Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (71 page)

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 his 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.

They say an alpha-male baboon, head of the troop, top of the pile, has about three years of easy living. Then someone will try and knock him off his perch. Mostly, during his reign of power, a baboon just has to nod or grimace and a young buck goes scuttling away. His rep settles all. But baboons transfer in. New males arrive to take their rightful place and to widen the gene pool and squire the resident females. One of these dumb young bucks may have a go at the chief. He’ll be beaten. That doesn’t matter. People who derive their ideas about fighting from boxing don’t realise that losing is the least of your worries. Losing means pretty much nothing. What counts is recovery time and the desire, or the foolhardiness, to have another go. Mubarak had no more recovery time; the Nile would soon have a new ruler.

EPILOGUE

I am finishing this book where I started, in my flat by the Nile looking out at the square of blue that is my touchstone, my connection with the river. Despite the unrest of the elections, the rumoured death of Mubarak (at the time of writing, in January 2013, in hospital rather than gaol, the same hospital in which my father-in-law had his pacemaker fitted), and the ongoing possibility of million-person demos in Tahrir Square, everything looks pretty much as I remember. There are still plenty of cars – too many, in fact – driving around. The shopping centres look full, and although tourism is about 30 per cent down foreigners still walk around in their sandals and shorts, bearing their small rucksacks. In short, the Nile keeps on flowing, however red things may become.

We have seen how this river has always attracted stories of passion and bloodshed, we have witnessed the way the Nile first burst its banks and flooded down to the sea only a few thousand years ago, we have learned that it is a relatively new river rather than something as old as the hills it flows through. Yet it is also the river of history, of human history, and the river of classical times, be they Greek, Roman or ancient Egyptian.

There is a real sense that writing the history, or biography, of a river will involve a tale both fleeting and vague. This could never be the case with the Nile. From biblical times to the battle of Omdurman the Nile has seen bloodshed and drama on a vast scale. How to render that down to a scale both readable and comprehensible has been our challenge here.

Recently I had the chance to visit the Sudan again. The plane, as luck would have it, flew into Khartoum in daylight and had to circle a while before landing. In a seemingly endless cycle we passed again and again over the place where the Blue Nile surges into the White. It was
as if the Blue Nile was rolling back, something aged and inadequate, a shot in the white arm of an elderly relative, and, like the blood coursing through a junkie’s syringe, the red flow was visible from thousands of feet up in the sky.

This cyclical rejuvenation of the river when the water is most needed, in summer, means that, unlike the ravaged Chinese rivers that are spent before they even reach the sea, the Nile is harder to suck dry, harder to kill. Man looks at the river, a picture of the dynamic reality of life, and tries to impose his static vision upon it. He tries to make that river into something tame and predictable, a resource to be milked. But a river, as we have seen, has a tendency to see red, to influence life in all sorts of strange and unpredictable ways.

A lot has happened in Egypt since the heady days of January 2011. After Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood took power in a supposedly free and fair election, things began to change with increasing and depressing rapidity. It became clear – in Egypt – that the Brotherhood had one agenda for home consumption and another message they would broadcast in English via their effective PR machine. Carte blanche to clerics to incite violence against the Christian community and Shiite Muslims resulted in churches being burned and Christians losing their lives. Ties with jihadist groups – overt and covert – were strengthened and the Sinai descended into a chaotic no-go area. Jihadists were allowed to return from Afghanistan. Prisoners convicted of killing police in the 1990s were released. During the tolerated attack on the US Embassy in Cairo, Al-Qaeda flags were visible, as they were in many Brotherhood demonstrations. Power outages in Alexandria and Cairo were so lengthy food was rotting in the shops. Tourism was down 50 per cent and the Egyptian people had had enough.

It was not a narrative the West could understand. Wedded to concepts of commitment and consistency, journalists who ‘got’ the Arab Spring because it fitted their naive notions of revolution and renewal couldn’t grasp the dual fact that a people would both want to be rid of a tyrant and also want to reject the ‘democratic’ results of a following election. First, of course, an election in Egypt is not the same as one in West Hampstead or Woking. In villages a ‘big man’ will offer chickens to people who vote for him, or drive around intimidating people into giving him their approval. In all probability the narrow win of Morsi was sanctioned by the army as the most politically acceptable result at the time. The army thought it could work with the Brothers
and turned a blind eye to election law. But it was not to be.

30 June 2013 saw a spontaneous uprising by the Egyptian people against the policies of the Brotherhood. Even my 80-year-old mother-in-law attended the rally in Tahrir square. As one joke went: ‘Nasser couldn’t get rid of the Brothers, Sadat couldn’t, Mubarak couldn’t. But in two years they got rid of themselves.’ Despite their social work, free clinics and legal services, the Brothers showed themselves more suited to agitation than ruling a complex modern nation. Crime had exploded; people could not find work.

But Westerners still persisted in imagining the Brothers were on the side of democracy – as they busily removed the basic framework that allows democracy to work and which we take for granted: an absence of lawlessness, an independent judiciary, the ability to feed yourself, equal opportunities for people regardless of gender or religion. As my friend Amr pointed out – and he was one of the keenest supporters of the 2011 revolution: ‘If you need a gun to feel safe, if your family cannot go out at night, if you have no money – what use is a “vote”?’ We have taken hundreds of years to refine our legal system and sense of law and order, justice and fairness. Universal suffrage is the cream on that cake – not the substance of it. To expect a people nurtured under centuries of benign, and not so benign, autocracy – as we have seen in the stories in this book – to suddenly embrace our highly developed notions of democracy is to ask and expect too much.