Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  This was the plan: by agreeing to finance the dam the British hoped to retain control of the Nile basin for years to come. They had been virtually bankrupted by the Second World War but insisted on punching above their weight by relying on their special relationship with an increasingly irritated United States. The World Bank and the US would provide most of the cash for the new dam, but the British expected to benefit the most by dominating the agenda about Nile control for the next two decades – which is how long they thought the dam would take to build.

  The Americans, meanwhile, were busy with their own covert plan – still ongoing – which was to reduce British influence in the Middle East and replace it with their own. By capitalising on the need of the British to appear as important as they had been before the Second World War, the US leviathan used British nous and intelligence to kick-start America’s own infiltration of the Middle East – partly to secure oil reserves and partly to find a market for arms sales. Rivalry between the US and the British would outstrip concerns over Soviet influence and find its arena in the lengthy distractions of the Nile basin.

  The Americans, with a wealth unimaginable to cash-strapped 1950s Britain, were pushing ahead with several hydrological aid projects along the length of the Nile. Called Force 4, the project had an energetic manager operating in Ethiopia, much to the appreciation of Haile Selassie and the disquiet of the British. Restored to his throne by the eccentric Wingate, Selassie, with the help of Force 4, was reviving that long-held plan to divert the wealth of the Blue Nile away from the apparent wastage of Egypt. The British were concerned but could do nothing about it. They relied on American cash elswhere and had to agree with American plans or prepare to be ignored.

  Nasser had come to power by ousting the General who had been the face of the coup against King Farouk. He had capitalised on American dislike of British power in the Middle East to build strong links with the CIA. These links would help in the financing of Daninos’ project, which had come to his attention almost as soon as he and the other so-called Free Officers (including Sadat) who led the coup had come to power.

  First, to the applause of the Americans he had to rid himself of troublesome leftists who wanted to claim the revolution for themselves. Then it was the turn of members of the Muslim Brotherhood to be purged. There was nothing in this behaviour to suggest someone singing from the same songsheet as Moscow, and the Americans were pleased (the CIA were represented in Cairo by Miles Copeland, father of the former Police pop star Stewart Copeland). It did not seem unreasonable to offer Nasser the money for the dam, even if he had just bought some cheap weapons from the Czechs. Better them than the British, who were getting very annoying about their right to determine Nile policy for the world.

  The British incentive to go along with the high dam was simply the offer of a seat at the table. There had been initial consternation that the old ‘century storage’ plan (creating a storage lake big enough to withstand a century’s worth of variable rains), involving the great central African lakes, the Jonglei Canal and the Blue Nile, was to be ditched or side-channelled perhaps. In an abrupt about-face the British under Prime Minister Churchill, sixty years almost since he fought in the River War, still believed they could turn that seat on the dam committee into more influence than their financial contribution suggested. And the dam would take years to build, especially with all the conditions that were attached to the loan.

  Naturally Nasser refused to abide by many of the conditions and the British were content to let the project ‘languish’, since they knew that an even bigger stumbling block would be the loss of Sudanese Nubia when Lake Nasser began to flood. It seemed inconceivable that Egypt would ever reach an agreement with the Sudan, and it was part of the work the British had assigned themselves to broker such a deal, naturally extending their control in the region at the same time. Churchill had seen Britain go from being the masters of the Nile to waiting for scraps to be thrown their way. All the folly of Suez and its aftermath can be traced to the forgivable inflexibility of men quite suddenly down on their uppers.

  Nasser, following in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali (who claimed that Machiavelli had nothing to teach him about cunning), outfoxed the British by establishing contact with the Sudanese military. These men, some of whom had trained in Egypt with Nasser in earlier times, felt a strong kinship with the Egyptian revolution. In 1958, the Sudanese army staged a coup. When Sudan’s Prime Minister stepped down they took over, and with great goodwill came to a quick agreement with Nasser: Egypt would pay £15 million compensation for the flooded land of Nubia (later Sudan would receive another £30 million to redress all the destruction caused by the dam).

