Egypt's Desert Dreams

Development or Disaster? (New Edition)

David Sims

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781617978845
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Egypt has placed its hopes on developing its vast and empty deserts as the ultimate solution to the country's problems. New cities, new farms, new industrial zones, new tourism resorts, and new development corridors, all have been promoted for over half a century to create a modern Egypt and to pull tens of millions of people away from the increasingly crowded Nile Valley into the desert hinterland. The results, in spite of colossal expenditures and ever-grander government pronouncements, have been meager at best, and today Egypt's desert is littered with stalled schemes, abandoned projects, and forlorn dreams. It also remains stubbornly uninhabited. Egypt's Desert Dreams is the first attempt of its kind to look at Egypt's desert development in its entirety. It recounts the failures of governmental schemes, analyzes why they have failed, and exposes the main winners of Egypt's desert projects, as well as the underlying narratives and political necessities behind it, even in the post-revolutionary era. It also shows that all is not lost, and that there are alternative paths that Egypt could take.

1

Egypt’s Deserts: History, Geography, and Early Development

Deserts have captured the imagination of western travelers for centuries, and Egypt’s deserts are no exception. For example, Cassandra Vivian talks about the extremely harsh environment of the Western Desert “that can offer little comfort, a deadly place that will and has killed, [yet] there is a beauty here that cannot be found in cityscapes or groomed parks. There is a silence so intense it is profound. The earth is clean of the debris of man. The air is pure, untouched by pollution. Freed from the sights, sounds, and smells of populated areas, senses are sharpened and purified in the desert.”¹ These sharpened and purified senses certainly affected the Victorian explorer and writer Richard Burton, who wrote, “the Desert . . . is pre-eminently the Land of Fancy, of Reverie; never ending, ever renewing itself in presence of the Indefinite and the Solitude, which are the characteristics of this open world.” He goes on to say, “in the forested land of the tropics Nature masters man; his brain is confused with the multiplicity of objects; he feels himself as a prisoner in a gorgeous jail. . . . But in the Desert man masters Nature. It is the type of Liberty, which is Life, whilst the idea of Immensity, of Sublimity, of Infinity, is always present, always the first thought.”² There have always been a few Egyptians who subscribe to this romantic love of the desert, but even with the recent rise in desert eco-tourism, they remain largely restricted to a small group of middle-class, westernized people who also love 4x4s.³

Counterpoised to this image of the desert is the more prosaic view seen from the Nile Valley, well put by the Egyptologist Arthur Weigall in 1924: “The resident . . . raises his eyes from the fertile valley of the Nile to the bare hills, and lowers them once more with the feeling that he has looked at the wall of the garden, the boundary of the land.”⁴ In the intervening decades much has happened outside this boundary, as we shall see in this book, but a largely negative and definitely non-romantic perception of the desert among most Egyptians has not. To many Upper Egyptian fellaheen, the desert at their doorstep is still seen as a place where wild beasts, bandits, and even ‘afarit may be encountered at night, where one dumps the carcasses of farm animals, and at best where certain building materials can be found or where there just might be some advantage in staking out a land claim (see chapter 3.) To the millions of young Egyptians who have completed their compulsory military service, the desert evokes memories of remote and desolate army camps, horrible living conditions, and crushing boredom. And to those motoring on one of the many high-speed (and consequently dangerous) desert highways that connect Egypt’s population centers, entertainment is provided by a bleak though eclectic panorama of empty desert interspersed with walls, electrical pylons, endless piles of rubble, triumphal gates, military camps, cemeteries, advertising billboards, puzzling half-finished concrete structures, and yet more walls and more mounds of rubble. The romantic beauty of the desert is only found far away in certain precious locales, far from any roads or tracks or habitation, and every year the “debris of man” extends farther and farther.

It is not that Egyptians, especially the well-to-do and their middle-class copiers, reject the desert. In fact, it is in the new desert towns that many now live—in compounds or gated communities where the air is pure and space is abundant—and it is in seaside desert resorts like Marina on the north coast and al-Gouna on the Red Sea that many take their holidays. Some even carve out hacienda lifestyles on desert farms, usually along the Cairo–Alexandria Desert Road. But in all cases, every effort is made to obliterate any reminder of the surrounding desert. Inside the walls of these villages and compounds and farms are enormous areas of manicured lawns, golf courses, orchards, swimming pools, and even forests, no matter how much water this requires. In fact, the main selling point of these projects seems to be that they create the illusion of being Europe-like enclaves ‘outside Egypt’ and are as divorced from their desert environments as possible.⁵

