Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (68 page)

Just below the bridge at the Rusomo Falls the river looks like the River Wye in Wales after a heavy rain. Day after day a body a minute went under that bridge – sixty an hour, 1,440 a day, 10,080 a week. Week after week. Many smaller tributaries of the Nile run into the Kagera, including the most distant source. It is hard not to see this act as some kind of symbolic desecration of the Nile itself. It is said that the Hutu were sick of the Tutsi claim to be from Ethiopia. They wanted to send them back to the place where the Blue Nile meets the White.

Rigor mortis sets in particularly early in the feebly developed muscles of the newborn. When a body has been decapitated rigor sets in slowly, perhaps after ten or twelve hours – but then it persists for more than a week, even when the weather is warm. Some of the bodies washed up on the beach at Kasensero could be carried to their graves with ease, still stiff as boards.

But many more did not wash up, they washed
into
. The Kagera is the true source of the Nile and its current is such that there is a perceptible movement from its mouth to the outflow at the Ripon Falls, now of course submerged. This slow current propelled bodies far into the lake. They began to raft together, rotting in the Equatorial sun.

But before putrefaction comes lividity. The skin loses its elasticity and the flesh its firmness, and the blood, once evenly distributed, gravitates towards the lowest-lying parts. Hence the deep violet tint of the occiput and the back, the places where the lungs and brain rest and slowly fill with blood. Sudden death is characterised by extensive lividity – when there is not substantial blood loss during the killing. When the arms and head have been removed, there is less blood to discolour the corpse, however violent the death.

The bodies begin to rot. One to three days after death a greenish discoloration of the abdomen. The eyeball becomes soft and yields to pressure. Out on the lake you see the inflated balloon of a belly, and then another, and another in the far distance. On one knee perches an interested crow.

Three to five days will see the genitals, if they are still present, a dirty brown-green. The whole of the abdomen a deeper shade of green now. Patches of green appear on the back and lower extremities. Gas, as we have seen, bloats the abdomen and now forces bloody froth from the mouth and nose, on those bodies still possessing these features.

After a week the odour of putrefaction is well developed. It is an odour none can ignore, nor forget. It lay in miasmic waves over the lakeshore. Even the fish, depleted in recent years, were driven away. That is why the people of Kasensero started to fetch the bodies in from their rafts of rotting flesh and bury them. As one resident put it, ‘Fish was losing market so we took it upon ourselves to bury them at different points.’

This is still a contested matter. It is thought that over 6,000 bodies were washed ashore or removed from the lake, and buried at Kasensero. The monument erected there to the slain of the Kagera is for only 3,000. Out in the lake, the ones that did not get driven back by wind and waves and were taken by the current, who knows how many disappeared into the depths, the relatively shallow depths, of Lake Victoria? (Not to mention those who crossed the lake and went over the Bujagali Falls.)

The people went over the bridge escaping to Tanzania. Underneath, the bodies were thrown into the river. Genocide and rivers have an ancient history. During the Spanish Inquisition, Protestants in the Netherlands had their backs broken with iron rods and then were thrown into the river. It was found, in the era before crematoria, to be the fastest way to get rid of people who disagreed with you.

The inner organs have their own rate of decay. The brains of infants rot quickest, followed by the stomach, spleen and liver. The adult brain is next. Slower to rot are kidneys, bladder and pancreas. Last to putrefy is the uterus. After ten days the cornea has collapsed, the veins have become red cords visible beneath the surface, the anal sphincter has relaxed. Soon the skin will begin to peel off.

Machetes and AKM and AK47 rifles kill more people in Africa than any advanced form of despatch. In the lake the bodies have been killed
by even simpler means: hoes, adzes, heavy wooden poles tipped with iron.

10
•
Rehab’s story

Seven times one may fall and seven times rise again
. Nubian proverb

The bodies, some Rwandans said, would be flushed down to the sea. The several dams and the slow-moving Sudd would make this unlikely, though particles of the dead would, over time, pass through Egypt to the sea. The Nile had been desecrated before, and will be again, though naturally one rebels against such a thought.

The particles of the slain pass by and the Egyptian fellahin do what they have always done, they dig. They dig canals, they dig levees, they dig crops. And they measure out their water with the pipette mentality of a scientist – when they aren’t sloshing it all over the place, perhaps in the remembered excess of the highest flood.

