Historical heritage threatened in Cairo – culture

Unless some influential figure in Egypt develops historical awareness and intervenes over the weekend, this text is an obituary. A requiem for 32 houseboats that are the last of their kind to float on the Nile in Cairo and are now being demolished or towed away – the Egyptian state has announced that they will be history by Monday. The authorities in the country that invented bureaucracy in the days of the Pharaohs are not exactly known for their speed. But this time the state demolition squad is acting precisely, efficiently and without regard to sentimentality: just a few days after the residents had received official mail, the demolition work began this week. First water and power lines were cut, then a barge with an excavator appeared on the Nile, the shovel crashing into wooden walls. Other houseboats were pulled away by barges. Three or four every day, now the last ones should go.

And even if the authorities show no consideration: The story of life on the Nile, which is now coming to an end, is one full of sentimentalities. the Avamat The houseboats mentioned, which were moored on the banks of the Nile, had their value not only as oases of calm for their inhabitants in a hectic and rather dusty juggernaut. Since the first wooden buildings were erected on floating pontoons in the middle of the 19th century, they have been places of ambiguity, of informal exchange – and the authorities did not necessarily feel comfortable with them.

You can read about why in the books of the first and so far only Arabic winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Nagib Mahfuz, who died in 2006 and is said to have owned a houseboat himself. In his Cairo trilogy, the otherwise strict patriarch likes to leave his family in the evening and secretly drives to his houseboat. Whiskey, belly dancers and singers – these are better things to do in the dark on the water, especially if you otherwise uphold morals and values. And Mahfuz’ later novel “A Houseboat on the Nile” from 1966 is set in its entirety: on the houseboat, it’s not pashas with double lives who meet, but young intellectuals to smoke hashish and debate the inadequacies of the world.

Divas invited guests to decadent saloons on the boats, and agents used them as a base

Otherwise, there are many stories and stories about the brightly painted boats, which are always blown by a light breeze and washed by the Nile water with all its flotsam: In the 1920s, cabinet meetings – more of the informal kind – were said to be on the boat of the diva-like singer Mounira el-Mahdia, who, like many other musicians, actors and artists, leased a stretch of the Nile to moor pontoons and erect an airy wooden house. During the Second World War, the houses were popular with British officers, but also with their opponents: Two German spies with the code names “Max and Moritz” converted one of the boats into a news station and, according to some reports, disguised the company as a brothel – smuggled into the country Incidentally, the two were created by the Hungarian officer László Almásy, whose life provided the basis for the novel and film “The English Patient”. Because the agents couldn’t get their radio transmitters to work, a collaborator organized a young officer from the Egyptian signal corps to provide technical support: Anwar al-Sadat, the future president of Egypt, who, like the two agents, was arrested in July 1942 – you can read about it in Ken Folletts, for example Thriller “The Key to Rebecca”.

Eighty years later, foreigners and artists still like to live on the boats, double standards are still widespread in conservative Egypt and young intellectuals continue to despair at the inadequacies of the world under the counter-revolutionary regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In view of the increasingly Stalinist social climate in Egypt, they certainly discuss their country less openly than in Mahfouz’s novel – and soon not at all on the water. Of the once more than 300 boats, 32 remained in recent years, moored on the bank of the western arm of the Nile on the side of Cairo’s twin city of Giza. Already an ambivalent place in terms of urban geography: behind the KitKat Square is the poor district of Imbaba, in which the Muslim Brotherhood has bought a lot of sympathy through social deeds for decades. On the opposite island of Zamalek, on the other hand, expensive high-rise buildings rise between art nouveau villas and embassy buildings in need of renovation.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi creates a lasting legacy – one made of concrete

The sudden decision to remove the boats from the cityscape is now less likely to have come from concerns about political and moral purity, or from security concerns, which an official at the Ministry of Irrigation cited on Egyptian television. But more out of commercial interest: “The defining feature of Sisi’s presidency is the concrete,” says the writer Omar Robert Hamilton in an interview with the SZ. His mother bought one of the houseboats in 2013 and lovingly renovated it. “Egypt builds more than any other country. Cities in the desert, highways through cities, skyscrapers in beach towns and high-speed rails across the Sahara, new prisons and shopping malls spring up every season.”

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With his debut novel “City of Rebellion” in 2018, Hamilton created a panorama of the Egyptian revolution in which the brutality and perseverance of the dark powers in the state already give an idea of ​​the later failure of the democratic experiment. And even today, Omar Robert Hamilton states that his government tends to work against the interests of the citizens. In his mother’s home country, the British-Egyptian writer observes “an eruption of infrastructure that was not planned with the needs of the population in mind”. But rather to create orders for entrepreneurs close to the regime.

Instead of investing in Cairo, which is ailing in many places, the government has been building a nameless new capital in the desert since 2015, including some superlatives: the highest tower in Africa is there, the second largest mosque in the world, the largest church in the Middle East. In order to connect the project, which has been calculated with 58 billion construction costs, with the previous capital Cairo, a network of new traffic routes is being created – which cultural heritage in Cairo has to give way to, in some cases even UNESCO World Heritage: for example parts of the southern necropolis, Cairo’s more than thousand-year-old necropolis. On the one hand, there are historically valuable tombs and mosques here, in and between which, on the other hand, tens of thousands of people live. At the other end of the city, in posh Heliopolis, a basilica was to make way for a new motorway bridge, which the local, sometimes influential, citizens initially prevented. The houses of the less affluent 20,000 Cairo residents in the Bulaq district and surrounding areas in the city center near Tahrir Square were bulldozed, and the area was tendered for redevelopment.

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The beneficiary of many new construction projects is the Egyptian army, which after the peace negotiated with Israel in 1978 by the former collaborator Sadat, looked for a new battlefield and found it in the economy. The generals now run hotels and amusement parks, canning factories and construction companies where young recruits toil. And the army is also acting as a land developer along the banks of the Nile: A five-kilometre-long circular path along the banks is to be built, with restaurants, cafés and event locations. Maybe soon in the place where Omar Robert Hamilton celebrated his wedding in 2016 and where he spent large parts of the pandemic with his children: the family cleared out the mother’s houseboat on Thursday.