Anglo-India in Egypt

It's been far too long since I've posted a new entry. It appears the dissertation writing process has gotten the better part of my prose since moving to Birmingham, Alabama in August. Now I work on writing Ma'adi's history everyday, and in doing so I've dug deep into the town's nineteenth century roots, and made some fascinating connections that show how Ma'adi came into being through relationships formed between members of the Indian Colonial Civil Service, powerful Egyptian Jews, and at least one British expatriate who lived throughout the Levant, only to finally settle in Ma'adi. All of these men cooperated around a unified vision for the establishment of a "garden city" seven miles south of Cairo, which I wrote about this past February. Now, I turn to just who connected to that vision, and some of the elements of how. I begin with Sir Auckland Colvin. I wrote about him for the December 2011 issue of the Maadi Messenger and include the article, with some modifications, below.

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We often take the streets we walk and drive on for granted. Their names become part of the scenery, and yet, if they changed, we would find ourselves out of place. Where would we be if Road 9 changed its name? Even if the street remained the same, there is something in the name that makes it familiar, that tells us where we are. The same could apply to any Main Street, in any town.

Sometimes, however, change is a good thing. In recent months, we’ve seen the power of a place’s name. We’ve watched the erasure of “Mubarak” from the metro system, and after a brief period of no name at all, the new moniker—Martyr Station. Each step in the station’s name represents a shift in the larger political story—from overthrow, to the uncertainty of Egypt’s new course, and now a new tone that has yet to define its leader, but recalls the loss of life in the struggle with a strong religious connotation.

This is not the first time Egypt’s street and place names have been overhauled. Ma’adi’s Port Said is one Cairo street that underwent repeated name changes as Egyptian politics shifted course during the twentieth century. When Ma’adi was founded in 1904, Port Said was Colvin Avenue. Today the name carries little meaning, yet to Britons, Egyptians, and Indians at the turn of the century, it referred to the strength of British imperial and commercial power in Egypt and South Asia.

The road was named for Sir Auckland Colvin, a stalwart member of the British imperial civil service, who worked in India and Egypt through the latter half of the nineteenth century. Colvin had an imperial pedigree. He was born in the Punjab of India’s Northwest Provinces on March 8, 1838, the third son of John Russell and Emma Sophia Colvin. His father was a governor of the Northwest Provinces under the East India Company, which ruled India until 1857.

As a child of an imperial civil servant, Auckland spent his early years in South Asia, and returned to England when he was of school age. He began boarding at Eton, one of England’s most prestigious boys schools, in 1850. These were the rhythms of imperial life—mum and dad remaining in India until the summer, when they would return ‘home’ for the hottest part of the year. Meanwhile, Auckland and his siblings straddled life between home at school and home with family abroad. The Britons leading these kind of imperial lives were called Anglo-Indians because of their blend of lifestyles, which was not wholly unlike the mixture of homes experienced by today’s expatriate community.

Colvin began his imperial career in his early twenties, in the wake of his father. In 1857 Indians in the Northwest Provinces staged a large rebellion against the British, and as result of the strain of event, John Russell Colvin suffered a nervous collapse. Auckland wrote in his biography of his father, “Exhaustion, sleeplessness, an overtaxed mind, combined with the strain of his position, the grief he suffered from the loss of his charge, and the death of so many about him, prepared him for the assaults of disease.” John Russell died on September 9, 1857, and Auckland entered the Indian Civil Service in 1858.

Colvin held a variety of administrative posts, finding his real niche in imperial finance. In particular, he worked on land value assessment—experience that garnered him the opportunity to work in Egypt. In 1878, Colvin landed in Cairo to head a survey assessing Egyptian real estate values for the purpose of taxation. At the time, Egypt was bankrupt and on the verge of revolution, after the Ottoman khedive, or viceroy, emptied the country’s coffers on massive new building projects and personal expenditures. The situation became Britain’s reason for invading in 1882, but when Colvin arrived it was an international fray of competing Egyptian, Ottoman, British, and French interests. Colvin got closer and closer to the complexities of the situation, going from head of the land survey to financial adviser to the khedive. He held the position until shortly after the British invasion, and returned to India in 1883.