After Sadat’s assassination Egypt was ruled, as we have seen, by his lucky Vice-President, Hosny Mubarak. Lucky – he took a shot but survived, which of course guaranteed that no one could seriously blame him (though conspiracy theorists have tried very hard). But despite greater and greater wealth being generated through construction projects, mainly in Egypt and the Sinai, things did not become easier for the poorer people of the delta and the banks of the Nile. Discontent rumbled on. Was the Nile itself guilty?

The impact of the dam was being felt in a way no one had predicted. Perennial irrigation had brought an increase in food. But, as already noted, the lack of flood silt meant far more fertiliser was needed. Food production rose but so did its cost. The dam electricity allowed for greater modernisation. More food and better healthcare saw the population soar, a population increasingly kept from the available wealth of Egypt. Sadat’s ‘open door’ policy was continued and brought more and more imported goods into Egypt as well as tourists to the new boom town of Sharm el-Sheikh (which Mubarak loved so much he lived there most of the year). The country also saw a slide into greater corruption and the rise of a class of ruthless businessmen capitalising on their connections with the Mubarak clan.

Many who chose not to participate left Egypt to earn money to send home, one of the few ways they could improve their standard of living in a country where the
wasta
, or influential connection, was necessary to get a job. Indeed, after the Suez Canal, gas production and tourism, remittances from workers abroad are Egypt’s largest foreign-currency earner.

Before I came to Egypt I was living in Oxford. We had two very small children, and my wife arranged for a girl to come out from Egypt for a year to live with us and help out. This girl was Rehab. She spoke no English. She was twenty-two, a bit spotty, and wore platform shoes that my mother-in-law threw away because they were so smelly. Truth be told, Rehab didn’t like washing that much. Her room, my old study, had a stuffy, fetid but not entirely unpleasant smell. She had a small TV, supplied by us, but she never watched it. Around 8.30 p.m. or 9 she would go to bed and sleep and that was that. Not that she got up early – she didn’t, unless I knocked on her door, which I did every day.

Rehab, when she smiled, had a lovely face. If you caught her unawares, her face in repose was distorted into a grimace, grim indeed. She looked after my newly born daughter with infinite patience, walking her around and around the garden to keep her sleeping. Because she knew no English my two-year-old son was soon speaking Arabic. Then Rehab herself picked up odd words of English and used them with great inventiveness. She would sit on the doorstep, the
mastaba
, as they say in Egypt, and engage passers-by in conversation. In one year she got to know more people in our street than we had in the preceding three. With less English than I have Italian, which is practically none. Always cheery and smiling, always keen to make contact, say hello. She used to go to the supermarket and target people who looked as though they might speak Arabic. She actually did find a woman who lived two streets down – an Egyptian who had married an English Muslim convert. Rehab got to know her daughters – slightly bewildered English girls in headscarves who spoke no Arabic. Rehab met a Mexican girl and asked us if she could invite her round, as a treat. The street was her preferred meeting place, though the Pakistani lad got a bit too interested and had to be dissuaded. Rehab was supposed to be engaged to a young man back home. This year away was to earn enough to buy a washing machine, a great ambition. She also loved charity shops, of which there are a goodly spread in quantity and quality in affluent Oxford. She bought vast quantities of children’s clothes for her nieces
and nephews and a great trunk which, when we took her back to Egypt after her year with us, took up two and half baggage allowances.

Rehab had had jobs far worse than ours. In fact our job, though limited in terms of Arabic-speaking opportunities, was heaven compared to the job she had done for two years in Lebanon where she had been locked indoors when the owners went out. She had worked since she was twelve, though she had been to school, off and on, too. She could read and write. I always wondered, though, about her set scowl – until she told me of her first job.

‘I was twelve and so they sent me to the fields. There I was given the worst job because of the noise: watching the pump. Every hour or so I had to fill the pump with fuel oil. If you let the pump run dry they beat you hard because it breaks the pump. You sit for twelve hours watching the pump, you can’t do anything, not even play because of the noise, but you do. But you have to be careful not to let the pump run dry, though I did once.’

