An Egyptian friend of mine once described the rapport between Cairo, its people and Egypt, saying: ‘The whole personality is interwoven… As a child I believed that if I laughed in the morning, the laughter would travel up and down the Nile and reach everyone by evening.’ There is a sense of belonging and entitlement to which no Cairene, however disenchanted, is entirely indifferent; but I would add that tears and anger travel swiftly too. As the year crosses the finishing line, Cairenes would agree with the rest of Egypt, and probably the world, that 2008 was not great. The city bears the scars of its passage, including the recent collapse of a massive cliff-face, burying alive hundreds of sleeping occupants of multi-storey slum dwellings.
Had the catastrophe occurred in a middle- or upper-class neighbourhood, the rescue efforts would have been more rigorous. Under the circumstances, one family trapped beneath the rubble reportedly begged for assistance for two excruciating weeks by cellphone, only to die, one by one, an unthinkable death. Housing for Egypt’s poor is not a state priority; more than half of the capital is composed of shanty towns, impromptu brick boxes piled haphazardly atop and beside one another. When the ones beneath the Muqattam cliffs were crushed, the state’s belated and meagre rescue operation, alongside the suppression of information regarding the number of victims and their identities, sent a familiar message – that those people shouldn’t have been there, and their lives were not worth saving.
