Upper Egypt Grows Poorer, Angrier

Packing 17 times as much sand and stone as the greatest pyramid at Giza, the Aswan High Dam is as imposing as any monument Egypt is known for.

Behind it sprawls Lake Nasser, the largest reservoir known to man. Below it, a ribbon of water winds through the gray and brown cliffs of the Nile Valley. Central to the dam’s history is what it represents: Man’s ability to harness a great river to modernize a nation living in the shadow of its past.

“The dam is the treasure of the country,” says Hamad Ghaitan, a farmer in a dirty blue gown working the lake’s sun-seared shores. “It’s not any different than putting money in the bank.”

But Ghaitan and the third of Egypt that lives south of the capital, Cairo--a region known as Upper Egypt, or more commonly, the Sa’eed--have yet to see any profit.

The dam and a handful of factories are the only signs of development in the Sa’eed, a dirt-poor region best known as the resting place of King Tut.

An insurgency by Muslim militants who despise the government in Cairo has driven away investors, and police provide personal escorts to any foreigner who sets foot in parts of the south.

The Sa’eed’s 22 million people, long neglected on the outer fringes of Egypt’s culture and economy, are growing poorer and angrier.

“I came from the womb of my mother simple, dirt-poor and worn-out,” says Mahmoud Sami, a worker sweeping a road across the High Dam for less than a dollar a day. “But that’s not my fault.

“There,” he says, pointing north along the Nile, “there’s opportunity for work, there’s space to operate, there are cities and there is building. Here, there’s nothing.”

Today, aware of the threat that neglect poses, the government has promised to develop the Sa’eed with the help of U.S. aid.

Loans with generous grace periods are given to small businessmen, a government fund has set aside $40 million for the region’s poorest province, and industrial parks with tax breaks are going up in long-neglected, faraway towns to court factories.

The push comes as Cairo celebrates its go-go days. Cellular phones and Mercedes fill the crowded streets. McDonald’s and Microsoft occupy a once sleepy market, welcomed by an economy infused with foreign investment.

The boom gives rise to a growing contrast: Egypt is looking at two futures, one a modernizing economy, the other a backward region still dominated by the same tools depicted in ancient tombs.

At stake is whether a nation that prizes its social solidarity will confront the strife of growing desperation that is evident in the fields and the villages of Upper Egypt.

“Development is not going to be easy,” says Magdy Mokhtar, head of the government fund. “It’s an inheritance of generations.”

*

A little after dusk, Train 136 shakes and rattles out of Aswan for an overnight ride to Assiut, halfway up the Nile.

Its third-class passengers, men in peasant gowns and women in traditional black, pay $4 for an often scarce spot--perhaps atop the luggage rack, on a floor with ample dirt or next to an overflowing bathroom. Maybe even a seat.

The windows are open to timeless scenes of peasants hoisting clover over their shoulders or families sitting under palm trees in fields of wheat that stretch to a sun setting on the horizon.

Through one of the windows comes a cool breeze, blowing over a weary, 17-year-old Baha Hasabullah.

“I wouldn’t travel anywhere if I didn’t have to make a living,” says Hasabullah, heading home to his village near Assiut after a semester at a training school in Aswan.

Like many young Egyptians, Hasabullah looks to a future he believes has already been determined: A stint in the army, a job in the Persian Gulf or Libya, a homecoming with money enough to buy land, marry and raise a family.

Faced with unemployment or jobs that pay next to nothing, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began leaving during the ‘70s oil boom to work abroad.

Then, as now, the lack of jobs was most acute in Upper Egypt. Only a fraction have jobs in industry, and the tiny plots of land so common here can support only a few, forcing many to migrate in what has become a powerful recurring theme in the literature of the Sa’eed.

Hasabullah’s father was one migrant.

Now 49, he took jobs in Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, one to three years in each place, trying to earn enough to support seven children in a small village.

This month, another son joined him in Libya.

The younger Hasabullah himself plans to follow them to Libya or maybe Saudi Arabia, working on a farm, as a butcher or in a store, despite signs that opportunities for work abroad are drying up.

“What do I wish for?” Hasabullah asks. “To live in a small villa, next to a fountain, with a car.

“I want today to be like yesterday, yesterday like tomorrow, nothing new,” he says. “I’ll go to work, I’ll come back from work, I’ll go to bed and then I’ll wake up.”

As he speaks, men hustle up and down the aisle of the train, hawking everything from crackers to razors to socks.

“Pen for a pound,” one shouts. “A lighter for a pound, a pair of scissors for a pound, four blades for half a pound.”

Nearby, someone bangs on the bathroom door in a vain attempt to vacate a passenger who found room to sit in the stall.

*

Up the Nile, beyond the grind of the provincial cities, is Manshiet Nasser, a village of canals, mud-brick houses and littered streets remarkable only for one grisly moment in its past.

