I’ve been meaning to write about what it was like to visit Cairo, after all these years and with such a different perspective on the world. Arriving in Cairo those many years ago opened my eyes to an entirely different world – one with a generous culture, a graceful pace, a magical history and an uncertain future. Poverty was in so many ways picturesque, and while the need for economic development was urgent, it also seemed in many ways far away. The Cairo I lived in was wonderfully technologically backward, with telephones almost still a novelty, cars restricted to a few models, and television fairly obviously more a medium of government propaganda than entertainment. Living there utterly changed my life for the better, and if I were to replace elements of my young life, the years in Cairo would be the bottom of the list of things a could bear to give up.
I have been all over the world since then, bathed in different cultures, learned different languages, and while remaining essentially American, given up so much of my American upbringing. And yet I had never returned to Cairo, a conscious decision driven by a desire to preserve that special time, to avoid seeing the ruin the massive poverty and overpopulation might have caused to my beloved city. And so to go back now, 40 years later, was a big event.
My modern experience of the country was as I would have hoped it to be. What leapt out immediately was the graceful manners and gentility of the society. Like many, I had been lulled by the reports of the occasional bomb and of the sexual attacks during the uprising into thinking that one might feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Nothing could have been further from the case. Everyone was incredibly nice and welcoming, and we never once had an uncomfortable moment. Feeling safe fuelled an urge to wander around more widely, to experience the people in many casual encounters, but travelling as a family without much extra time, I didn’t have much chance to do that. And everyone was so nice despite it being the middle of summer Ramadan, when everyone we saw was fasting all day and for many days. Ramadan meant our experience of the country was slightly stunted, because Egypt only really came to life around 8 at night and everyone stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning, so that was when you really wanted be out and about. Our children become very grumpy and unhappy if they don’t go to sleep by 8, so although we stretched them a bit, we couldn’t experience the evenings except on our last night. That last night, we threw caution to the winds and went to the Khan al Khalili and found ourselves in the middle of vast crowds, almost too energetic for the kids to process, and they fell slightly deliriously asleep in the taxi on the way home.
But even in the day, and doubly in the evening, Cairo was still the same Cairo I knew, buzzing with energy, with something special in the air that somehow seems to connect the people there in a marvellous common adventure. And in some ways that also explained to me how the Arab spring began. One has the feeling that everyone in Cairo feels themselves to be part of a web, and so one can imagine that the potential of the Egyptian growing middle class, the economic drive of these well-educated and thoughtful people, could naturally have led networks to grow up to challenge the status quo.
As much as it might surprize an Egyptian, what struck me more than anything else is how rich the place has become. I somehow didn’t imagine that Cairo would have joined the modern world in the same way that Bangkok or Nairobi or Delhi has, but it has (and in some way even more than other African cities). The city that used to be confined to the Nile Valley has spread up and over the lip of the canyon, massive new neighbourhoods being built on reclaimed desert that in our day would be been considered valueless and beyond reach. Some of these new developments are every bit as ambitious as similar ones in the UAE, modern mid height buildings built around grassy parks, close to malls with international brands and down the road from the IKEA opening up middle class life to the masses. The presence of this kind of mass wealth stunned me, as I had never really thought how modernity would have come to Cairo.
Now, of course from a vantage point vastly removed from the complexities that really govern reality in Egypt, it felt to me that Egypt is full of potential, and if only if that potential could be liberated, the country would leap forward. But Egyptians describe the last 8 years since the reimposition of military rule as a time of economic malaise. Salaries for well educated people working in international companies are stunningly low, perhaps 10% of their European counterparts, and that means that the comfort of these new developments feel out of reach to the new generation of well-educated ambitious Egyptians. In fact, it was hard to see who is building these new suburban dreams and who will be living in them. But they certainly are being built like popcorn and someone must be paying the bills for the cement and glass and water.
My childhood experience of Egypt was that everyone worked for almost nothing and from my perspective did almost nothing. At that time, I had no contact with what was even then probably a real Egyptian economy, likely more prosperous than I fully appreciated. How, after all, did the Egyptians we knew socially make a living? I knew that Egypt had always been a relatively well educated place. I knew that Egyptians were often the mainstay of the workplaces of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. And I was aware that remittances played a big role in Egyptian economics. But when I was young and living there, I always thought of the Egyptians as poor rather than potentially wealthy. Because we couldn’t get what I considered “normal” consumer goods, Cairo in my young eyes was different and economically less promising than Beirut or Tehran (in those days), where you could go to supermarkets and buy western goods easily. But there must have been more going on than I realized at the time. And from the vantage point of today, that seems silly and naïve, as there is no particular reason why Cairo would today be less developed than any other major emerging market city. But that was the lens that I returned with.
