No, it was far too audacious an idea for a government-paid British engineer to come up with: to plug the Nile permanently and flood Nubia. Crazy. But one Egyptian, of Greek origin, Adrian Daninos, had precisely this idea. Rather like the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who claimed that his life’s work was just the physical completion of ideas he had had before he was eighteen years old, Daninos, an agronomist by training, came up with the first part of his plan in 1912 when he was just twenty-five. His father had been an archaeologist, and the son was trained first in Cairo in agronomy and then in Paris as a lawyer. He married a Welshwoman and lived his whole life in Cairo.
In 1912 he came up with the idea of adding a hydroelectric station to the 1902 dam at Aswan. Included in the scheme was a plan for a nitrogen-fertiliser plant. This scheme was presented to the Egyptian government time and again, with improvements and changes, through the First World War and the Second, until in 1948 it had mutated into a scheme, the first ever mooted, to try and hold back the entire Nile flood behind a single dam. There was something preposterous and momentous about this challenge to nature. Daninos had made many journeys to Nubia and had calculated that above Aswan a single dam could stop up the whole Nile valley for hundreds of miles. A gigantic lake could be created. All earlier plans were designed to slow the river but at least deliver some of its annual floodwaters. The new plan insisted that everything could be stored and released when needed and not wasted during the high waters of the summer months. From previous schemes which planned to hold back 13 billion cubic yards of water he leapfrogged to one that proposed stopping in its tracks 186 billion cubic yards. The thought of the world’s greatest river penned up behind one wall of concrete was just too big a leap of faith – the leading government engineer Dr Harold Hurst wrote of the Daninos proposal, ‘the claims are somewhat exaggerated and the difficulties passed over. It is a very long way from this stage to the presentation of the final project . . .’ – and again the high dam looked likely to disappear. By this time Daninos had added to the plan a steelworks using the hydropower electricity generated and a lock to allow ships to pass through the dam.
If Nasser had not come to power in 1952, it is likely the high dam would never have been built. There would have been no destruction of Nubia, no problem with a lack of silt in the delta, no collapse of the sardine fisheries that thrived in the Nile flood as it entered the Mediterranean, no spread of bilharzia through the stagnant canals that could be used year round, and of course, no hydropower, no steelworks, no increase in agricultural yield, no freedom from African control of the river, no reduced harvests during the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s.
Those who say the dam was essential to the welfare of Egypt are talking nonsense; not one of the highly experienced British engineers with over a century of meddling with the Nile thought the dam was possible, let alone necessary. Only Nasser’s revolutionary zeal made such an audacious thing happen at all. Arguments about its overall utility miss the point: it is here to stay. The silt that used to cover and nourish the delta now spreads itself along the floor of Lake Nasser, which at 350 miles long is one of the world’s largest man-made lakes. In 500 years, it was originally estimated, the lake would have silted up and no dam would be possible. But recent studies show siltation is far less than was previously imagined.
Strangely, once Daninos’ plan was taken up he was shouldered aside by the Russian and British and Egyptian contractors who finally built the dam. He ended his days in 1976 living in a small flat in central Cairo trying to interest the world in a new plan to crisscross the planet with canals that would end food shortages for ever.
2 • Inside the dahabiya with Sadat
On the day birds learn to speak they will say: ‘Disappear! Disappear!’
Egyptian proverb
But we’re ahead of ourselves again, carried along by the dreams of the likes of Daninos, Nile dreams which would be used by Nasser, and his successor Anwar Sadat, to make Egypt not only independent in terms of power and food, but independent too from the grand strategic aims of the great powers of the twentieth century.
Let’s take up from where we left off with Agatha and turn to a less romantic fellow denizen of the dahabiya: Anwar Sadat. Perhaps there is another way of looking at his life, a Nile perspective, that starts with his birth in the Nile delta village of Mit Abu el-Kom, travels upstream via a humble houseboat and ends with his traumatic assassination in 1981.
Sadat’s original name was el-Sadaty, which means ‘followers of the masters’. This refers to one of the many Sufi groups found throughout Egypt, and indeed throughout the whole of north Africa and the Middle East. Their proliferation and influence were noted by Richard Burton (himself a Sufi), and, years later, as we have already noted, it was during the 2011 revolution that Sufi groups resisted the fundamentalist Salafis, intent on destruction in the name of an Islam alien to most people of the region.
