Nubians revive dream of returning to land

Egypt’s Nubians, forcibly resettled to make way for Aswan Dam on Nile River, step up demands to return to land.

The world of their parents and grandparents was turned upside down more than 50 years ago when they were evacuated from villages along the Nile River to make way for the High Dam. Now a younger generation has revived the long-dormant cause of Egypt’s Nubians, campaigning for a return to their lands and struggling to preserve their culture.

Their timing could not have been worse.

Recent peaceful marches by Nubians were met by swift suppression from the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, which has shown little tolerance for dissent. To a state dominated by the military and security agencies, Nubians’ assertion of their distinct identity and heritage amid the Arab majority looks like a threat to stability.

“This country has so many colors and ethnicities, and it is so destructive that we are trying to give it just one identity,” said Fatmah Imam, a Nubian activist born and raised in Cairo. Even during her days at university, she recalled, the message instilled was that the country should be homogeneous.

“It is painful for me that I am unable to manifest my identity,” she said. “I see Egypt as a mosaic.”

Nubians are an ancient ethnic group who from Pharaonic times lived along the Nile in a stretch of territory from southern Egypt to northern Sudan, even becoming rulers for a period in the 25th Dynasty 3,000 years ago. Darker skinned than most Egyptians, they have a language and culture distinct from the country’s Arab majority.

The 20th century brought a series of displacements, starting with the construction of the first reservoir at Aswan in 1902. The biggest came with the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1950s and 1960s under the rule of the charismatic, authoritarian Gamal AbdelNasser. Some 50,000 were subjected to forced resettlement in 1963 and 1964, and the creation of Lake Nasser flooded their ancestral homeland.

Their dream since has been to return to land along the lake near their original villages.

Nubian activists have found inspiration from the 2011 pro-democracy uprising that overthrew autocrat Hosni Mubarak. In 2014, there seemed to be a breakthrough when the crafters of a new constitution included a clause that for the first time recognized Nubians as an ethnic group and committed the state to organize their return to traditional lands and develop those areas by 2024.

But so far, nothing concrete has been done, activists say.

Succeeding a generation traumatized by displacement, young Nubian activists say they are determined to bring change.

“You must not be worried about the future. I personally feel that the future, God willing, will be dear and generous for all of you.” —Egyptian President Gamal AbdelNasser, addressing Nubians in 1960.

Older Nubians remember vividly their lives in their original land. They talk of sprawling villages of large houses painted in brilliant colors spread out along the Nile. Receding river waters after annual floods left fertile land for crops.

Most important was the bond with the Nile. For generations they lived on its banks. Their rituals were closely linked to it. They would baptize their children in its waters, and before weddings, grooms would bathe in the river. On holidays they would float dishes of food on its current to the river’s mythical guardians. Though Muslim, Nubians have traditions from their Christian past mixed in with their identity; for example, at weddings the guests often call to Jesus and Mary for blessings as well as to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

When the government resettled the Nubians in the 1960s, it told them they were making a major sacrifice for Egypt’s progress, giving up their villages for the sake of a dam that would electrify and modernize the nation.

In return, the authorities promised, the socialist system would ensure them a prosperous future: new, model homes with electricity, running water and farmlands awaited them.

Officials raced to evacuate the Nubians as the Nile’s waters rose. Nubians of that generation recall families frantically packing possessions and pulling livestock to riverboats as officials, soldiers and members of the only political party at the time, the Socialist Union, shouted, “Yallah, yallah!” — “Come on!”

The Nubians were moved to 44 new villages, mostly clumped around the area of Kom Ombo, north of Aswan, more than 200 kilometers (120 miles) from their home region.

What they found was a startling blow. In some villages, houses hadn’t been built yet — there were just chalk outlines. Houses that were ready were small and cramped. Often there was no running water or electricity. Farmland couldn’t be farmed because a canal hadn’t been built yet.

Even worse for the Nubians, most of the villages were miles away from the Nile. The fact that all the new villages bore the same names as the Nubians’ now submerged home villages seemed almost cruel. They became known as the villages of “tahgeer,” or exile.

“People felt they were deceived and the first few years here were very tough,” Mohammed Dawoud, 71, recalled as he sat in a mosque after the sunset prayers in Abu Simbel, one of the tahgeer villages.

Nubians to this day still feel the trauma of having their community shattered. Many left the impoverished new villages for Cairo, Alexandria and other cities to find jobs, often as household servants or doormen. Customs fell away. Though the Nubian language is still spoken in some homes, it is not taught in schools, nor is Nubian history or culture. There is no official data, but some estimates put the number of Nubians today at 3.5 million to 5 million.

In the 50 years since, the tahgeer towns have become indistinguishable from neighboring Arab ones, a sprawl of dust-covered, eyesore apartment blocks, mired in poverty and underdevelopment.

Speaking Arabic haltingly with a heavy Nubian accent, Naemah Hussein, an 85-yearold grandmother, said her house in her original home village of Eneiba was right on the banks of the Nile, where she baptized her first two children. Eneiba at the time had one of the best river ports in the country, built by the British in the 1930s.

Now she lives in the “tahgeer” Eneiba. Since being evacuated there, she had four more children.

The town “is a place that sends people away, no investments, no jobs,” one of her sons said. It is also far from the Nile. “Well, it’s a life,” Hussein said with bitter resignation. “Now I don’t even see the river in my dreams.”

NARIMAN EL-MOFTY — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Sheikh Mohammed walks near his home in the “tahgeer” Eneiba village, northern Aswan, Egypt. In the 50 years since, the tahgeer towns have become indistinguishable from neighboring Arab ones, a sprawl of dust-covered, eye-sore apartment blocks, mired in poverty and underdevelopment. “Tahgeer” Eneiba “is a place that sends people away, no investments, no jobs,” he said.

HAGGAG ODOUL VIA AP This undated photograph shows the parents of Haggag Oddoul before they were forced to leave their homeland, in Egypt. Oddoul, at 74, has spent a lifetime chronicling the miseries of the Nubians’ displacement in dozens of novels and short stories while campaigning for the rights of his community. Arabic reads, “late Sekyna Abdel Megeed and Hussein Oddoul”