Founding Ma'adi

(From the November 2010 issue of the Maadi Messenger)

It takes a stretch of the imagination to conjure up an image of what this place called Maadi looked like a hundred years ago. Taking a backwards glance in time, you have to remove piece by piece the things we now take for granted. First, take away the billboards and brightly colored signs that line the streets. Then take out the cars, and all of the noises that come with them. The trash piled up at the corner, and its scent are gone too. Finally, remove the walls, fences, all of the buildings, the paved streets, the gardens. Watch the pavement beneath your feet dissolve into desert.

The sights, sounds and smells of Maadi have transformed in the last century. It was a not a tree-lined suburb, but the village Maadi al-Khabari, where inhabitants lived in mud-built homes. Today, little remains of that early existence, apart from the enduring Nile, the dust, and a railroad line running south of downtown Cairo to Helwan--once itself a resort for Egypt’s royal family.

How does a village on the outskirts of turn-of-the-century Cairo become a modern suburb, now encircled by the city’s ongoing sprawl? It began with a railroad and a business transaction. Had you picked up a copy of the British daily Egyptian Gazette on March 26, 1904 you might have missed the headline. A notice on the middle of page three announced the creation of the Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Company Limited, for the purpose of purchasing, developing, and selling land adjacent to the rail line--the same line now used by the Cairo Metro.

The company was created in association with the similarly named Egyptian Delta Light Railways Company, which a month later would purchase the railway adjacent to Maadi al-Khabari. That village would become Delta Land’s primary investment and hallmark development project, but only a privileged few knew as much at the time.

The newspaper’s larger headlines carried more pressing reports than the creation of this new business. The Russo-Japanese War waged in the east, threatening the balance of power on a global scale. Within Egypt itself, health crises were wreaking havoc at human and economic levels. The country was beset by the growing challenge of cholera and bubonic plague, as each day the Gazette reported more cases of both. Agriculture faced cattle plague and a wave of locusts that destroyed rural areas. The plague and cholera forced Egypt into a state of quarantine, hindering cross-Mediterranean commerce--a major source of profit.

In the face of such pressing issues, the creation of this land development company seems of little significance. It was just this kind of subtle news item, however, that indicated a new trend in the geography of Cairo, a trend in which residents in the 21st century continue to participate. Maadi’s story cannot be told apart from the creation of the Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Company. That unremarkable notice on page three was the first among many subtle decisions and developments continued to shape the formation of what we know of as Maadi.

The Delta Land Company did not purchase land at Maadi Al-Khabari until 1907. Soon afterward the company’s directors began the creation of a carefully laid out suburb. It was supposed to recall the atmosphere of a small English town, with residential streets arranged in a grid, intersected by larger avenues that radiated out from a series of midans. A year later, ground broke on a handful of villas that were Maadi’s first homes.

Each month this column will undertake a different journey into Maadi’s past. It will examine the intent behind the suburb’s creation, and the reasons for its various quirks, charms, and challenges. The Delta Land Company is one among many factors that informed the creation and development of Maadi. My hope is that by giving readers a richer sense of the area’s history, it will inform Maadi’s present life, offering an enriched sense of the place’s previous existence, and the lives of its former residents.