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.
An interesting example I saw recently compared the worldwide export of the British invention of the roundabout with democracy. In Britain and France roundabouts work well. In other places they don’t. In Egypt you need a traffic cop on each entrance of a busy roundabout otherwise there will be gridlock. In fact a straight intersection works better because at least one line will keep moving. We don’t realise it but a roundabout is built on a whole set of assumptions about etiquette and fairness. If something so simple can fail under the slightest pressure, is it any surprise that cosmetic applications of democratic politics will also fail?
Tourists are coming back. The future is a little brighter.
A VERY SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books beget books and big books require a lot of begetting. In Cairo I was kindly offered the use of the AUC library by Matthew Ismail, while in England I used the Bodleian and the unique, invaluable, though sadly no longer free, interlibrary loan service. I bought many books over the years from the famed booksellers in Ezbekiya Gardens (which I wrote about in my book The Extinction Club, London 2001). I also found many excellent books in English and Arabic in the superb Kotob Khan, Maadi, Cairo (a great place to have a coffee too, by the way).
Rather than list over twenty pages every tome I consulted or from which I pulled one fact or insight, I’ve made a list of everything I have used that I think the reader will further enjoy. Some sections have more books recommended than others, but this is the accident of research rather than an unstated preference for that era. If you have some particular interest that may be served by knowing a more recondite volume not listed below please feel free to get in touch via my website: www.
roberttwigger.com
One: Natural Nile
R.E. Cheesman, Lake Tana and the Blue Nile, London 1936
George Cotter, Ethiopian Wisdom, volume 1, Ibadan, Nigeria 1996
J.S.R. Duncan, The Sudan, London 1952
F. Clark Howell, African Ecology and Human Evolution, London 1964
H.E. Hurst, The Nile, London 1952
Richard Leakey, The Making of Mankind, London 1981
Patrick Synge, Mountains of the Moon, London 1937
William Willcocks, Sixty Years in the East, Edinburgh 1935
Two: Ancient Nile
Kenneth Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes, 2008
Wallis Budge, The Nile: Notes for Travellers, London 1890
Richard Carrington, Tears of Isis, London 1959
Amelia Edwards, 1000 miles up the Nile, Leipzig 1878
William Golding, An Egyptian Journal, London 1985
Adrian Goldsworthy, Antony and Cleopatra, London 2010
Matthew Ismail, Wallis Budge, Kilkerran, Scotland 2011
Barbara Mertz, Red Land, Black Land, New York 1978
Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs, New York 2007
Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile, New York 1962
Alan Moorehead, The White Nile, New York 1960
Karol Mysliwiec, Eros on the Nile, New York 2004
Paul Perry, Jesus in Egypt, New York 2003
Anthony Sattin, The Pharaoh’s Shadow, London 2000
Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra, New York 2010
Three: River of the Believers
Philip K. Hitti, History of the Arabs, London 1967
Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, 1986
Joel Kraemer, Maimonides, New York 2008
Stanley Lane-Poole, Saladin and the Fall of Jerusalem, London 1898
Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, London 1984
Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, Cambridge 1994
P.H. Newby, Saladin in his Time, London 1983
Ahmed Al Shahi, Wisdom from the Nile, Oxford 1978
Bradley Steffens, Ibn Al-Haytham, Greensboro, North Carolina 2007
Four: The Nile Extended
James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 5 vols, Edinburgh 1790
Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, Cairo 2008
Louise Colet, Lui, Athens, Georgia 1986
Max Gallo, Napoleon, Paris 1997
Al Jabarti, Napoleon in Egypt, Princeton 2010
Martin Kalfatovic, Nile Notes of a Howadji, London 1992
Philip Marsden, The Barefoot Emperor, London 2007
Francine du Plessix Gray, Rage and Fire, New York 1994
Anthony Sattin, A Winter on the Nile, London 2010
Ataf al-Sayid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammed Ali, Cambridge 1984
James St John, Egypt and Mohammed Ali, London 1834
Ferdinand Werne, Expedition to Discover the Sources of the White Nile in the Years 1840, 1841, 2 vols, London 1849
Five: The Nile Damned
Richard Burton, The Kasidah, London 1974
Richard Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, London 1860
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, London 1977
Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End, London 1945
Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile, London 1937
Winston Churchill, The River War
Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols, London 1908
Matthew Green, The Wizard of the Nile, London 2008
Richard Hall, Lovers on the Nile, London 1980
John Hanning Speke, Discovery of the Source of the Nile, London 1863
Arthur Hawkey, Hiram Maxim, Staplehurst, Kent 2001
Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live, London 1998
Dan Morrison, Black Nile, New York 2010