  There was now no negotiating role for the British. It also looked as if Nasser would get this thing done far more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Without the British there to be humiliated and bullied there wasn’t much point in the Americans financing the dam – and they already had control of the Blue Nile through their Lake Tana project. Nasser suspected they would cancel – and as a test he suddenly agreed to every one of their stringent conditions for the loan. Getting wind of this the Americans promptly cancelled their offer, leaking the information that it was because of Nasser’s turn towards the Eastern bloc. Which was a prophecy easy to fulfil. The Russians, however, found Nasser no pushover.

  That it was British–American rivalry that sank the loan to build the Aswan dam is supported by the disastrous reaction to Nasser’s emboldened occupation of the Suez Canal zone in December 1956. The Americans continued to back Nasser against the humiliated British. Now control of both the lower Nile and the canal had slipped from the seventy-year-long grasp of the dying British Empire. The British Cabinet discreetly discussed the suggestion that the Nile could be turned off at the Owen Falls dam, which had been opened only a few years previously. But beyond petty revenge there seemed little point in punishing the wily Nasser this way. He had won.

  In Cairo, on Zamalek Island, incidentally reclaimed from the Nile by the work of William Willcocks, there stands the famous Cairo Tower, with its revolving coffee shop at the top. It wasn’t revolving when I went up, but the view was certainly worth the slightly scary lift ride. Although the Americans withdrew their finance from the Aswan dam, they did pay some development money at the beginning. It was with this money that Nasser built the Cairo Tower. (There is now a better, and higher, revolving restaurant, good at night, on top of the Grand Hyatt on the tip of the old island of the River Mamluks, Roda. Ride up to the fortieth floor and you’ll be able to see almost the whole of Cairo).

  7 • Countdown to an assassination

  Unless the vein is cut, blood will not flow. Egyptian proverb

  The Nile flows on. Even after being dammed at Aswan, it flowed on. The Israelis have used the dam’s vulnerability to their advantage; at regular intervals, as we have noted, a hardline Knesset member will mutter about the possibility of bombing the high dam. But they never will. Even supposing that it could be blown up, if the dam broke millions would lose their lives: in a country of over eighty million people, at least sixty million live within the floodplain of the tsunami that would be released by a destroyed Aswan dam.

  Sadat understood the possibilities of coming to terms with Israel. In his historic manoeuvring to regain control of the Sinai he saw that the humiliating defeat of the 1967 Six Day War, when Jordan, Egypt and Syria all lost territory, though tragic for the Palestinian people, was only a problem to the Egyptian people if they could not regain their own lost territory. Sadat managed that with the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979 and gained the Nobel Peace Prize into the bargain. From being described by Henry Kissinger as a ‘donkey’ he went to being hailed, also by Kissinger, as a statesman ‘as great as Bismarck’. But it would not save him from being killed.

  Sadat was truly a Red Nile president. Being half black African, previously a source of some shame, he could now exult in his Africanness. He saw the Nile as one way of linking all the African nations beh
ind a world player: Egypt. He chose Aswan as his favourite winter quarters, symbolic centre of the Nile and the gateway to Africa; he would be Africa’s voice. Indeed Sadat became so enamoured of foreign affairs that he neglected what was happening alongside the banks of his own river in Upper Egypt – in Sohag and Asyut and a hundred other Nileside towns which resented modernisation when it resulted in higher prices and wealth for a tiny minority. In 1977, as Sadat met with the Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito in Aswan, guests asked why there were burning buildings in the town. Anwar Sadat had to telephone his own office in Cairo to discover that his people were rioting over the rise in bread prices.