Why would a street in Ma’adi be named after a man whose career in Egypt ended more than twenty years before the town was founded? Though Colvin returned to India, his involvement in Egypt did not stop. Rather than working for the empire, he found new commercial reasons for being there. He retired from the imperial civil service in 1892, and by the late-1890s, he served as the chair of several private companies abroad, including the Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Company which founded Ma’adi in 1904. Colvin navigated the complexities of Egyptian finance first as an empire builder, and later as a private businessman, and through his efforts became one of the founders of Ma’adi.

In the town’s early days, its streets were named after many of its founders, but focused primarily on the Egyptian Jewish landowners who partnered with British businessmen to establish the town. Midan Mustafa Kamel was previously Midan Menashe and Midan Suares still carries the Egyptian Jewish surname of one of Ma’adi’s founders. Other midans were called Mosseri, Cattaui, and one avenue was called Rolo — all after influential Egyptian Jews. There were a handful of Avenues named after Britons — Colvin Avenue being among the most prominent, was joined by Palmer Avenue and Williamson Avenue.*

Colvin Avenue survived the first generation of Ma’adi’s existence, but by the late 1920s, its reference to British imperial power was no longer popular. It became Abdelwahab Pasha and wasn’t Port Said until the 1950s. The name change marked a significant shift in Anglo-Egyptian relations. In 1919 Egyptian nationalists staged a nationwide revolution that successfully loosened the British empire’s hold over Egyptian affairs. Considering that Colvin was instrumental in shaping British policy during the invasion and subsequent occupation, residents could not abide his name on one of their main streets. Even though the street itself remained the same, the name change signified that Egypt itself, and with it Ma’adi, had undergone a profound shift.

*NOTE: Samir Raafat’s Ma’adi 1904-1962: Society and History in a Cairo Suburb (1994) was consulted on the changing of Ma’adi’s other street names.

Rioters, protestors and congressional hi-jackers

I had a conversation with a good friend soon after evacuating to England this past February. He asked me about the ‘riots’ in Cairo, and I was quick to correct him -- protests, not riots, protests, not riots. This past week the tables turned. I have since returned to the US, and my friend in now in Scotland, a safe distance from the current unrest in London, Manchester and elsewhere in England. I emailed him, remarking that the rioting seemed senseless. His response -- inexcusable, yes, but senseless, not exactly. Touche.

Riot seems the appropriate word to describe the events in London, and while there have been riotous moments in the Middle East and North Africa since January, there has been a kind of deliberate intention behind the events there that we simply do not see in England today.

I asked my students last night what separates a riot from an act of terror. They argued that a riot is spontaneous, where an act of terror, however unexpected, is planned and deliberate. Terrorism is also explicitly political, where a riot can emerge from a general sense of frustration.

The events in England certainly lack the political organization that characterizes either a protest or an act of terror. There is no central organization attempting to coerce the general populace into submission, or overturn the existing regime. The rioters themselves appear to be the ones who are afraid -- looking into a future with few prospects, in a system where they do not feel their interests are represented.

I will confess, I have played the ‘ugly American’ while watching the news coverage, surprised and even disgusting by the slow and seemingly mild-mannered response of the English police. In America, after all, the police have guns, so you are afraid to run away from them. You should be, I keep thinking to myself, afraid to break the law. Yet the English police seem impotent in the face of what they call ‘unprecedented’ uprisings.

Then I read TIME Magazine’s article on how the Tea Party caucus was able to control the debt deal last week, and I was forced to reconsider my sense of American strength in the face of a paltry English response. If there seems to be something inane about the riots on Tottenham Court Road, at least they do it in a place where the police can respond. The United States’ would-be rioters have already taken the Capitol.

