leaving Matthew to guard the block (with the Egyptian doorman and his assistant) all night long. In a way it didn’t matter since they weren’t attacked, but understandably Matthew is pissed off, and tired. On my own building, because it is right next door to a mosque, there is no shortage of defenders. The mosque PA, which is bolted to a pole about a foot from our balcony, is now a source of comfort and support rather than loud call-to-prayer broadcasts at 5 a.m. The mosque relays information throughout the night, ‘The thugs are in the next street. The army is at the crossroads. More thugs in Gazeir Street.’ It is very comforting. Private enterprise is represented in our street by two internet cafés, frequented by small boys who lean on our cars and break off the wing-mirrors. The cafés have provided nothing for the community since I have been there bar a place for small kids to play shoot-’em-up games that they also play at home. In this time of trouble the cafés are locked down with iron gratings over the windows. The mosque never closes and is a real force for unity and help in the community when it is under attack. And I don’t even like the caretaker at the mosque, a grumpy old devil with a huge praying mark on his forehead.

  So Matthew gone, Roland phones and says he is going too. My wife Samia says she will stay and I should go. I say I’ll stay, but the next day there are reports that more foreigners are being targeted downtown. It gets harder to argue against rumours when they seem to affect you personally. I start to rationalise. My son is refusing to go outside, whereas my daughter at least walks round the neighbourhood with me when I make a sortie. My son has built a barricade of all his toys which he calls ‘the nest’. It seems perverse to carry on in this sort of scenario when we could be back in England watching it all on TV at his grandma’s house, playing footie in the park and listening to audiobooks of horrible histories. So quite quickly I decide to go. Buying the tickets online (they’ve turned the internet back on now) is done in two ticks. We are off tomorrow, it seems, just like that.

  14 • The author leaves his story

  The axe does not sharpen itself. Sudanese proverb

  I had been here seven years; I thought I would live here seven more, like the biblical lean and fat years, seven seemed a good number. Now I was leaving, running for home, another home.

  ‘I’ve never seen a real tank before,’ says my son on the way to the airport, ‘and now I’ve seen nine.’ Yep, real tanks with swivelling guns that line up on you as you approach, tanks at every motorway sliproad, on-ramp, watch out the army is out in force. The country is locked down tight, no one could move around the ring road – which we are using to get to the airport – if these tanks decided to trundle into the centre lane.

  I made my plan, which was basically to go early but not too early. The curfew was until 7 a.m., or was it 8? No one seemed to know. I knew that first thing the local barricades were still up and people were tired and jumpy from a night of watching. By about 9 a.m. things were more normal, everyday life had started again. By 11 a.m. they were starting to get a bit nervous, which worsened until the curfew again at 3 p.m., or was it 4? So, tactically, the best time to be on the ring road was 9–9.30 a.m., even though our flight wasn’t until 2 p.m.

  Yes, compared to that SAS raid on Benghazi I’d been reading about only the other day it was tame stuff: being driven in a taxi by our trusted taxi driver Gamel, we were stopped only once by a fairly bored bunch of soldiers who wanted to look in the boot as we approached the airport. Everyone was alert in the car, waiting for something to go wrong. It felt exciting but also boring. The boring part of war is you can’t get on with your own life. At first that’s a giant relief, and I’m sure a lot of heroes are people whose own lives were tedious and irritating and war offered a welcome release. But my life, though moderately dull by any standards, still held a few attractions, and once all the fun of sneaking around and going through roadblocks and checkpoints and seeing what places had been looted and what hadn’t, once that became, not routine, but somehow less interesting, then I wanted to get on with what I wanted to do, such as make a trip up the Nile to Luxor to investigate something I needed for this book, so though it was an inter
esting experience it wasn’t a life-changing one. I wasn’t about to drop everything and become a war correspondent.