  The building of the dam dragged Egypt into the industrial age, through increased power supply and a revolutionised irrigation system. What this meant were huge changes – increases in crop yields, but also changes in the pattern of work. Men from Upper Egypt could earn far more working in factories in Helwan (no longer an idyllic spa town, but now, in what some thought an assertive act of irony, transformed by Sadat’s predecessor into the steel and concrete town of Egypt, a place later to be synonymous with causing respiratory ailments rather than curing them). These Upper Egyptians and displaced Nubians found work as bawabs, or doormen, stonemasons and drivers in the rapidly expanding cities of Cairo and Alexandria. Here their natural conservatism was seen as potential fuel for the long-running power plans of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamic organisation that would later achieve Egyptian office in the 2012 election.

  Modernity along the Nile had meant prosperity to some; to others, as we have seen, it had brought bilharzia, disrupted age-old agricultural practices and replaced a culture of punishingly hard work followed by complete rest with one that demanded constant slogging away. It was a brusque welcome to the modern world. Though Muhammad Ali had instigated this turn to modernity, and the British had accelerated it, it was Nasser who made it ugly yet took the credit; and it would be Sadat who would take the blame. He was a thwarted actor who had posed on the world stage as a ruler of the Red Nile; he would die as one, shot down by his own men who believed he had led them too far away from the traditional virtues of an imaginarily idyllic Nile existence . . .

  It was a few days before the 6 October Parade in 1981. The parade was held every year to celebrate the Egyptian victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Israel (a victory in as much as it kick-started the return of the Sinai, Sadat’s aim, but tactically only successful in that the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal). The day actually commemorated the successful storming of the Canal, further memorialised in the name of a bridge across the Nile and a new suburb of Cairo, 6 October City. The parade always lasted several hours as trucks of soldiers, tanks and gun carriages drove past Sadat and his generals and other prominent folk seated in a raked concrete stand.

  That day an irresistible package had arrived for the President of Egypt, from London. Sadat was excited to discover that his Savile Row tailors had completed the new uniform ahead of time. In his Nileside residence in Giza, which had been sequestered from a former army officer of the old regime, Sadat took his time trying on the new uniform. It was exquisitely tailored, a slim fit that in comparison made his Vice-President (and successor) Hosni Mubarak look positively stodgy, despite being ten years younger. Sadat found that the attractive lines of the slim-fit uniform would be spoiled by wearing a bullet-proof vest, so three days later, when dressing for the 6 October Parade, he left the vest at home.

  Sadat, like many world leaders, had a soft spot for theatrical uniforms and decorations – he had uniforms designed by Pierre Cardin as well as by Savile Row tailors. In his youth he favoured cropped hair, a monocle and a swagger cane. Once he was president he carried his field marshal’s baton like a pharaoh’s ankh and crowded his chest with medals. Only recently he had awarded himself the green silk ‘sash of justice’. His sense of being an actor was enhanced by all the hours of TV footage in which he starred. He increasingly liked to spend hours alone watching the old video tapes, the filmic record of past triumphs: the address to parliament after the 1973 war, his journey to Jerusalem, his several TV appearances in America. Most of his day would be spent in interviews, almost all filmed. At night he would eat a light dinner, meet more people, then from 10 o’clock onwards watch imported and recently released films (even before they reached the censor) in his private cinema. He usually watched two a night, though he would be snoring before the end of the second. By the time of his assassination this latterday Pharaoh was living largely in a bubble of his own design.

  On 6 October, Sadat’s last day had begun like most in the latter years of his presidency. He had gone to bed fairly late after watching a film. He had risen around 9.30 a.m. and eaten his preferred mix of honey and royal jelly followed by a cup of tea. Later he would munch on low-fat cheese and a low-calorie wafer. Sadat ate little as he was careful about his weight. He had then taken some light exercise and received his daily massage.

  Sadat had announced a few days earlier that he would ride to the parade in his open-top Cadillac. He had taken to making trips in this car (which was reminiscent of the vehicle that saw the end of JFK), yet it seems the assassins never contemplated an assault on the car, possibly because the route would never be disclosed beforehand. Certainly Sadat, like most world leaders, was safest when there was no prior warning of his movements. With no warning he could wander through a crowd without protection – assassins need days and days to prepare. Somehow the profession does not attract the spontaneous type . . .