History

It could be said that Egypt’s deserts have a unique place in the development of human civilization. These immense tracts were inhabited by a multitude of Neolithic hunter-gatherer and pastoral groups at times when the climate was much less harsh and grassland savannas predominated along with valley forests, lakes, and rivers. This epoch, roughly extending from 10,000 to 3500 bc, was called the Holocene Wet Phase.⁶ Over this period of 6,500 years there was moderate to temperate rainfall (10 to 50 centimeters annually), although with drier and wetter cycles. There is considerable evidence of the flora, fauna, and human habitation prevalent in the deserts during this period, including thousands of wonderful rock drawings and glyphs made by sophisticated Neolithic humans found in hundreds of desert locations. These reveal that for a long period the desert contained an abundance of wildlife including giraffes, crocodiles, and elephants, as well as domesticated cattle and other large herds. As the theory goes,⁷ these areas began to dry up around 4300–4000 bc, and the increasing aridity forced the dispersed human populations to escape to better conditions, including oases and coastal zones. A portion of these humans migrated into the Nile Valley where the river and its many water bodies supported plentiful sources of food, and this in turn led to settlement densities that required higher levels of social organization and, eventually, to what some consider the world’s first civilization. Coincidental with this climatic desiccation and the settlement of the Nile Valley was the start of human agriculture in Egypt, with the first indications being the discovery of grain bins in Neolithic settlements along the north shore of Lake Fayoum that could be dated to roughly 4300 bc.⁸

Figure 1. Neolithic rock carvings near Kharga Oasis (photograph by Nicholas Warner, 2012)

Figure 2. Qasr al-Sagha, Middle Kingdom temple north of Lake Qarun, Fayoum (photograph by Nicholas Warner, 2013)

As pre-dynastic Egypt evolved into the unified Egyptian state, the ancient Egyptians came to hold strong views about the perils and difficulties of their adjacent deserts. First of all, they considered the deserts to be places of death, in the sense of a wilderness in which wrongdoers might be sent to perish as either exiles or mine workers, and also as an entrance to the underworld after death. These wastes were referred to as deshret (‘red land’) in stark contrast to the kemet (‘black land’) of the fertile Valley, and they were ruled over by Seth, the traditional god of chaos and disorder.⁹ Evil and the desert were, in effect, closely associated.

Over the twenty-six centuries of the pharaonic era, desert uses were restricted mainly to mining and other extractive industries. There were extensive stone quarries in both the Eastern and Western Deserts, copper and turquoise mines in Sinai (Serabit al-Khadim), and gold mines in the Eastern Desert (especially in Wadi Hammamat). The natural oases deep in the Western Desert—Kharga, Dakhla, Farafra, Bahariya, and Siwa—were colonized at various periods, but the reclamation of virgin desert for agriculture was practically unknown.¹⁰ Of course, the pharaohs needed to traverse the deserts for military and trade purposes, and the main routes were east across the Sinai into Palestine and beyond, west to Libya, east and south to the Red Sea, and south to Nubia and Sudan.

Figure 3. Cleared and marked-out desert 5.1 km in length, presumed to be for chariot training and races, attributed to Amenophis III, Eighteenth Dynasty, Dab‘iya, Luxor West Bank (photograph by Sonja Spruit, 2014)

In the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Christian periods (305 bc to ad 645), Egypt’s deserts remained much as they had under the pharaohs, limited to mining and quarrying activities (e.g., Mons Porphyrites, Mons Claudianus, and Mons Ophiates during the Roman era), to the maintenance and protection of trade and caravan routes (such as Via Nova Hadriana, which ran from Antinoöpolis near Sohag to the Red Sea and all the way south to Berenike), and to small agricultural pursuits in the main oases of the Western Desert.¹¹ However, another dimension to the Egyptian desert that appeared during the Christian period was a movement in which hermit monks, also known as the Desert Fathers, cut their worldly ties to pursue lives of asceticism and to abjure physical temptations. The first monastery in the world was set up by Saint Pachomius around ad 320 near Esna (Tabennesi), and they are now found in many locations in all three Egyptian deserts.¹²

Once Islam spread to Egypt and North Africa, desert trade routes multiplied and became more important, both as conduits for migrating Arab tribes, the burgeoning east–west military and commercial activities between the Maghreb and the Mushreq, and also to accommodate the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Even so, the deserts of Egypt remained for the most part something simply to traverse with the least discomfort and expense possible, whether the travelers were generals and their soldiers, tradesmen, or pilgrims.