  Partly it was the fact that I didn’t have the same instincts as war-correspondent types. For my friend Steve, who’s been shot at by Israelis, carried wounded Palestinian children and made a film about the aftermath of the Jenin massacre, the revolution meant finding out what was really going on. The night snipers were defending the Interior Ministry; he kept going closer and closer until he passed a group bringing back a dead body. They begged him to go back but he went on. Then he met some more with another dead body who begged him even more strongly to turn back. ‘That begging wasn’t the normal kind of alarmist begging you get in Egypt, it was quiet, it had the ring of truth all right.’ He turned back. But not before he had shot film of the hospitals and prowled around all over the place. And, unlike me, who look Egyptian enough until I open my mouth, Steve looks foreign, foreign and tall, and carrying a couple of cameras. But still without fear of going anywhere. My own inclination was to avoid all the places that others were going to. Why go to Tahrir Square? Why snoop around with a camera? It wasn’t my country. It wasn’t my revolution. I felt this quite strongly. I guess it meant I wasn’t a revolutionary at heart, whatever my former protestations had been. I liked sneaking around my neighbourhood, seeing how that had changed, seeing what I knew and what was familiar, but I hardly ever went downtown these days, and anyway, what would I do? Chant?

  I’m not a team player and revolutions need team players. I wasn’t Egyptian and going to ogle seemed brainless. My wife went downtown to join the crowd for a day – this was the day, the turning point it now seems, when the baltagi rode into the square on horses and camels. She’d left before that happened, and it was lucky she did, because they locked the square down until 12 p.m. As I said, my pal Amr said he would have fled, everyone would have fled, if it hadn’t been locked down. In a way, the army had saved the revolution by forcing the protesters to unwillingly face the baltagi . . . and win.

  After my wife had been downtown once, I said why go again? She wanted to go but I thought she’d shown enough solidarity. We need you here, safe and sound, I said. Several times. But still she was staying, to look after her mother and our apartment, or that was thrown in as an extra, a spin-off from looking after relatives. The apartment might be tempting. I had already lost my car – stolen one night from a supposedly safe place quite near to where the Carrefour hypermarket was looted.

  Later, watching looters at work in Britain I realised what an amazingly well-orchestrated job had been done on Carrefour. Not only was the entire hypermarket relieved of all its goods but so were the surrounding shops. One cousin of my wife’s who lived near by (it was his driveway from which the car was nicked) reported that the looting was ‘steady like a breeze’ all night long, trucks and vans and cars, no arguments, no frenzy, just slow and steady and methodical looting, leaving the hyper-market quite bare by morning. Later it emerged that the government had probably encouraged this highly public act in order to show that the country was under attack. Bad, greedy men are often assumed to be stupid, but they avoid being over-clever, over-sophisticated. Badness and greediness don’t go with creativity and imagination, not long term; crooks tend to stick to what works and then repeat it. The bad, greedy men who ruled Egypt had worked out how the carrot and stick worked long ago. Letting a bit of looting happen would reward their thugs and let the world know Egypt was under attack. Why Carrefour and not, say, my street? Because Carrefour would be in the news. It was, in my experience, the only serious bit of looting that happened. In our own street I found a broken drinks machine. That was it. Then my mother-in-law was mugged – the day we left for the airport. It gave a new impetus to leaving, though surely it should have been her instead of me? Two guys, they looked normal, not angry, quite well dressed, zoomed up on a motorbike as we faffed around by our taxi making an obvious show of bags and suitcases. The bike was on us in seconds. I remember thinking What’s that bike doing so close? – and then seeing my mother-in-law, who is seventy-six, fighting to hold on to the bag, but she’s canny and let go without being pulled over. I ran after the bike for three steps, she ran for more. Impossible. I shall never forget the face of the bag snatcher. There was no hint of malice or even victory – simply the look of a job done, perhaps the job was a little harder than expected, almost a quizzical look; you’d never clock this guy as a robber in a hundred years. Looked like a shop assistant or a government clerk.

  Gamel, our trusted taxi driver, started to make excuses about his heart, how he couldn’t run after them because of his heart. I said no problem, I didn’t run either. It was impossible, they were too far ahead, though every bike I saw from then on with two riding I scrutinised. I would not forget that face.