But Anwar el-Sadaty was no Sufi, which is probably why he changed his name after the first revolution in 1952. His father, though born into a very poor peasant family, was reasonably well educated thanks to the unceasing efforts of his mother, who sold butter door to door to the wealthier peasants. He came to the attention of a section of the British Medical Corps who were studying the alarming rise in bilharzia noted in the delta since the introduction of perennial irrigation. They needed an interpreter and someone to liaise with local villagers. So a river disease was Sadat’s father’s, and Sadat’s, ticket out.
Sadat’s father was transferred with the Medical Corps to the Sudan. His mother found him an ex-slave to marry, Sitt el-Barrein, ‘woman of the two banks’ – a true Nile name. It is not recorded from which part of the upper Nile she had been snatched. Despite the best efforts of Baker and Gordon the slave trade continued well into the twentieth century. I was introduced to a smiling African in Siwa whom everyone called ‘the slave’. He was about fifty and his father had been a slave brought via the desert route from Chad or the Sudan.
That Sadat’s mother was a Nilotic African would connect him to the source of the Nile; it would supply him with truly African credentials in a world where such credentials had begun to mean something; it would also be a source of humiliation and shame in the formative years of his life when his family moved to Cairo. Sadat’s father took another wife, and then another, who bore him nine children. Sitt el-Barrein was at the bottom of the pecking order, beaten in front of her powerless son when she failed to clean the house correctly. Naguib Mahfouz’s novels abound with the kind of domestic tyrant that Sadat’s father became. It is a tyranny encouraged by the tyrannised in the fond belief that the tyrant will protect them from other petty tyrants. In Sadat’s case it made him outwardly servile and submissive, but within, all the evidence suggests, he was burning with an ambitious rage – one that would spur him on to joining a secret pro-Nazi group and aiding the German war effort under the nose of the British invaders who had provided his father with the wealth to become the tyrant he was.
While Sadat’s mother and father lived in Sudan, they would travel back and forth from the delta on a post boat, an overcrowded steamer or sailboat plying the waters up to the first cataract at Aswan. His mother, when pregnant, which she was four times, would make that long journey back to the delta so that the children would not be born in Sudan. As an unborn child Sadat would have felt the slow rhythms of the river as he travelled south inside his mother; as a boy he grew up playing in the waters of the Nile. He would have known the flood and all the work it entailed. His happiest memories were all of this Nile village, an existence which abruptly ended when, aged six, he went with his family to live in Cairo. His father was stationed at Abbasiya barracks – hardly any distance from the place where Sadat would ultimately be murdered.
As a young man growing up in Cairo, Sadat would have known that the dahabiya houseboats were the kind of place where actors and actresses might relax after a show. Sadat had dreamt of being an actor – he once answered a magazine ad a
sking for new talent with a letter in which he declared, ‘I am a young man with a slender figure, well built thighs and good features. Yes – I am not white, but not exactly black either. My blackness is tending to reddish.’
The dahabiya was the main mode of transport in the golden age of Nile tourism, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It was something of a barge, not so dissimilar to the Oxford University Boat Club barges moored on the Thames, with a flat bottom and a shallow draught. It could be seen as a direct descendant of the kind of barge used by Cleopatra and all subsequent Nile travellers of the Islamic epoch; it could be rowed or sailed using two masts – a large foremast and a smaller mizzen – both rigged with the lateen sail seen on dhows throughout the region. The cabins were on deck, which was cleaner, lighter and more convenient than having them below deck. The upper deck is the province of the passengers; the lower deck houses the crew.
The kitchen, which was a small shed containing a charcoal stove, was near the bow between the foremast and the prow. The cook was protected from the wind by both the shed and a moveable awning. A dahabiya could be as little as sixty and as much as a hundred feet long. Some were luxuriously fitted out with grand pianos, gilt-framed mirrors, bookcases and divans. The crew had no quarters to speak of – simply a box with their few possessions and a brown blanket to roll up in on the foredeck. Though the Nile is favoured by southerly winds that counteract the current, when the wind was down the crew could be expected to tow the boat along the bank from dawn until dusk. This they reportedly did cheerfully, singing songs, smoking and chewing on sugarcane grabbed from the bank. When there was no towpath they could punt all day and move the barge that way.