Now there is something to be said about the democratic process, seeing as rather than rioting, a largely disgruntled group of disillusioned American whites have been able to have their voices represented in the government -- whereas a similar population in England feels themselves more removed from their own political process. But to pretend that the US doesn’t face the same kinds of problems and pressures is ignorant. While I can sympathize with many of the Tea Party’s demands for more transparent governance, and cuts to bloated bureaucratic systems, holding the welfare of the country’s poorest citizens hostage while you refuse to negotiate with the other side is where I draw the line. What is worse, rather than being the voices through which the American people get the clearest most direct information on the crisis, Tea Party members have been responsible for some of the worst instances of misinformation. Their hyperbole has made them more opaque than anyone on the other side of the aisle.

The long and short of it -- the headlines out of the West make me miss Egypt. The rioters in London, and the congressional hijackers from the Tea Party caucus should take some notes from the pro-democratic protestors in Tahrir Square. They should look to places where democracy is really at stake, and consider what people in those places are willing to do to fight their battles. Perhaps then they could put their belligerent tactics aside and focus on rational approaches to affecting change.

The indomitable Mrs. Devonshire

We're more than a week into June, and I'm now back in the US. While I'm no longer in Cairo, I want to share the story of a woman who, despite experiencing significant personal loss while in Egypt, did not repatriate. While many expats return 'home' when they experience pain or trauma abroad, she gave up her 'domicile of birth' and deeply invested herself in Cairo, as her 'domicile of choice.' I first published this article in the June issue of the Maadi Messenger.

Henriette Devonshire moved to Cairo in January 1907 because of her husband’s work. Robert Llewellyn Devonshire left a promising law practice in England to take up work in Egypt’s Mixed Tribunal and Consular Courts. At the time, Egypt was governed by a complex judicial system, where foreigners were tried according to their native-born laws, and each major power established its own court in Egypt. Robert appears to have quickly made a name for himself in Cairo. He later partnered with Charles Golding and fellow Ma’adi resident Aaron Alexander to form one of the more prominent law firms for Britons in Egypt.

Before landing in Egypt, the Devonshires’ life already had an international touch. Henriette was French, and the couple married in Paris on May 24, 1887. Shortly after marrying they moved to England, where they had their children -- Marie, their son Feray, and Antoinette. When they arrived in Cairo, the two younger ones were still school age, being 16 and 13, respectively.

They initially lived elsewhere in Cairo, and moved to Ma’adi in the 1910s. Perhaps it was in those first years that Henriette formed her deep attachment to Islamic Cairo, because while many Ma’adi residents remained firmly planted in their garden city outside Cairo, Henriette made a name for herself traversing the space between the two, regularly exploring the ins and outs of Cairo’s medieval mosques and monuments.

Moving to Ma’adi provided the opportunity to share her passion. At the time the world faced the Great War, and Cairo was full of British Commonwealth troops. Digla was first developed at this time, and became a military base for New Zealanders. Henriette began writing travel guides for this population of newly-arrived foreigners, who were in Egypt long enough to venture off the well-worn tourist path. The articles were published together as Rambles in Cairo -- and gave a conversational, but informative guide to Islamic Cairo.

Ma’adi residents had a varied war experience, watching troops move into and out of the city, some never to return. German residents became ‘enemies’ overnight, and some where interned in Prisoner of War Camps, their property being seized by the government. The nationalist spirit among Egyptians was also on the rise. Not long after the war ended in 1918, these nationalists took to the streets, demanding independence.

In addition to world war and revolution, the Devonshires experienced their own personal tragedy in 1919. On July 20 their son Feray was killed in the third Anglo-Afghan War. Then, just two years later, Robert died suddenly while on a trip to Alexandria.

We do not have a personal comment from Henriette on how these experiences affected her. There is a telling statement, however, in Robert’s will, that speaks to the Devonshires’ commitment to Egypt. He began the will stating that he renounced his domicile of origin in England, “and adopted Egypt as my domicile of choice.” The sentiment was likely shared by the rest of the family, because rather than looking to flee reminders of Robert and their home, Henriette remained in Egypt for the rest of her life.

