By Ali Zaidi
Never was there a land more wrapped around a river.
Most people know that Egypt’s economy throughout its history has been based around the Nile — through the millennia the river’s annual flooding has watered and fertilised its farmlands, and from 1902 the Aswan Dam, and from 1970 the Aswan High Dam have controlled the flooding and allowed properly irrigated agriculture.
But for this writer, it took an actual visit to Egypt to appreciate just how central the river is not just to the economy and history but to the cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of the country.
Indeed, as you can see for yourself quite clearly if you fly over it, Egypt is not so much a country as a corridor, a narrow strip of continuously cultivated land on both sides of the river where 90 per cent of the population live — surrounded by burning desert. The river provides up to 90 per cent of the water needs of a country where, especially in Nubia in the south, it sometimes doesn’t rain for years on end.
The fertility of this narrow corridor and the creativity of its people, produced the most spectacular of the ancient civilisations; the country’s subsequent history has been hardly less illustrious – always with a touch of the grandiose – and over the centuries, given its central position in North Africa and the Middle East, coupled with the commerce of the Mediterranean, established itself as the intellectual and cultural centre of the Arab world.
In another direction, south, while the cataracts on the Nile inhibited conquest and commerce, over the centuries, a great variety of peoples moved up the river, and today a large proportion of the population of East Africa are their descendants, the so-called Nilotes.
Egypt has, in that sense, been one of the major historical gateways between the worlds of the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.
In the middle of the 20th century, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the country allied itself to the anti-colonial cause, giving significant material and diplomatic support to the Independence movements around the continent.
Today, the country is again compelled to look south, as the talks on a new treaty on the sharing of the river’s waters — to replace the colonial-era treaties that secured it the bulk, 55 billion cubic metres a year out of an annual flow of 84 billion — stumble from crisis to crisis under the aegis of the Nile Basin Initiative.
The trouble is, of course, Egypt itself (and Sudan) — after the latest round, a Cabinet Minister told Parliament. “Egypt’s historical rights to Nile waters are a matter of life and death. We will not compromise them.” Now the other Nile Basin countries are threatening to go ahead and sign a new treaty without Egypt and Sudan.
Recently, a group of journalists from the Nile Basin countries was invited by the Egyptian government on a week-long tour of the country. The idea appeared to be to showcase the formidable expertise in river/water management and other economic benefits that Egypt has to offer the upstream countries (sub-text: as long as you leave our share of the water alone.) We were taken to Cairo, Aswan and Luxor.
We met ministers, government officials, water resource management experts, journalists — we even saw the Pyramids, though our minders’ attitude seemed to be: What’s the big deal?
We visited the Egyptian Museum, saw the superb mosques of old Cairo, took in an awesome light and sound show at the Temple of Karnak. We went on a boat ride on Lake Nasser after a tour of the High Aswan dam, an engineering feat of rugged simplicity pulled off in the teeth of Anglo-American opposition, whose giant turbines were built in (the then) Leningrad and are currently being refurbished by an American company. We had lunch with Boutros Boutros Ghali.
The people we met couldn’t have been friendlier or more forthcoming; every meal was a banquet, every conversation an eye-opener.
There was much agonising over Egypt’s role in Africa; a senior journalist at Al –Ahram, the country’s ‘national’ newspaper, who has covered the continent extensively, lamented that his compatriots’ views of their southern neighbours were so coloured by the stereotypes of war, famine and chaos propagated by the Western press, but also pointed out that people in sub-Saharan Africa harboured equally distorted stereotypes of North Africa and Arabs in general, courtesy of the same Western news agencies.
In private conversations, we found our Egyptian interlocutors deeply fascinated by East Africa’s struggle for democracy — something that they will soon be undergoing themselves, it would appear — and our advances in mobile phone technology. Never mind MPesa, they went round-eyed over borderless networks.
The East African