John Petherick, Travels in Central Africa, London 1869
Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, London 1873
Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie, London 2007
Patricia Wright, Conflict on the Nile, London 1972
Six: Blood on the Nile
Paul Carell, Foxes of the Desert, London 1960
Mohamed Heikal, Autumn of Fury, London 1983
Tom Little, High Dam in Aswan, London 1965
Samir Raafat, Cairo, the Glory Years, Alexandria 2005
Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity, London 1978
Viscount Wavell, Allenby in Egypt, London 1943
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe you all: Matthew Ismail, Ian Preece, Bea Hemming, Andrew Kidd, Samia Hosny, Wak Kani, Shaun Bythell, Joyce and Ian Cochrane, George Feltham-Parish, Maria Golia, Zohra Merabet, Steve Timpe, Jon Bjornsson, Mahmoud Sabit, Haajar and Mustapha Majzub, Paul Gordon and Lynne Chandler, Jihan, Mario and Manel Trinidades, Steve Mann, Ed O’Grady, Charon Mokhzani, Chris Ross, Richard Head, Richard Netherwood, Dave Morrison, Roland Prime, Lucy Westwood, Jessica Fox, Mahmoud Mohareb, Yusuf Zeydan, Steve Carter, John, Will and Rupert Seldon, Marie Shelton, Nick Owen, Gerard and Barbara Flynn, Naomi Darlington, Denys Johnson-Davies, Dan Morrison, John Paul Flintoff, John Crockett, Matthew Green, Paola Crochian, D’Arcy Adrian-Vallance, Hugo Dixon, Mark Dixon, Adrian Turpin, Arita Baaijens, Carlo Bergmann, Ramsay Wood, Gill Whitworth, George Scanlon, Patty Schneider, Ian Sansom, Ian Belcher, Boris Johnson, Richard and Claudia Mohun, Hassan, Homda, Ian Singleton, Chris Stewart, Tahir and Rachana Shah, Leon and David Flamholc, Aaron Fuest, Hassan Webster, Mihail Ivey, Floyd Evans, Peter Davies, Ryan McCliment, Christoper Watson, Jug Rushbrooke, Sonali Wijeyrathne, Stuart Dodd, Martyn White, Johnny ‘Two Niles’, Doris Odden, all donors and loyal blog readers. Abu Nasr, Mohamed, Hassan Ezzat, Pius, Theodore, Father Ecklund, James Carter III, William Coles, Antony and Jean Twigger, Babu Ramlingham, Peter Davies, Aoife O’Driscoll, Frank Nasre, Ben Forster, Tarquin, Anu and Al Hall, Garry Shaw, Clara Twigger-Ross, Rachel Barker, Enrique Turbot, Nigel Hale, Stu Pask, Jeffrey Lee.
INDEX
Abbas Pasha, ref1
Abbasid area of Cairo, ref1
Abruzzi, Duke of, ref1, ref2
Abyssinia, ref1
and Portuguese, ref1
see also Ethiopia
Acholi tribe, ref1, ref2
Aesop
fables, ref1
and Luqman, ref1
Aga Khan, ref1, ref2
AIDS (‘slim’), ref1
Albert, Lake (Luta Nzige), ref1
salt in, ref1
as source of the Nile, ref1
alcohol, ref1
Alfi Bey palace, ref1
Almásy, Count László, ref1, ref2
America (United States), ref1
British–American rivalry over Aswan dam, ref1, ref2
exit from Egypt, ref1
New York Statue of Liberty, ref1
support for hunt for Kony, ref1
and Toshka project, ref1
Antony see Mark Antony
Anwar the Druze, ref1
Asperger’s syndrome
and hatred of stories, ref1
and Hypatia, ref1
and measurement, ref1
Assassins, ref1, ref2
Aswan dam, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
effect of possible destruction, ref1
see also Willcocks, Sir William
Aswan (Syene), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Cataract Hotel, ref1
Flaubert in, ref1
Atiya, Farag see Farag Atiya
Aybak al–Turkomani, ref1, ref2, ref3
Azande see Niam Niam
baboons, ref1, ref2
background, and exploration, ref1
Bahri Mamluks, ref1
Baiburs (Mamluk sultan), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
see also Mamluk
Baker, Sir Benjamin, ref1
Baker, Florence (née Florenz Sass)
marriage, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
purchased by Baker, ref1
Baker, Samuel, ref1, ref2, ref3
capture of elephants, ref1
death, ref1
discovery of Murchison Falls, ref1
and Florence, ref1, ref2
and Kabba Rega, ref1
and Kamrasi, ref1
and Luta Nzige (Lake Albert), ref1
and Murchison Falls, ref1
purchase of wife as slave, ref1
retirement, ref1
on slavery, ref1
Baker, Valentine E., ref1
balloon flight, first attempt, ref1
barrages see dams
Barras, Paul, ref1
Bartholdi, Frédéric, ref1
battles
in 2011 Revolution, ref1, ref2
battle of Masindi, ref1
battle of Omdurman, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
battle of the Shangani, ref1
battle of Tebai, ref1
Battles of the Nile, ref1, ref2, ref3
injuries, similarity between Tutsi/Hutu and 3,000-year-old Egyptians, ref1
Mamluk, control of, ref1
and the Red Nile, ref1
Tutsi/Hutu battles, ref1
Beja nomads (‘fuzzy–wuzzies’), ref1
Beke, Charles, ref1
Bellisle, Pauline see Fourès, Pauline
Beni Hassan, ref1, ref2
Bernoyer, François, ref1, ref2
Bible
Exodus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Genesis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
bicycles, and Kony, ref1
bilharzia (schistosomiasis), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
birds, crocodile bird, ref1
blood, plague of, ref1
Blue Nile, ref1
character, ref1
course, ref1
as source of the Nile, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, and Burton, ref1
body building, ref1
Boustead, Hugh, ref1, ref2
The Bridge (Danish drama), ref1
bridges
bridge of Munkidh, ref1
Mounib Bridge, ref1
over the Kagera, ref1, ref2, ref3
over the Nile, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
British
acquisition of the Rosetta Stone, ref1
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 55
