The bank took peasants who defaulted to the mixed court in Cairo, where many European judges heard cases that involved Europeans and Egyptians.44 The court ruled for the company to seize the land and evict the peasants. In these modern courts, European and modernized Egyptian judges heard the cases of Qina Province’s villagers and applied new civil laws and banking regulations. The southern peasants were, without a doubt, unfamiliar with these foreign legal codes and probably had never before been to Cairo—the big capital where their cases were heard without their presence. After seven thousand farmers from Hasanat lost their small plots to the bank, they complained in a petition sent to the government in Cairo:
The bank’s treatment of us was harsh to the worst extent. . . . We mortgaged our land to the Agricultural Bank at an interest rate of 9 percent. . . . As for our delay in paying, it is because of the aforementioned reasons [low Nile inundation and bad weather]. . . . When the bank started to dispossess us of our land, it made us pay fees in court that exceeded half of what we originally owed. It already confiscated the land and took hold of it, and the people are now landless and have nobody to rescue them. . . . The entirety of the village’s fields, 1,300 faddans [acres], are now confiscated by the Agricultural Bank . . . and in the meantime God afflicted us with another distress, that is, the existence of the [foreign] water and the sugar companies in Naj‘ Hammadi. . . . We suffer from hunger, our children become orphans, we lose our honor, our houses become ruins, and we are forced to migrate.45
The farmers of the villages of Armant, Khuzam, Nagada, and Isna had an even worse experience with the bank. While carrying the burden of their bank loans, they faced recurring years of low Nile inundation that left them with poor harvests, as well as high taxes, huge crop shortages, dramatically higher seed prices, and a sugar company that purchased their harvest at unfairly low rates. Furthermore, two foreign water and fertilizer companies had established monopolies in these two commodities in the province. While the water company was intolerably late in installing irrigation machinery, the fertilizer company provided peasants with services at excessively high prices. Qina’s peasants lamented that these conditions, coupled with being evicted from their land by the Agricultural Bank, had left their families and children in a state of complete misery.46
The Agricultural Bank soon showed signs of failure and collapse, but the colonial administration immediately stepped in to bail it out—unconditionally. The number of peasants borrowing from the bank declined precipitously, likely due to a creeping lack of confidence in the institution. While the bank had 106,373 borrowers in its first few years, this number drastically declined, reaching only 47,081 in 1907. During this crisis, the bank’s shareholders in London gratefully asserted that they relied, “not only [on] the financial guarantees of the Egyptian Government, but also on the definite support and encouragement given by that government to the enterprise.”47 In 1906, the Egyptian government guaranteed 3.5 percent of the debentures issued by the bank and allocated 6,570,000 British pounds from the state budget for that purpose. In fact, it was only the large shareholders, holding more than 150,000 British pounds, who would benefit from these advantages.48
Meanwhile, the government applied a strict free-market policy of nonintervention when it came to the Egyptian peasantry. Cairo’s offices received numerous collective petitions from Qina’s farmers protesting their evictions but did nothing to help them.49 Finally, in 1910, the Parliament suggested that the government initiate negotiations with the Agricultural Bank and other lenders to assist the debtors. The government responded, “The government has made sure that the bank uses its authority moderately against the debtors. The bank is now studying whether there is a way to decrease the debtors’ burden relatively. As for the government, it is now working on improving the agricultural conditions in the country, upon which its economic welfare is based, and believes that this is the best cure for the current conditions rather than its interference in the private deals of the banks.”50
The bank’s shareholders in London blocked the only legal exit for the peasants of Qina. In 1912, the government was considering a proposal to modify articles in the civil and commercial code of the mixed courts that would ban the seizure of indebted small properties. From their headquarters at 57½ Old Road Street, London, the committee members of the Agricultural Bank sent an urgent letter to the colonial administration in Egypt with a long memorandum attached opposing the proposal.51 They argued that they had initially embarked on this enterprise because of the government guarantees and support and declared, “We believe that the proposed legislation would be detrimental, rather than beneficial, to the interests of the Egyptian fellaheen.”52
The efforts of the shareholders in London met with great success. For several years to follow, hundreds more female and male peasants in the impoverished villages of Qina Province lost their small plots to the almighty bank.53
IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
Years of peripheralization, dispossession, debt, and poverty soon brought about a devastating environmental effect in Qina Province: a cholera epidemic. Cholera had invaded Egypt in its modern history at least twice before, once between 1830 and 1840, during the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, and another time in the mid-1860s. During the first outbreak, Upper Egypt was spared. Some Cairo residents even fled the capital for the safety of Upper Egypt. The second time cholera hit Egypt, while the informal empire was at work in the north and the marginalization of the south had already begun, the epidemic reached Upper Egypt. Qina Province reportedly lost 250 persons in one day.54 Under the colonial regime, official reports stated that cholera invaded Egypt in 1895–96, but it had found its way to Qina years before that.