During the summer months the dahabiyas would be moored in Boulaq in Cairo where the captain, or reis, would supervise their overhaul. Over time some of these moored dahabiyas became houseboats used for nefarious pleasure-seeking purposes, but they could also be simply rented out as places to live. In time they became a fixed part of Cairo life, so much so that Naguib Mahfouz wrote a novel about life on a houseboat for a group of hedonistic artists. When two German spies hid in Cairo during the Second World War they did so on a houseboat, one with a large antenna disguised as a washing line. The antenna-maker, one Anwar Sadat, was a signals officer in the Egyptian army. He had become a kind of actor, first idolising the Prussian style, even going so far as to wear a monocle, then playing the more demanding role of a spy and resistance fighter.
That he was able to escape the usual fate of a spy in wartime was a tribute to his charm and luck. He would go on from being an underground radio operator to becoming one of Nasser’s co-conspirators against the British.
3 • The adventure of the Hungarian Boy Scout leader
The hyena that is going to eat you does not cry out first.
Ethiopian proverb
By the time of the Second World War the Nile was all about Egypt. The Red Nile was all about Egypt: this was where the huge showdown between the new Black and the new Red would occur – the Black of the Axis countries and the Red of those allied to the Soviet Union, which from 1941 onwards bore the heaviest burden of the European war. The Red and the Black were duking it out in the north African desert while the diplomats of Cairo grew exceedingly nervous and burned their papers. (Sadat would have seen them in action, and indeed paper burning, when he became president, was a yearly ritual for him – he would start a personal bonfire in the grounds of his Nileside house (which is still in the Sadat family – in 2009 Jehan Sadat greeted tourists there for an exclusive cocktail party, a former first lady reduced to being a gimmick for an expensive Nile tour), or the annual fire would be held at his ancestral village of Mit Abu el-Kom, incinerating all offending and incriminating documents that had accrued in the previous twelve months.)
Back in 1940s the Nile waited for its new masters. Though the British controlled the headwaters of the White Nile in the Sudan and Uganda, they knew that mere riverine control was not enough in these times. To control the Nile in military terms meant, very largely, retaining control of Cairo.
With the Axis advance on Cairo came a need for intelligence from that city. The Germans, for a while, benefited from an American leak in security engineered by the Italians. This was hardly enough. Rommel decided to place some spies right in the heart of Cairo, oddly enough on a boat on the Nile.
In 2006, driving through the Western Desert of Egypt, close to the Libyan border and the huge wilderness plateau of the Gilf Kebir, Richard Netherwood and his team of amateur desert explorers and histori ans discovered the original spy camp of Count László Almásy, the Hungarian adventurer, explorer, soldier and espionage agent upon whose life Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient (and Anthony Minghella’s 1996 movie) is based. I met Netherwood in Cairo and was impressed by his can-do approach to modern desert archaeology. In the camp they had discovered German-made batteries, German newspapers and German tyres – all mummified in the desert air (tyres last particularly well – from a distance, their sand-polished exterior makes them look very black and new). Netherwood’s method was based on being a well-travelled desert driver himself. When he saw a place that looked like a good campsite he was certain it would also have appealed to the ‘English Patient’ some sixty years earlier.
Working from Almásy’s books and correlating possible campsites with his descriptions and Google Earth pictures, they decided a number of locations could be where the German team had rested up while infiltrating two spies into Cairo in 1942. This was Operation Salaam, which has gone on to inspire novels such as Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca, The English Patient and the much underrated Cairo Foxhole, a 1960s epic with Michael Caine in an intriguing bit part. None of these productions, however, has given enough prominence to the part played by the future President and leader of the Egyptian people Anwar Sadat.
Sadat had managed to get an education, just as his father had. As a man of ambition he resented the presence of the British occupiers. Unlike wealthy Egyptians, who were insulated in their palaces and motorcars from British army arrogance, the poorer folk felt the injustice of a foreign ruler keenly. Sadat wrote of his hating the sight of a British NCO in the military police riding his motorbike at full pelt through the streets of Cairo, forcing people to leap out of the way. And the two-tier justice system whereby British subjects were not tried in Egyptian courts for crimes committed in Egypt rankled with all Egyptian patriots.