Rather than cutting ties with Egypt, Henriette further engrained herself here. She fashioned herself into one of Cairo’s most reputable experts on Islamic Cairo -- writing books, giving tours, and delivering lectures. In 1922, just a year after Robert’s death, she published Some Cairo Mosques and Their Founders. It was a more academic, and archaeological counterpart to what she had already published in Rambles in Cairo.

She followed up Some Cairo Mosques with L’Egypte Musulmane et les Fondateurs de ses Monuments in 1926, and then published Eighty Mosques and other Islamic Monuments in both English and French in 1930 and 1931, respectively. To do all of this she also learned to speak and write Arabic. Also in 1931, she republished an expanded edition of Rambles in Cairo, making her expertise more accessible to non-specialist readers who wanted to learn more about medieval Cairo.

She was writing to people like herself -- those who were in Cairo for long enough to really explore what the city had to offer. She explained, “These ‘rambles’ are destined for people who have time to spare, who can come again to see the beautiful things that have pleased them a first time and to go further afield in order to make comparisons for themselves.”

Cairo’s history became a refuge for Henriette. In circumstances where it would have been understandable for her to turn to the familiar, she lived out her recommendation to her readers, going further and further afield. She found herself more at home in the places where she would have ostensibly appeared most foreign.

Henriette continued giving weekly tours of Islamic Cairo into her 80s, while also continuing to publish on the topic. Her final book, Moslem Builders of Cairo, was published in 1944. In the same year, King Farouk recognized her work by conferring on her the Order of Al-Kamal. The Egyptian Gazette reported at the time that the honor “will be deeply appreciated by those who realise how much Mrs. Devonshire has done to make Egypt loved and understood by Europeans.”

On Sept. 7, 1949 Henriette died at her home in Ma’adi. She was 86 years-old. By that time, she had watched Cairo endure two world wars and a revolution, while also losing both a son and husband. As we face revolution and instability in our own moment in Egypt’s history, Henriette provides a story of perseverance and increasing dedication to Cairo. She, like her husband, renounced her domicile of origin, and chose Egypt as her home.

How did Mary's garden grow?

It's been far too long since my last post. I leave Cairo in five days, and then it's back to the US to start writing... a daunting, but exciting task. I have a couple thoughts about war/revolution and memorialization that I've been meaning to post, but while those are still in the works, here is my most recent entry from the Maadi Messenger. The April issue was on gardening, so I did a bio of one of my favorite former residents - Mary Stout.

As I have learned more and more about the history of Ma’adi, there are a few distinct figures who manage to emerge from the sources, and the more I read, the more I get a sense that I know them. Among Ma’adi’s strongest historical personalities is Mary Stout. She was a wife, a mother, an American, and a world traveler. More than anything, however, she has left a trail of sources that present her as Ma’adi’s consummate gardening expert.

In a town of gardens and gardeners, appropriately residing in Cairo’s garden city, Stout continues to be an authority on gardening in subtropical climates. Sir Robert Greg, chairman of the Egyptian Horticultural Society wrote of her, “Mrs. Stout is one of the pioneers of modern gardening in Egypt, and persons like myself, who had the privilege of visiting her garden at Maadi before and during the war, must remember with gratitude the wonderful display flowers, creepers and shrubs in that small earthly paradise on the edge of the desert that it then was.”

Greg is referring to the First World War here, and describing Stout’s home at a time when Ma’adi was on the verge of its own spring. After its founding in 1904, Ma’adi remained largely in the background of Cairo’s noteworthy places for nearly two decades. It developed gradually, and Mary and her husband Percy Wyfold Stout, were among its earliest residents. While they first purchased land in Ma’adi in 1910, it wasn’t until the 1920s, after the Ma’adi Sporting Club was built in 1921, that the town really began to bustle.

