Two communities show Nubians’ past and a version of the future

WADI KARKAR, Egypt, July 15, (AP): With a mix of nostalgia and sorrow, Egypt’s Nubians look back at their lives in ancestral lands in southern Egypt as a peaceful era tied intimately to the Nile River.

Since their eviction in the 1960s to make way for the giant lake behind the Aswan High Dam, they have lived in desolate towns further north, often on the edge of the desert. Many in the community yearn to return to lands along the banks of Lake Nasser.

Two communities show the contrasts of the Nubians’ fate — one pointing back to the Nubians’ past, the other showing the state’s fumbling attempts to find a substitute to quiet calls for a return to the old country. HEISA ISLAND The village of Heisa, home to around 2,000 people, offers a glimpse into what life was like for Nubians in their homeland before the upheavals of the last century.

It is perched on an island in the Aswan reservoir, which was created by the building of a small dam in 1902. While other villages surrounding it were evacuated from the area, Heisa’s people stayed, moving to higher ground. Most of their farmland was lost under water. Decades later, the Aswan High Dam was built upstream, sandwiching Heisa in between.

The air is clean and crisp on the island. The houses, built on rocky hills, are spacious and painted in bright colors, some with domes mirroring the traditional Nubian architecture.

In some places, the Nile stretches majestically for more than a mile into the distance to the surrounding desert shores. Children are out in the river on small boats in the afternoons as young men swim to cool off. Some of the villagers still practice old traditions like baptizing newborns in the Nile, grooms washing in its waters before their wedding or floating dishes of food for the river’s mythical guardians. WADI KARKAR Wadi Karkar, a complex built by the military in the desert west of Lake Nasser, has been touted by the government as providing a “Return” for Nubians.

First opened in 2008, the colony has about 2,000 homes, and more are planned. There’s a police station, post office and greenhouses that employ a few dozen people. With well-ordered symmetrical streets, it looks almost exactly like the innumerable other planned communities that have been built in the deserts around Cairo and elsewhere — except the houses are built in a modern concrete-brick-andstone imitation of the traditional mudbrick Nubian style.

Authorities boast that it will eventually number some 30,000 people. Some Nubians qualify to receive homes there for free as compensation for past losses. But so far, Wadi Karkar has fallen flat.

Fewer than 500 of the homes are occupied, and the streets in many parts feel deserted. People have been reluctant to move in because of lack of jobs or services. The mobile signal is sketchy.