In 1884, Mustapha Agha, the British consular agent at Luxor, attempted to draw attention to several environmental catastrophes he foresaw in Qina. Lord Cromer’s administration did not modernize the irrigation system, which affected the subsistence harvest of the peasants and put them into heavy debt. Cholera completed their growing misery:
The majority of the natives here are suffering a great deal on account of their misery. They continually subsist on bread made of maize and onions. . . . The causes for all this are numerous: 1. The produce grown by them being barely sufficient for payment of the Government land-taxes and for their maintenance. . . . 3. The epizooty (cattle disease). . . . 4. Being dispossessed in former times of cash and cereals. . . . They borrowed money at high rate of interest for the payment of the monthly installment for taxes and refunded in cereals at low prices. . . . The feddan [acre] generally yields from 1½ to 2½ ardabes, of which a portion is given to the creditors and the other portion to the Government for land taxes. The produce of the lands irrigated by means of the Shadoof [wooden water lifter] and Sakeyehs [shaykhs] which the natives subsist upon, is not sufficient for the payment of land taxes . . . the cholera and the epizooty reduced them to the lowest ebb.55
The government, nevertheless, did not recognize the disturbing news, and the province went ignored. Cholera lingered in Qina throughout the following years. In 1902, the local administration declared conclusively that “the cholera epidemic is spreading in numerous villages of the province.”56
One major factor precipitated the appearance of the epidemic in Qina: a lack of clean water for the lower classes. British physicians and sanitary officials of the time had already detected a direct correlation between cholera and the quality of the water supply. One official report stated, “If further evidence were needed to prove that cholera is chiefly a water-borne disease, the late epidemic in Egypt afforded ample.” The report continued, in reference to solving the crisis, that “during the period since [the] 1895–1896 epidemic of cholera a certain amount of work has been done in the larger provincial towns to provide the water supply with as much protection as possible from pollution, and some have been supplied from deep tube wells. In none of these towns did the disease assume an epidemic form.”57 Unfortunately, the villages of Qina were not among the lucky areas
saved by the colonial regime.
In 1880, the Egyptian government privatized water resources by giving a concession to the Cairo Water Company—a shareholding company managed by a foreign investor.58 According to the concession, the company was to install free public taps in urban areas in an attempt to provide clean water. The company installed the spigots and the Department of Public Works footed the bill.59 The company concentrated its work in Cairo, the Delta, and Middle Egypt but neglected Upper Egypt. Thousands of pounds were spent from the country’s budget to equip Cairo with free taps and improve the quality of drinking water, which paid off when cholera broke out. A 1902 report asserted that “the steps taken . . . to prevent the spread of the disease [cholera] in the town of Cairo, were especially successful.”60 The Delta received similar attention, followed by Middle Egypt, which reduced the severity of the epidemic in the north. For instance, the number of infected cases in Fayoum, south of Cairo, remarkably decreased between 1896 and 1902.61
The Cairo Water Company only started to pay attention to Qina Province after the epidemic had already spread. Even once the company did begin projects in Upper Egypt, it provided purified water only for the towns of Qina and Luxor, where state officials and Europeans resided, and ignored tens of surrounding villages. The local committee of the province, consisting of the corrupt landed elite, made most decisions about where to invite the company to undertake public works and install taps. Once the water company installed new systems in Qina, the capital city of the province, water quality finally improved and this successfully halted the disease: “At Keneh [Qina] . . . , which formerly drew its water from wells and stagnant back-water of the Nile, an engine, with pump, etc., was erected about eighteen months ago on the Nile. The result of this was very remarkable, only one case of cholera occurring in this town of 27,478 inhabitants whereas during the epidemic of 1896 no less than 422 cases were registered.”62 Elsewhere, the disease severely affected the neglected villages. As a 1902 report attested, “During the cholera epidemic, the inhabitants of Keneh enjoyed immunity from the disease, whilst the surrounding villages were infected.”63
The committee of Luxor—a town highly frequented by European tourists and residents and with a large population of elite Copts64—chose select places along the Nile where they worked on protecting water purity. The committee issued several warnings with preventive procedures to secure clean water, particularly where hotels and houses of wealthy Copts were located. For instance, a 1902 decision prohibited steamships and commercial boats from anchoring in the area between a particular waterwheel and the house of Monsieur Ensenger, as hotels took their water from this area. The decree did not allow common townspeople in Luxor to draw water there, forcing them to use an area south of the waterwheel. It also prohibited them from washing clothes or bathing animals near the designated hotel area, and those inhabitants who did not comply were subject to a fine of between 50 and 100 piasters.65
In the time of cholera, the province suffered from severe food shortages, and consequent malnutrition further deteriorated health conditions. The plague broke out as well. Because the Delta and Cairo were busy cultivating cotton, they relied on Upper Egypt for provision of wheat and other staple crops. Thus, the peasants of the south had to pay their tax in grain delivered to the state storehouses in each province. Ironically, when the Parliament was discussing this policy of in-kind tax, it presented it as a relief policy for Upper Egyptians, because Upper Egyptians were unable to submit their dues in cash like the rich Delta.66 In reality, the peoples of Qina were kept from consuming their wheat in order to sustain the rich north.