In those in-between years, Ma’adi was known for its villas, with their large gardens -- Stout’s being among the most reputable. The same year the club was built, Stout also began more publicly making a name for herself as a gardening expert. In 1921 she co-wrote a guide for gardening in Egypt with well-known British gardener Madeline Agar, most famous for designing the War Memorial Garden in Wimbledon, UK.

Greg described that initial volume as both a guide and a despair to Cairo’s gardeners. A despair, he explained, because “so few of us have been able to to reach the lofty standard not only preached but practiced by the gifted author and experienced gardener.”

Demand for Stout’s expertise was high. The garden in Egypt already figured prominently in the expatriate experience. Articles like “In an Egyptian Garden” compared the dynamics of gardening in Egypt to those in England. The author begins by stating, “An Egyptian garden has one great advantage over an English or German one—it is beautiful the whole year round.”

The article’s author, the sister of a botanist, goes on to describe the variety of flowers that bloom in Egypt over the course of a year. In January the garden is a “blaze of poinsettias,” which give way to the “purple glory of the bougainvillia, which pours a great cascade of bloom over the western verandah, and up to the very roof of the house.” By summer, the garden “gets its crowning glory, the great white magnolia.” And in the fall, “the passion flower is in full beauty, and the starry blossoms of the climbing Jessamine shine out a pale green mist of foliage.” These kinds of landscapes were common in Ma’adi, where residents were committed to cultivating the space around their new homes.

Stout followed up her initial handbook with a larger, more detailed volume in 1935, titled Gardening for Egypt and Allied Climates. The Egyptian Horticultural Society supported the production of this expanded work, and Stout, in turn, addressed the essentials of proper gardening in Cairo.

Gardening opened with ten “do not’s” for garden planning. They include “Do not make curved paths where straight ones are of more obvious use;” “Do not make a path end without any reason;” and “Do not overplant. The effect is as unrestful as an overfurnished house.” Of her ten points, perhaps the first was most significant, “Do not forget that the house and garden belong to each other, and that the garden is mostly seen from certain fixed points within the house.” The list, she concluded, could be summed up with three words: “Utility, Proportion, Unity.” Stout continually recommends designing a garden that ties flowery aesthetics to social uses.

As intertwined places, the home and the garden provided the setting for the interactions of everyday life, and a successful garden accounted for the people who would live and play within it. Stout repeatedly emphasized the importance of designing the garden with human interactions, especially the perspective of guests, in mind. For instance, “picturesque” flowers should not be planted too close to the house because they evoked the best effect when viewed from a greater distance. Likewise, seats were to be placed “in shelter, shade and privacy, where good views of the garden can be had.” Such locations offered an intimate setting for close, personal interaction, surrounded by foliage. She also accounts for entertainment, instructing readers to design their lawns with particular games in mind, having to be watered continuously to ensure they kept their green color.

With Ma’adi’s reputation from early on as a haven for gardeners, it is not so surprising that today it is home to some of the city’s most active environmental groups—the Tree Lover’s Association, and the Environmental Rangers. These organizations pour their energy into preserving the suburb’s identity as a garden on the edge of the desert. Their efforts continue the work that Stout began nearly a century earlier. For them, the suburb’s British roots are secondary to Maadi’s significance as symbol of Egypt’s natural resources richly cultivated.

Abu Simbel, life in a modern village

I am back in Egypt. After two and a half months in England, I returned to Um al-Dunya, where hopefully I can tie up some loose ends and then go home to the US. Before I could sit down and write about Cairo again, though, I left again! I returned last Friday, and by Sunday night I was back at the airport, this time to fly further south, to Aswan. I had never been to Upper Egypt before, and when Marty (my Um fi Masr) generously offered to take me along, I couldn’t resist.

I am currently writing from Daraw, a town near Aswan, where we’ve spent the last 24 hours, staying with a German nurse. Before arriving here, we were in the Nubian village of Abu Simbel, where we spent the previous two days.