The Second World War naturally brought such antipathy to a head, with the hundreds of thousands of British and allied troops moving through Cairo. While watching a Second World War movie with my mother-in-law, who was about ten at the outbreak of the war and living in Cairo, she remarked on a bar-fight scene with drunken Scottish soldiers fighting English squaddies – ‘Like in Cairo,’ she said. My father-in-law told me, shortly after I married his daughter, how he had been on protest marches as a young student during the war. Anti-British sentiment, as in India, was rife. Hitler became a popular name. Indeed it has seldom been remarked upon that the full name of the general who headed the governing military council after Mubarak was deposed in 2011 was Mohamed Hitler Tantawi, the ‘Hitler’ being quietly dropped in the 1970s. Sadat, like many Egyptians, sought to aid Nazi Germany not out of direct affection, but to destroy the common enemy of Imperial Britain.
In a strange reversal, the original English Patient initially preferred to help the British, not the Germans. Count Almásy had been schooled for a while in Eastbourne and had many friends among the group of explorers known as the Zerzura Club, so named because membership required one to have spent time searching for the lost oasis of Zerzura. Almásy was complicated; as well as exploring he was the founder of the Hungarian Boy Scout movement, a glider champion, a chainsmoker and a homosexual. In the First World War he had flown in the Austro-Hungarian air force; this together with his unusual background led the British to decline his offer of help, despite the obvious desert expertise. Rommel was less circumspect and Almásy was emplo
yed to smuggle two Germans, Johannes Eppler and Hans Sandstede, into Cairo right under the noses of the occupying British.
By driving hundreds of miles through the desert – and stopping at the camp that Netherwood found – Almásy was able to reach the Nile 600 miles south of Cairo. From there, the two spies proceeded, dressed as British soldiers, by train to Cairo. There they rented a houseboat which they shared, improbably, with a bellydancer. You can see how their minds were working: instead of skulking around like spies, let’s be right out in the open. Officers enjoying time off at the Kit Kat Club were encouraged to continue the party on the houseboat. Eppler, who had been brought up in Egypt, was able to pass as a wealthy Egyptian, while Sandstede posed as an American. Though the British at Bletchley Park were on to Almásy’s journey through radio transmissions made by Rommel, they did not know he was transporting spies. It is possible, had Eppler been less flamboyant, that the duo might not have been discovered.
Sadat was appointed as the radio expert for this comedy act. He wrote, ‘I had an appointment to see the transmitter. The first thing that surprised me was that they were living on the Nile houseboat belonging to the famous dancer, Hikmet Fahmy (who had danced for Mussolini before the war). The surprise must have shown on my face, because Eppler laughingly asked, “Where do you expect us to stay? In a British army camp?”’
Eppler told Sadat with pride that a Jewish intermediary had changed money for them. He also boasted of having Jewish Egyptian girls enact sex fantasies for him by pretending to be virgins. He said he was ‘deflowering’ one every night. Sadat was not alone in thinking that this was a doubtful strategy for keeping a low profile. Hikmet Fahmy grew jealous and started complaining about ‘the Germans’. Soon the British started to investigate. It wasn’t hard to work out that there was a radio on board as it was the only boat with a washing line made of cable, not rope. Sadat could not fix the transmitter brought through the desert, but he did carry out some repairs on an American transmitter the pair of comedy spies used, a radio obtained through the Swiss Legation. When Eppler and Sandstede were arrested, Sadat was given away. The military police searched his house, but the radio was in the women’s section and the police were too mindful of Eastern tradition to insist on searching the harem. Without that evidence against him, Sadat was able to avoid a death sentence. He spent the rest of the war in prisons of varying degrees of laxness – in one, the Zeitoun, he was able to take a taxi into town at night, spend an evening at a pension run by a Frenchwoman and visit the Abdin Palace on his way home, where he was to make a complaint about prison conditions to the royal entourage of King Farouk, who were powerless and yet indignant about British interference in Egypt.
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 48