Lack of wheat killed many people during these dark times. It was such a rare and expensive commodity that every year during harvest, landless beggars asked charitable farmers for wheat.67 Sulayman Radwan was part of a gang of thirteen thieves who seasonally robbed peasants of their harvest. One night, his murdered son was found beside the bridge of a village with traces of wheat inside his pockets and shoes. Inspectors found other amounts of wheat buried in fields adjacent to the crime site, and the owners of these fields knew nothing about it—it was probably wheat he had stolen from other fields. More fresh wheat was also found in his house, although he had not grown any that year.68 Hungry thieves raided peasants’ houses during this time, demanding bread. When a gang of fifteen robbers attacked the house of a peasant on his farm to demand bread, the peasant asserted that the bread he had could barely feed him and his son. He brought out all the bread he had, and some of the thieves ate while others did not get a share. Those who remained hungry shot the poor peasant, left him for dead, and fled to the mountains, where they hid.69
The plague infected all of Egypt, but British officials affirmed that it was most widespread in the starving south. A 1907 report of the British consul-general stated, “[Of recent years the disease has appeared mostly in Upper Egypt, where it commonly assumes the pneumonic form. This form is especially dangerous on account of the rapidity with which it spreads, its infectious nature, and the high mortality (approximately 100 per cent) attending it. . . . In 1905 there were reported from Upper Egypt only 3 cases of the plague, occurring in 2 localities; in 1906 there were 412 cases in 26 localities; and in 1907 838 cases in 71 localities.”70 Another report a year later again emphasized that Upper Egypt was a special case. The plague affected the whole country, but “when . . . Upper Egypt was invaded, it [the plague] assumed the very infectious and fatal pneumonic form.”71
THE RETURN OF BANDITS
Facing peripheralization, misery, and uncured maladies, Qina Province’s subalterns had to revolt against the empire and the nation-state. The lower classes of Qina devised their own mode of nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against the colonial regime and the local ruling class. It was a constant, daily resistance championed by female and male peasants and laborers, and its implacable masterminds were audacious bandits.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the northern elite embarked on a project to forge another “imagined community” in Egypt. The Cairene bourgeoisie were vehemently active in struggling for independence from British occupation, as they advanced a discourse on a national identity and mobilized the masses to serve their goal. They published numerous newspapers and founded political parties, banks, and companies, all under the slogan of national independence from Western economic domination. Cairene bourgeois women joined these political parties, founded charitable associations, and published women’s magazines serving the same goal.72 Despite the absolute marginalization of the south, Cairo’s nationalistic discourse insisted on incorporating Qina’s peoples into this fabricated nation. The co-opted local elite of the south introduced the northern rhetoric to the province, and many of Qina’s corrupt abovementioned parliamentarians acted as the nation’s advocates. If education was a main tool deployed in elite invention and diffusion of a national identity, as postcolonial theorists affirm,73 the local elite of Qina followed the rules. Many boys’ schools were founded in the province to help disseminate the Cairene narrative.74
Qina’s subaltern women and men could not possibly identify with these patriotic discourses or struggles. For them, the hegemonic north and corrupt local elite afflicted them with poverty and killed them with recurring epidemics. Thus, they embarked on their own liberating struggles against the colonizer and the nationalistic elite alike. The living memory, both distant and recent, of the province’s massive revolt against former empires invigorated the new wave of resistance. Historical pockets of unrest in places such as Salimiyya, Armant, and Samhud, where numerous widespread and small revolts had erupted in the past, once more became vibrant centers of uprising. New places of relentless unrest joined them, especially in Dishna and Naj‘ Hammadi, where foreign companies worked.75
Everyday resistance in Qina included attacking village shaykhs and mayors, refusing to pay taxes, or sabotaging public works. In 1885, in the village of Busayla, Zaynab Husayn, a widow, and her two younger brothers, Taha and Ali, attacked Shaykh ‘Abd al-
Jalil, beating him and breaking two of his teeth. When he was in the hospital for treatment for more than ten days, Umm Muhammad, the female maternal cousin of Zaynab, went to his house, attacked his wife, and took a pair of silver bracelets and a golden earring from her. Zaynab and her brothers completely denied the incident, asserting that the shaykh’s teeth were already loose from drinking alcohol and this was not the first time he had fabricated a false accusation against innocent people concerning his teeth. Evidently convicted, Zaynab and her brothers were sentenced to thirty days in jail and fined eighty piasters, equal to what the shaykh spent on treatment in the hospital. The shaykh could not prove the charges against Umm Muhammad and had to withdraw his lawsuit against her.76
Landless peasants vandalized state projects, probably because they were primarily established for the benefit of the local elite. Some angry peasants cut the irrigation dikes that the Department of Public Works was constructing.77 Peasants usually kept weapons to use in attacking state symbols, but they hid them from the village authorities, sometimes by burying them underground in their houses.78 In one incident, angry farmers used those weapons against contractors who used cheap labor from the province in public works. In 1889, the dissatisfied inhabitants of the village of Bayadiyya, whose houses lined the two banks of a canal under construction, collectively took up arms and attacked the contractors and laborers working on the canal. The contractors were attempting to pave a road cutting through the houses of the peasants, in order for their workers to pass and dispose of dirt. The farmers of the village quickly gathered in a crowd with their arms and shot at the workers, who ran away.79
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