Figure 4. Roman fortress at Deir al-Munira, Kharga Oasis (photograph by Nicholas Warner, 2014)

Figure 5. Perimeter wall of Saint Paul’s Monastery, South Galala Plateau, Red Sea Governorate (photograph by Nicholas Warner, 2005)

Figure 6. Muslim tombs near Qalamun, Dakhla Oasis (photograph by Nicholas Warner, 2008)

But what about the Bedouin, who have made their homes in the desert over centuries and are comfortable in it? The origins of the various Bedouin tribes and clans in Egypt are murky, although unruly desert tribes were a frequent nuisance in the Eastern Desert under the ancient Egyptians (they are referred to in pharaonic texts as Medjay) and under the Romans, and there are references to their settlement and use as auxiliary forces under the Ottomans and Muhammad Ali. The largest concentrations of Bedouin were and continue to be found in North Sinai and along the North Coast, where limited winter rainfall supported pastoral pursuits and also allowed winter field crops as well as olive and fig orchards. Over the last century there has been an accelerating trend toward their permanent settlement and absorption into urban areas of Egypt. This was partly government policy but mostly it was inevitable, as nomadic desert living could not sustain the increasing Bedouin population and town life with its employment and trading opportunities became more attractive.

Today, the Bedouin are said to represent only 1 percent of Egypt’s population, or some 700,000 to 800,000 persons.¹³ In the Sinai Peninsula there may be some 250,000 Bedouin out of a total population of 550,000, made up of fifteen distinct tribes,¹⁴ and there are perhaps a similar or slightly greater number along the coastal plains stretching from near Alexandria to Salloum. To these concentrations must be added the sparsely distributed tribes in the Eastern Desert made up of the Ma’aza, the ‘Abada, and the Bisharin, the last two of these being not Arab but derived from the Hamidic Beja. Also, there are Bedouin of Berber origin in and around the oasis of Siwa.

The Bedouin of Egypt may have become largely integrated into town life, but a minority continue to have connections with the desert. Along the North Coast, a few Bedouin herders still move their flocks south in winter to graze on desert steppes and to cultivate cereals, although their families have long ago established permanent homes along the coast.¹⁵ Other Bedouin use their knowledge of the deserts as eco-tourist guides and trackers for the military and for hunting expeditions. And as we shall see in chapter 4, some Bedouin have found lucrative vocations as squatters on and traders in desert lands. Especially around the Canal Zone and west of Alexandria, Bedouin have been quick to perceive the windfall gains to be made by reviving or staking claim to plots of land with development potential, either based on their interpretation of customary rights or simply by being the first to move in and establish claims on what had been desolate margins, waiting for some investor to buy them out.

Twentieth-century Explorations, Surveys, and Military Adventures¹⁶

Whereas the geography and history of both the Sinai and the Eastern Deserts have been relatively well-known since antiquity, the huge Western Desert remained one of the last uncharted corners of the earth’s surface until the early twentieth century. Technically part of the Libyan Desert and considered by some to be the largest and driest desert in the world, this blank hole in the map of Africa started south of the Siwa Oasis and west of the oases of Kharga, Dakhla, and Farafra, and it continued beyond Egypt into what are now parts of Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Romantic legends of lost cities, ferocious tribes, and disappearing armies added further incentives to the turn-of-the-century penchant for exploration and discovery.¹⁷

Even before the first organized explorations of the Western or Libyan Desert started, a few Europeans had tried to penetrate the Sahara Desert, in each case joining caravans and posing as traders or pilgrims. Frederick Hornemann, a German traveler sponsored by the African Association of London, traveled with a caravan that left Kerdasa near Cairo in September 1799. The caravan, a semi-annual affair, headed due west across the Qattara Depression to the Siwa Oasis, then continued to Awjila (now in southern Libya) and on to Murzuq (in the Fezzan region, directly south of Tripoli).¹⁸ Hornemann became the second European ever to have visited Siwa, the first being a young Englishman named W.G. Browne. He had traveled south from the Mediterranean coast som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword to the Hardback Edition Timothy Mitchell
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Egypt’s Deserts: History, Geography, and Early Development
• 2 A Roll Call of Desert Schemes and Dreams, 1952 to 2014
• 3 Greening Egypt’s Desert
• 4 Building Cities and Settlements in the Desert
• 5 Desert Tourism and Environmental Challenges
• 6 Industry, Mining, and Everything Else
• 7 A New Population Map for Egypt?
• 8 The Fatal Flaw: Disastrous Management of Public Land
• 9 Summing Up: Will Lessons Ever Be Learned?
• 10 A Way Forward
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography