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from their ancestral home; it was 100,000 of them. Almost seven millennia of Nubian history were drowned in the waters of Lake Nasser, which flooded an area 300 miles long and up to sixteen miles wide in certain places. It was a cataclysm for the Nubian peo- ple and the pain it generated is still very vivid.
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Osama Mohammed, aka ‘The Boss’, from the Nubian band Nuba Nour was born barely a year after the hijra – the great Nubian exodus from the old country ordered by the Egyptian government in 1963–4. “[My parents] were very angry and some of them died because they just couldn’t bear to leave their homes,” he tells me in a quiet intense voice. “And they’ve been angry ever since. They couldn’t live anywhere else. They want to go back to the old Nubia, their homelands near the Nile with the palm trees. Their lives became controlled by the government: how they eat, how they can go to other places. They didn’t have their freedom any more.”
old March winds whip the street where we sit, outside an old pub by the Bristol docks. Even though none of Nuba Nour were born when their homeland was drowned, I want to know what they feel was lost in those waters. So I put the question to Mamdour, the band’s translator, not once, but twice. “They just said ‘paradise’ about five times,” he tells me with a chuckle. “They lost something spiritual. They lost their soul. They lost their clean village. They lost their community. Because in Cairo, yes they are in the same neighbourhood, but maybe you don’t know who’s living in the next building. They had a close community back there [in Nubia].”
The Nubian people were split apart by the dam, half going south to new settlements in the Sudan, half going north to an area known as Kom Ombo, 25 miles away from their beloved Nile, their ‘blessed water’. The concrete houses the government had built for them were stiflingly hot. Their walls cracked easily and needed constant maintenance. Each family was given two acres of land but the soil was a far cry from the fertile mud of the Nile, and had to be soaked in chemicals and fertiliser before it produced a crop. There were no trees, no greenery, no softness. Some called the place Wadi al Jinn, ‘The Valley of the Devil’.
Irony and insult joined forces when the settlers discovered that quite apart from all the schools and clinics that the govern- ment had promised in their endless radio broadcasts but hadn’t delivered, the new villages didn’t even have electricity. That’s what the high dam was supposed to have been for: electricity, water, industry, jobs, fertile fields and modernity for Egypt. It was to be the cornerstone of their great leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s vision of a bright new tomorrow.
Many Nubians bought into that vision and left their old homes with hope in their hearts. Their people had already been displaced by the first dam at Aswan, built by the British in 1902, and by more dam building in 1912 and 1933. In any case, life in that paradise of theirs could be harsh and marginal. Most of the blessings of modernity, including education and healthcare, were bestowed on the north of the country. Many Nubians had left their ancestral homeland of their own free will to look for work in the northern cities.
In the popular Egyptian imagination of the post-war years, Nubians were somehow second-rate. Their dark skin, their strange language (descended from the language of the Pharaohs) and their clean, quaint manners earned them the roles of unthreaten- ing buffoon or faithful dogsbody in Egyptian films, or work as ser- vants, maids and guardians in the wealthier parts of Cairo or Alexandria. Furthermore, the strong position of women in Nubian society and the moderation of their religious observance made them suspicious in the eyes of the Muslim Brotherhood and its sympathisers. The fact that many Nubians became radicals, even Marxists, within Egypt’s political system, and that their homeland was now a strategic frontier ‘gateway’ to Africa, did not endear them to Egypt’s political elite, who smelled the threat of national disunity and separatism every time a Nubian spoke up for his or her rights. On no account could this marginal people be allowed to scupper Nasser’s grand vision of progress or the commercial interests of his backers in the Soviet Union and Europe.
Millions were spent trying to save the ancient monuments of Nubia from the waters of Lake Nasser. Swedish engineers sliced the immense statues of Ramses II and his acolytes out of the gran- ite of Abu Simbel and moved them to higher ground. Other tombs and temples were also rescued. But many treasures disappeared under the waves. Old rocks and carvings: that’s all the internation- al media seemed capable of talking about at the time. The many living beings who packed their belongings and left their beautiful-
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