The format of the book reflects the zeitgeist: it brings together reportage, essay, tweet, anecdote and cyber-psychology; plus some economic insights gathered amid clouds of tear gas.
And the role of ‘the book’ itself is changing. Writers of my generation stood in awe of the New Journalism of the 1960s, when the sudden swing to truthful reportage could end presidencies and terminate wars. But the equivalent in this era will not be like the grand reportage of the Sixties at all. Rather, it is the combined input of thousands of people into the freely accessible public record of social media: the thoughts they tweeted, the jokes they cracked as their friends panicked in the crush of crowds, the football shirts they wore as they toted Kalashnikovs through liberated Tripoli. There is a great river of human hope flowing, and all I am trying to do is dip my fingers in it.
The essence of why it’s kicking off was put into words by a student protester in the USA. Federal police had tried to arrest somebody on a university campus, so a group of students sat down around the police car. A twenty-one-year-old with curly blond hair took off his shoes and stood on the car’s roof, to begin a mass meeting that would last several days. Later, he said:
The act of sitting around the police car, of getting up on the car and starting to speak, of physically structuring the possibility of a community … all of a sudden there is a self-justifying factor to it. In a way, once it’s been established, there might be other reasons for sitting around the car than keeping it from moving—namely participating in the community. I have never experienced that anywhere nearly so strongly as around the police car.2
But that was not in 2011. Those words were spoken in 1964 by Mario Savio, a student leader in Berkeley, California, in a protest that kicked off a decade of campus revolts throughout the USA.
You may have thought such days were gone—such idealism, such eloquence, such creativity and hope. Well, they’re back.
London, 26 October 2011
1
‘Now There Is Freedom’:
Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Not Over
Cairo, May 2011
The ground floor of Musa Zekry’s house is head-high with garbage and thick with flies. The floor above is home to the widow of his brother, shot dead during the revolution. Musa will live in the top floor, above her, when it is finished—but for now it’s a shell, choked with rubble, dust, more garbage and more flies.
A dead brother, several fear-filled days in Tahrir Square, weeks of danger and distrust: that’s the balance sheet of Musa Zekry’s revolution. All he’s got to show for it is a banner slung across the street outside, hailing his brother as a martyr, alongside a portrait of Jesus Christ. Plus freedom.
And it is this freedom, so unexpected and so viscerally felt, that lights his face and energizes his five-foot frame as he steers me through streets filled with shisha smoke, donkey crap and a blizzard of flies:
The Central Security forces now are non-existent—because we have freedom! Now everybody has a voice and wants to speak. Before, under Mubarak, if you raised your voice they would kill you in the street. Now there is freedom.
Cairo’s Moqattam slum, in the south-east of this vast metropolis, is home to 65,000 zabbaleen or ‘garbage people’. The young men and children collect the garbage in the twilit streets of downtown Cairo. The women sort it into separate sacks: bone, metal, cloth and plastic in all their subsets: water bottles, oil containers. A whole family just down the street from Musa specializes in smashing plastic knives and forks into a crisp white rubble. The zabbaleen’s world is one of rank alleyways, face-stinging heat, cheap bread eaten fresh out of grubby fingers.
The zabbaleen are mainly Coptic Christians: the face of Jesus gazes down on every workshop and rubbish pile. But in the street, as Musa leads me to a makeshift factory where they are using vats and blowers to turn plastic bottle shreds into translucent snow, two men embrace each other, gesturing at the religious symbols tattooed on their wrists: ‘I Christian, I Muslim,’ they chime. ‘We together.’
The Egyptian revolution may have begun on Facebook, but when it reached these alleyways, mobilizing men whose whole lives are stratified by religion, family and caste—well, that was the point that things got serious for Hosni Mubarak.
‘Two men came to us and said, let’s go down to Tahrir, to ask for change,’ says Musa. He’s reluctant to name them even now, but he clasps his palms together above his head to demonstrate what they did. ‘They told us: let’s make a demonstration with the people in Tahrir Square. One was Muslim, one Christian. One hand! We went by car: ten or twenty cars. When we got there I realized that our goal was right: to make a revolution and get freedom.’
Some of the bottle shredders did not go: ‘We have our own square here,’ laughs one, pointing to a patch of dust and dog-dirt. ‘We waited for Tahrir to come to the zabbaleen!’
It did, but not in the way they had expected. On 7 March 2011, less than a month after Mubarak had fallen, and the garbage people had symbolically cleansed Tahrir, thugs from the old regime organized a Muslim mob to attack the slum. These hired gangs are known as the baltagiya:
My brother ran to tell my Dad—he works in a garage in the place the baltagiya were marching to. But my Dad had already run away. Then we got a phone call: your brother is in the hospital, he is dead. He was shot but nobody knows who did it.
Relations between the Copts and the Muslim slums nearby were always fraught, but, despite his brother’s death, Musa is not scared to go there. It’s the city centre, where law and order has been minimal since the revolution, that frightens him: ‘I can walk through the Muslim slum, no problem. The problem is, now, if I go downtown I am worried somebody’s gonna shoot me; somebody is gonna wave a pass—I don’t know whether it’s fake or real—and tell me to give money, or kill me.’
For Musa, as for millions of others from the slums and tenements of Cairo, this has been no ‘social media revolution’. It’s been a chaotic, frightening implosion of order. Policing, he says, is lax; security is ‘just decorative’:
Economically nothing has changed. We went to Tahrir to make a change, but so far, nothing’s improved. What we need is for Egypt to be like America—so that if you have an idea, if you want to start a business, you can do it freely. We need social justice. That was what we chanted for.
To see how far from social justice Mubarak’s Egypt was before 25 January 2011, the Moqattam slum is a good place to start. It’s crammed into a sloping gully beneath a sandstone cliff. If you stand at the top, near one of the caves they use for churches, you’re confronted by a landscape of wooden shacks, twisted metal rods, crumbling concrete and hundreds of rusted satellite dishes. But this is just the unfinished roofscape, the top layer of misery. Plunge down into the alleyways and it becomes dark. The zabbaleen build their shanty-dwellings five or six floors high; each new son or marriage adds another layer of brick and concrete to create a warren of urban canyons—like a miniature New York, with donkeys for traffic.
And there is intense noise: machines shredding and crushing plastic; blacksmiths hammering old metal into something new. Coptic ballads of death and resurrection wailing out of tinny radios mingle with the braying of donkeys and goats. When the garbage arrives—in 1970s-model Datsun trucks whose windshields and brakes are long gone— they tip it into the alleyways, right next to where people live. The women come out, accompanied by any children old enough to walk, squat down in the middle of the garbage and start picking through it. They rummage deftly, looking for valuable stuff amid the refuse. The women’s hands and faces are grey with grime, but they’re swathed in acid-coloured scarves and headbands, while their ears are weighed down with yellow gold.
And then there are the flies. If you painted the Moqattam slum you would have to fill the canvas with small dots of brown light, like pointillisme done with flying dirt. But no picture, not even a video, could capture the intensity of the insect life which swarms across your gaze, inhibiting your inward breath.
Like all modern