The Nile has always had its
sakieyehs
, waterwheels driven by buffaloes treading a circuit, and
shadoufs
, to raise water into a canal or, often, to rid a place of too much water. But since the building of the British dam in 1902 the activity has become year round instead of being concentrated around the three months of the flood. And the flood raised water levels, so, without it, the height the water has to be moved through increased. This problem was exacerbated by the building of the high dam, but was then ‘solved’ by the introduction of the ubiquitous diesel pump, which is the sound you hear as you walk through the delta, over the perfect manicured fields without a scrap of space wasted.

We had an allotment in Oxford by the river and when we arrived Rehab borrowed, with smiles and gestures, a spade from our eighty-year-old neighbour (we’d never dream of borrowing tools) and set to making a raised bed to grow carrots. Egyptian towns and villages might look a mess, but, as I often repeat, Egyptian gardens are beautiful. They lay out the vegetables with just enough aesthetic awareness to make looking at the fields a pleasure. In Holland you see the same careful use of each square yard as you do in Egypt, but not with the same flair, the mixing of a few flowers with a crop – to combat pests, they will tell you, but also adding to the look of the fields. The habit is carried with them. Police recruits will water and care for a raised bed next to their shack of corrugated iron, where they are supposed to watch the road; farmers’ boys, they stoop down to water plants and make tea on a three-stone
fire when their superiors are absent. If you walk by the Nile in central Cairo, in Maadi, or Zamalek or Imbaba, you’ll see market gardens of elegance and beauty that seem to contradict the searing ugliness of the concrete and cars around you. Why should that be? Another Nile mystery. Anyway Rehab was a natural gardener, fast and efficient and looking for things to keep her busy.

You read about agricultural yields, which have undoubtedly gone up since the creation of both dams. But without the Nile silt the Egyptian farmer had to manure his fields for the first time ever; now he uses chemicals, and the dependence on fertilisers is complete. Then there are the problems of declining fish yields, growth of algae, canals blocked with vegetation, bilharzia – all this, and yet for me it is the image of that smiling girl, her face, when in repose, turned into a set scowl by the requirements of the machine.

11
•
A load of Toshka

Touching the teat will lead to milk stealing
. Ethiopian proverb

Sadat’s legacy lived on, appropriately, in a canal that bore his name. The Sadat Canal, like the Joseph Canal of yore, was designed to carry away Nile water in excess of what could be stored. Satellite pictures from on high initially showed a string of three lakes growing, through run-off from the main lake, on the western side of Lake Nasser. But funny things happen to lakes out in the desert. The third one has dried up, it seems; the others are clogging up with reeds and swampland. The problem, as Willcocks would have seen immediately, is not irrigation, but drainage. The lakes have no exit except the sky. Like Lake Qarun in the Fayoum they are just getting siltier and saltier, slowly dying.

But Toshka in Egypt means more than these run-off lakes. Toshka, also known as ‘Mubarak’s Pyramid’, was the last desperate attempt by a Nile leader to alter destiny. His, his country’s and the Nile’s.

Toshka was the most grandiose scheme ever conceived by an Egyptian government (if you discount a British plan in the 1930s to flood the Qattara Depression west of the Nile delta with seawater to drive a waterwheel perched on its edge, around the place where the battle of Alamein was fought). Toshka was nothing less than an attempt to
create a new Nile, a second valley running parallel to the old Nile. By diverting water along canals from Lake Nasser, the oases of the Western Desert, it was planned, could be linked up to become vast new hubs of industry and agriculture. Some 20 per cent of Egypt’s population would move there. In one swift (well, rather slow) move, but only one, all of Egypt’s problems could be solved. Population growth, lack of land, increasing food demands, job requirements.

Just as the Aswan high dam was designed to solve all Egypt’s problems in the 1950s, and, of course, didn’t. The idea was a fantasy projection by a president who knew he had done little but maintain the status quo since the death of Sadat. A president streetwise enough to know that the ever younger population were not going to put up with jobless overcrowding for ever. But Toshka was not the right answer. Those children who watched, as I did, in 1997–8 the endless propaganda films on the TV about the dream of Toshka, who read the children’s books by Egypt’s leading writers commissioned to encourage belief in the fantasy (one book had a resident of the ‘new’ valley writing to her cousins in the ‘old’ valley saying how large her house was, what a nice garden she had). Those children were in their twenties in 2011. Instead of living the Toshka dream they stoned the police and started a revolution.