In May 1992, Muslim militants, their faces concealed by scarves, opened fire on Christians in the verdant fields and narrow alleys. Thirteen were killed in what many call the beginning of Egypt’s simmering insurgency.

Nearly 1,100 people have since died.

But the sectarian tension that once prevailed no longer lurks behind the wooden doors where trays of pita bread wait to be baked, or in the ripe fields dotted by towering palm trees.

Rather, the solitude of Manshiet Nasser is broken by anger directed at a government that villagers accuse of ignoring them. The last investment, they say, was an elementary school in 1989.

“There’s no development here and no one believes there will be,” says Abdel-Rahim Abdel-Rahman, a 40-year-old farmer in white scarf and brown hat, standing under a hot sun near his field.

Through much of the countryside, the government long ago ceded control to the wealthy farmers and local notables, who effectively run the region’s villages and hamlets.

With more than a few acres, those farmers grow the lucrative vegetables, sugar cane and fruit. Wheat, maize and clover are left to their poorer neighbors, who farm with hoes and animal-driven plows.

Many are without even those tiny farms. Villagers say four out of five of Manshiet Nasser’s young men have no work.

“The people are worn out,” says Salah Mahmoud, a 32-year-old villager surrounded by a crowd of residents nodding vigorously. “One person owns 100 acres, everyone else has a half-acre, and they have to support four people with that. What are they going to do? Eat from the street?”

In the more cosmopolitan north, Upper Egyptians are met with contempt--jokes that cast southerners as innocent, simple or dimwitted are legion. The violence here is often blamed on tribal feuds, quick tempers and a penchant for age-old vendettas.

The prejudices have made it easier to treat Upper Egypt as a security issue instead of a problem to be solved. That reinforces already solid anger at a north seen by many as oppressive, deceitful or both.

In villages like Manshiet Nasser, the last government representative was probably a soldier behind a gun.

After the massacre in 1992, security forces clamped a curfew on the village for 16 months. Soldiers were posted at its entrances, and young men were randomly questioned or detained.

Fathi Abdel-Mohsin remembers it bitterly.

“There was fear when you would see the police,” the 24-year-old says. “There was a lot of tension, and until now, there’s still no faith in them.”

*

Along the thoroughfare of Assiut University, lined with trees now blooming with purple buds, is a rare example of hope.

With its 10,000 students, it’s the largest and oldest campus in the south, offering education and opportunity in a region where only two out of five residents can read or write their names.

While Manshiet Nasser is distinguished by its anger, Assiut University and its students are marked by their ambition.

“Within 15 to 20 years, I think, the divisions will end, and we’ll all become one,” says Sameh Ibrahim, a 17-year-old who, like nearly all Christians, wears a tattooed cross on his wrist. “The ties between the regions will become greater than the divisions keeping them apart.”

Like many students, he insists he’ll forgo work abroad for a job near home after he’s finished school. What’s rare about Ibrahim is his optimism.

In recent years, the government’s priorities in Upper Egypt have been health and education.

The idea is as obvious as it is striking: Bring the opportunities to the people, said Ibrahim Makram, a specialist with an Egyptian group working on development in Upper Egypt.

“It’s not just money to develop an area,” he says. “You have to empower constituencies to take part.”

Nasr Ali Zaid, a 24-year-old law student, agrees.

Sitting on a park bench, he gazes at a construction project on campus. Two cranes arch over rolls of wire, piles of cinder-block and steel rods that reach upward from concrete pillars. “Look at the work here,” he says.

To him, the scenes of migrant Upper Egyptian laborers lining the main streets of Cairo, their primitive tools bundled loosely in twine or rags, are but a memory. He sees another future.

“Egypt has put one foot forward into the developed world--all of Egypt,” Zaid says. “We’re on the road together.”

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Egypt by the Numbers

Some comparisons between Upper Egypt and the rest of the country.

Income: The average income in Upper Egypt is less than $500, almost half that of Cairo.

Adult Literacy: In Upper Egypt, only about a third of residents can read and write. In rural areas of the south, the figure drops to 29%. In Cairo, more than two-thirds of residents are literate.

Family Planning: Upper Egypt’s poorest provinces rank dead last in family planning. In the region, less than a third use some method of birth control, compared to more than half elsewhere in the country.

Infant Mortality: Rural Upper Egypt has the country’s highest rate, more than twice that of urban areas.

Electricity: Nearly one in five homes in rural Upper Egypt has none. Elsewhere, virtually all homes have it.

Sanitation: One in five homes in rural Upper Egypt has no plumbing. Elsewhere, it’s widespread: nearly 98% in urban areas and more than 80% in the Nile delta.

Water: Nearly half of homes in rural Upper Egypt have no running water. In the delta, three-fourths do. In the cities, nearly all. Access to piped water actually decreased over a 10-year period in Upper Egypt, the only region of the country where this was the case.

Sources: Egypt: Human Development Report, Insitute of National Planning, 1995; Demographic and Health Survey, National Population Council, 1995