BY DOTUN AKINTOYE
With any revolution comes reaction, or to be more precise, the language of reaction. The counterrevolution in Egypt is couched in words like stability. A word which, if there remains any meaning in it, can only mean the maintenance of the status quo. But the debate surrounding the departure of Hosni Mubarak requires a grasp of that status quo; how it was sustained and at what cost. In other words, what it meant to live in his Egypt.
You might call Egypt an ownership society. Former President Mubarak owned everything and everyone. I spoke to two young Egyptian men, both in their middle twenties, about what growing up in Egypt was like. There is something incredibly buoyant yet guarded about intelligent young men who grow up in such a society. They wouldn’t even let me use their names. One granted me permission to use his first, Mohammed, because it’s common enough. The other insisted on remaining anonymous so as to not endanger his family in Egypt (I’ll call him Hassan). Even with Mubarak in flight they don’t feel safe. Exhilarated but not secure.
Hassan described Egypt as a paternal society, a sort of “Family Corporation.” When Hassan was a school boy, the image and voice of Mubarak were everywhere; as was the mythologizing of his efforts in the 1973 war against Israel. “We watched him on TV and heard him on the radio. We called his wife Mama Suzanne. They wanted us to feel loyalty towards Mubarak’s family the same way we would feel loyalty to our own.” In a country whose median age is 24, Mubarak has been President as long as most Egyptians have been alive. “That’s why he talks to us as if we are children. Retarded children.”
Not just minds, but bodies too. The pictures of Khaled Said’s shattered skull and face are available all over the internet. “There are a million Khaled Saids” says Mohammed. Said was beaten to death in public by two policemen in June last year, an act of state violence so pornographic that it helped to galvanize the revolution.
“Before 2005, if you wore a beard, you were arrested,” Hassan tells me, reflexively stroking his own. It sounds ridiculous and so I laugh out loud. “No. I’m serious,” he insists. “The police thought that it meant you were religious, or at least took your religion seriously. Many people refused to attend early morning prayers because that is when most people disappeared.”
Outsiders talk about corruption in Egypt, but they’re only referring to the petty bribes that keep the state running. When Egyptians talk about corruption they mean that every interaction in one’s daily life is a form of perjury. Hassan relates the story of a man who was arrested and tortured until he agreed to inform on the members of his mosque every week to the police. “They told him that if he didn’t come back to them, they would find him and do it again. We joke in Egypt that one in every three people you meet is an informant.”
“So you lie to everyone and everyone lies to you?” I ask. Hassan smiles faintly, the way you do when someone has just grasped what you mean in the most superficial way. “Yeah, but somehow it’s even worse than that” he answers. “You have to bribe your kid’s teacher just to get to the next grade. They call it private lessons. If you don’t pay for them, you can’t pass the exam. And who can blame the teacher? He makes almost no money and he has to bribe his own children’s teachers.”
My conversations with both young men wander to the people they seem to feel the most sorry for, their parents. Hassan tells of the small sacrifices of conscience required daily of his own father. “He is just a businessman. He’s not religious or involved in politics. But he has to involve himself in petty bribes every day just to run his business.”
Mohammed’s parents, both doctors, have spent much of the last 20 years trying to put the bodies of young men like their son back together after encounters with the police, or ministering to the destitute and invisible. But Mohammed doesn’t describe them as great humanitarians. For his parents, to practice the rituals of life and death in Cairo is to learn to weep for the victims while you smile at their executioner.
Mohammed himself readily concedes Mubarak’s claim to stability. “Look,” he says. “We used to be proud to have a man like him. But it just got too bad, the police, the poverty. My grandfather was a member of the NDP (the ruling party) and watched the last election rigged against him, right in front of him at the polling booth. He had been a public servant for thirty years and no one said anything. The last ten years have taught Egyptians of all classes that no one is safe.”
Tourists don’t go to the shantytowns near Cairo, to the neighborhoods with streets too narrow for cars and wooden boxes too narrow for bodies and noses too accustomed to open sewage to even smell the shit anymore. But Hassan was a social worker for three years after college and witnessed these medieval ghettos that Mubarak created by physically driving the poor out of the city to preserve the façade of stability. Those shantytowns are Mubarak’s Egypt too. They’ve been there for years. Stable.