  Striding out of his palace in Giza, he left behind on the side-table his field-marshal’s baton. Later, Jehan Sadat, the President’s wife, would say she had seen this as a bad omen, though quite how bad she had had no idea.

  Not that there weren’t security measures in place. The Americans had contributed over the years, it was rumoured, $20 million to keep Sadat from being killed. This included signals intelligence and an elite unit trained by the US to deal with any attempt on his life. But in keeping with Sadat’s desire to appear at his most uncluttered before the TV cameras of the world, the elite unit were banished to a position behind the reviewing stand where they would not get in the way of the cameras. The President was like a Hollywood superstar – if it wasn’t filmed it didn’t exist. When Prince Charles and his new bride Diana were passing through Egypt on their honeymoon in August that same year and asked that a picnic with Sadat not be filmed, he was annoyed and puzzled. His love of appearing on television certainly did not make him popular, as he imagined it did.

  The head of the Presidential Guard, a brigadier general, explained later that his main task had been making sure that only those invited took a seat on the stand and that the food and drink consumed by Sadat were checked personally by him. The old habits of Nile rulers die hard. It was as if they were protecting against medieval assassins armed with poison when they should have been aware of twentieth-century ones armed with rifles and grenades.

  It took some hours for the truck carrying the killers actually to pass the stand where Sadat was sitting. This reviewing stand, which looks like a small section of a football stadium, is situated on the main road to the airport. It is still there, though the chipped concrete at the front has long been repaired. You can see that the front edge of concrete is very thick, and if one lay down on the inside up against the wall (which is what Hosny Mubarak did) you’d be perfectly safe from gunfire. Sadat, however, did not consider such a manoeuvre until it was too late.

  At the parade stand Sadat asked Bishop Samuel of the Coptic Church and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar to sit next to him. It was for the cameras, of course – the man of power living in peace with the two religions – but it was the right message to be sending to an Egypt intent on division; it was, however, too late to heal the rifts already about to engulf President Sadat. The religions did not fare equally in the face of fate: Bishop Samuel was killed but the Sheikh of Al-Azhar survived.

  The gun lorries, roofed over with metal hoops designed to hold canvas, came to a halt.
It’s easy to see why no one suspected anything. On the footage shot by a news team covering the event it looks like a breakdown. The plan had been to recruit the driver as part of the team, but this had proved impossible. It was Khaled, the leader of the assassins, who came up with the simple expedient of ordering the driver at pistol point to stop the lorry. It hardly swerved out of line. Here is yet another instance of the colossal luck that attached to this attempt. Everything was lining up against Sadat, as if destiny had determined that his time, indeed, was now up. If, as had been planned, the lorry had been under the care of a sympathetic driver it would have driven closer to the stand than it did. From where it stopped to the stand looks a good seventy yards. By driving this distance adequate warning would have been signalled to Sadat that something was wrong, and he would have been able to duck down behind the concrete barrier of the stand. (One wonders how simple it would have been to install a long window of bullet-proof glass running the length of the concrete lip – indeed Jehan Sadat was behind such a windowed balcony at the side of the main stand.) Sadat, of course, would never have agreed to this, as it would have looked too much like hiding. There was also the precedent of Nasser, who, after an assassination attempt, had not flinched, had in fact issued an on-the-spot invitation to any future killers, announcing his fearlessness of death.

  Khaled, the lead assassin, came from the small Nileside town of Mallawi. Mallawi not only had a sizeable Coptic Christian community, it was a bishopric of the Coptic Church. It was also famous as a place that the Holy Family visited on their journey into Egypt. Kum Maria, not far from Mallawi, is revered to this day as the spot where the Virgin Mary stepped ashore during the journey of the Holy Family up the Nile. Yet it is precisely in these towns with a significant Coptic presence that the terrorists of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad proliferated. With the uncertainty that comes with modernisation, age-old disputes were again visited as the ‘real cause’ of current problems.