Looking around as we drove in from the new airport, I wondered where is all the money coming from and going to. As far as I could tell, the economy is still dominated by a few industries – agriculture, oil and gas, tourism most likely dominate, although real estate must be creating fortunes. All of these are both open to and likely suffer from huge problems of graft, and understanding the potential for wealth, one can understand why the army fought back against the revolution. I would guess that a huge proportion of the tourist revenues from entry into historic sites (quite expensive by international standards), from oil and gas, and from the sale of land for development, flow through to the ruling generals (but not before the many layers of bureaucracy and informal intermediaries between the generals and the real economic activity have each taken their cut). In fact, it would be fascinating to follow the money through the process from land purchase, bank financing, building construction, mortgage lending, and tax paying, and see who is taking what as the cycle develops. One thing was clear, and to me surprizing – to be at the top of the Egyptian economic pyramid is to be quite rich.
This economic puzzle is almost interesting enough to drive me back to some academic research. If I had more time, I would love to chase down the question of how the economy is supporting this massive growth, whether in fact despite their frustration, the next generation is solidly middle class (something that seemed incredibly out of reach when we lived there), and whether there are new sources of economic growth. Most interestingly, Egypt seems to be generating a healthy number of well educated, potentially hard working, and internationally experienced young professionals. I was struck by how much potential this represented – in an internet age, surely a well-educated young potential work force is a massive asset just waiting to be used? And with things like Uber now ubiquitous in Egypt, can people find their own way in a gig economy to economic success?
Knowing that the economy has declined in the last eight years, the failure of the Arab spring, and with it the crushing of this insurgent middle class, feels like a terrible, missed opportunity. That the uprising led to an Islamist government seems strange in a city that feels as secular as any modern emerging market city. Islam is everywhere, of course, but it feels more part of the social fabric than as a religious force -- and even less a governing force. Head scarves are more common than in my day, but we met people who told us that they get paid a small amount to wear them, suggesting that the return to a more fundamental approach to Islam doesn’t always go deep. Islam at least to an outsider feels more like a social compact, a set of moral beliefs, something that defines civilization (all as it should) but not something that overwhelms modern governance.
Of course, Islam may simply have been filling a void. It seems that the Mubarak government sat astride the development of the country rather than led it, and any encounter with officialdom only suggests that the formal government likely manages the needs of the people poorly. You can see how in the neighbourhoods the Muslim Brotherhood could emerge as a rallying point for the disaffected. That may be a superficial assessment, as I can claim no expertise other than instinct, but everything I have read about the student movement suggests that it was their lack of structure and preparation that opened the door to the failure to elect a government that actually connected to the needs of Egyptians. Islam still feels like it was a default choice rather than a positive one.
Indeed what option do Egyptians have? The visit didn’t make me hopeful that the government would do anything to help solve the problems of its citizens. Instead, it is clear that the generals will do everything to keep power. The presence of the police and army is felt heavily throughout the city (less so in the south in Luxor and Aswan but still there), and they don’t really pretend that they are there to protect anyone. There are huge military and police bases next to many of the large roads, and one feels that they are there not to keep the peace but to reinforce their message that opposing them is both dangerous and fruitless. The day to day security intrusions are persistent and silly. Occasional roadblocks popped up while we were there, and police would demand papers from our drivers and look lazily in the trunk of the car. Casual hassle seems to be the order of the day, and keeping people off balance is clearly a policy. As overemployment is a national pattern – there still aren’t enough jobs, so too many people are employed for every public sector task – no single official can make a full decision and the result is bureaucracy gone crazy. As a visitor, you don’t feel this -- we didn’t encounter even a casual request for a bribe, but then again we didn’t try to do anything different than a normal tourist – but I expect that had we done anything that required government permission would have come at an informal cost.
The combination of police oppression and silted up governance is a heavy burden for the country to bear, and one has the feeling that the country will have a very hard time breaking free of it. It’s a paradox – the heavy hand of the military keeps people from building a coherent and throughtful opposition, but the lack of that opposition means that when frustration boil over, the insurgents don’t have the resources to govern.
At Zelmira’s urging, we spent one night in Maadi, and I went off for a long walk around the old streets where I used to live. It was funny being out late in the evening and realizing that I probably hadn’t wandered around Maadi like that in the many years I lived there (because I was too young to stay up that night). And it made obvious how things had changed, because evenings in Maadi for me were nights out in the garden, sitting under the huge and ancient trees, feeling the light night air around me, and feeling inspired by the night sky. Maadi is still a relatively gentle suburb, with streets with potholes and crumbling sidewalks, dusty trees (although the old irrigation canals have all been filled in) and sleepy poorly paid and totally ineffectual security guards sitting in front of some of the houses. Our house has long since been torn down and replaced with four different now slightly run down apartment buildings, but there are still large houses scattered around the area with large gardens and the potential for the same magical evenings. As I walked the streets, I found myself wondering if I could come back for a year, rent a big and slightly run down house with a garden with old trees, and pass the evenings with my family around me, and perhaps my days trying to draw some new rationality into the Egyptian economy and government. I knew that was only a fantasy, but it spoke to how strongly those childhood ties pulled at me for that moment. Cairo for me still held the magic it did when I was a child, and now that I know that does, I found myself wanting to share that with my children in an impossible dream…
And so we left Egypt feeling that we had visited a wonderful place, a place we would love to go back to again (and again). I left vowing in the back of my mind to try to bring some commercial activity to Egypt (and I think I will). But I also left struck by how hard it would be for anyone to stand up to the current order and make any meaningful change happen.
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