  And then my trousers were stolen. First the car – my favourite ever vehicle, a short-wheelbase Toyota Land Cruiser specially adapted for desert travel with one-ton rear springs and no back seats etc etc. Every time I got into that vehicle it brought a smile of fun and satisfaction and growling macho potential to the accelerator foot – a rumbling menacing truck of a car on massive tyres . . . nicked. Probably now it was in Libya or the Sinai with a rocket launcher bolted to the back. It did, however, have a few technical issues that needed fixing, and strangely I felt, after waves of nausea, a pinprick sensation of relief – I wouldn’t have to get it fixed after all.

  Not so my trousers. These were again my favourites. A pair of zip-off North Face trousers I had used for several desert rambles and had found excellent in every way. They had been entrusted to the boy who carried our wet laundry on his bike – in a plastic crate tied to the back – to the place where it was ironed for a small fee. He left his bike outside our building and asked the bawab, a man of immense laziness, to watch it for him. While he went into the shop, probably for cigs as he had, aged 13, just taken up heavy smoking. In England, agreeing to watch someone’s belongings for them is a risky thing. It carries responsibilities that can be a bit nerve-racking. Not so in Egypt. People agree to do things that would normally incur huge responsibility (like watching my car, for instance) with scarcely a second thought. If you want to understand Egypt, think of a nation of students: enthusiastic, humorous, up for a party, unreliable, gregarious, fun, not to be trusted with a car if it doesn’t belong to them, nor trousers it seems . . .

  So during the revolution crime increased exponentially. In fact it must have gone through the roof if I experienced three crimes against me and my family in such a short time – a few weeks. In a way they were all crimes of opportunity – and Egypt had been such a safe place that one had become more lax than one would be in London. I’d say Cairo is probably like anywhere else in the world – London, Paris, New York. It’s still way safer than Nairobi or Jo’burg.

  Anyway the boy’s bike was stolen and so were the trousers. The man who employed the boy and owned the ironing business agreed to pay me £50 for them. I knew he wouldn’t. He did give me £20 though. Which was something.

  Then we received a call (this was after I had returned to Egypt – we fled, stayed abroad for six weeks, realised things were fine, bar the thieving, and returned), a call from the police. They said they had caught my mother-in-law’s mugger. This call came at 8 p.m. and was answered by my wife. She and my mother-in-law were instructed to go down to Bassateen police station to identify the bag-snatching criminal. ‘Isn’t it a bit late to be visiting Bassateen?’ I said, but they brushed me aside in their eager desire for justice. When they arrived by taxi at the police station, however, they found it besieged by protesters of various kinds, all chanting, some armed. Inside, the supposed thief was a young lad of fifteen who, my wife said, looked incapable of any crime. But the tough detective said he came from the area’s most notorious crime family and was guilty of many such motorscooter muggings. But he was not the man. Then, in a moment of supreme uproar, that very boy’s family advanced on the station to break him out. The detective ran, unholstering hi
s gun as he went, leaving my wife and her mother with the chained and grinning criminals. All the policemen were needed, letting off rounds above the protesters’ heads, who were all now ducking, and fire was exchanged with the crime family before they scarpered in a fleet of broken-down Peugeot 504s. Before that happened, my wife and my mother-in–law, alone with the tethered crooks, looked in vain for a back entrance to the police station. Eventually one of the handcuffed prisoners pointed out a side-door. They left and were picked up by the same quick-minded taxi driver who had been circling the area waiting for them to leave. It was quite a night, all told.

  15 • Baboon wars

  The love of the baboon: in times of dew she carries her young under her, in times of rain she carries her young on her back. Sudanese proverb

  In my journeys along the Nile I had seen hippos and crocs and learnt to be cautious of both. But I was most careful with baboons. A big alpha baboon, whatever the primatologists will tell you, can be real trouble. As we heard earlier, he can tear your head off he’s so strong. I think the baboon gods of the ancient Egyptians or the earlier baboon cave paintings I had seen in the desert, were a warning. In a simple and direct way, now backed up by extensive zoological studies, they suggested what becomes of some men in power. Those cave paintings had baboon bodies and human heads, and some were headless baboons, the most dangerous kind perhaps.