The time in Abu Simbel was not like anything I have experienced. The homes are a series of rooms surrounding an open-air courtyard in the center. There is no sense of ‘my room’ or ‘your room’ -- the spaces are shared, and people sleep where the temperature best suits them.

We stayed with Marty’s friend Azza, whom she has known since first coming to Egypt nearly 30 years ago. Azza recently moved with her children from Cairo to Abu Simbel so that her four kids would grow up in a healthier environment and attend better schools. It is so different from Cairo -- so quiet, the air clean, and the social relations closely knit, as most people in the village are related in one way or another. The main activity of the day is sending the kids off to school at 7 a.m., and then feeding them when they return in the early afternoon.

It would at first appear that the place is wholly removed from some of the more burdensome elements of modernity. It is tempting to idealize it as an escape. No one has to run off and check their email. The very notion of a schedule is silly, and we were regularly teased for having some sort of plan.

The tell-tale signs that we are all part of the same, shrinking world exist there, however, just a bit below the surface. Everyone has a mobile phone, and each house has a television, equipped with a satellite dish. We went to one woman’s house, where after sitting on the floor and sifting through corn kernels, we went into the front room where we drank Sprite and watched a soap opera. The villagers in Abu Simbel strike a balance between the traditional and the modern.

Yet cell phones and satellite dishes are just the beginning of the village’s modern existence. If you wander the streets of Abu Simbel, it is difficult to get lost, because off of the streets are arranged in a perfect grid. Every few streets a large manhole cover peaks out from the dust, and you can tell that the road was once evenly paved, and has eroded into mostly dust over the years. The manholes are accompanied by a modern sewage and water pumping system -- so that the homes have running water.

The village exists in this orderly fashion because it was built by the government. This is the second Abu Simbel. The original village is now under water. It was relocated in the 1960s, after Nasser heightened the Aswan Dam. The government rebuilt villages, and with the assistance of UNESCO, moved the people to new homes north of the city. Families were then assigned to homes that corresponded with their size -- a small family receiving a smaller house, and so on. The village continues to exist, with the state’s permission, more closely tied to state intervention than quarters of Cairo populated mostly by squatters.

The transplantation of Abu Simbel and other Nubian villages transformed village life. Where their former homes, near the Sudanese border, were in green, vegetated areas, this new village was in the desert. The village was no longer self-sustaining, but more of a government housing project. To support their families, men left the village and found work in Cairo, Alexandria, or near the Red Sea. This added another modern element to village life as the family became a mobile entity -- moving between the village and urban centers, depending on the season, and communicating largely by mobile phone.

Azza’s husband works in Cairo for a tile-making company, where he runs errands. He calls his wife on her mobile probably five times a day, but only sees her every six weeks to two months. Similarly, I was woken up one night at 2 a.m. when Azza’s niece Samar got a call from her fiancé, who is in Hergada. They hope to get married in two years, when they have saved up enough money to build a house in Abu Simbel. The village is a place of women, children and old men, and life there thrives on ties provided by modern communication.

Are these couples so different from my aunt and uncle, who spent the last few years doing a ‘hitch’ with an oil company -- where he worked for a month in Pakistan, and then would return to the US for a month off, only to return back to Pakistan and start the routine over again. The income levels are night and day, yet the strain on the relationship, and the type of commitment formed because of the distance might not be all that different. Perhaps my aunt and Azza would find a lot to talk about. We think of the oil company ‘hitch’ as especially modern, with all of the air travel, and networks of global commercial connections implied. Yet this village life might be all the more modern, when one considers that the village’s very existence is based on the state’s construction of it. What does this say about our notion of what constitutes modernity? and what is required to have it?

The villagers have struck a different kind of balance between the modern and the traditional. In some ways they are more embedded into systems of modern state-craft than most Westerners. At the same time, however, their dress, diet, and household structure have remained the same for centuries. If they are able to carry out this negotiation, then what does that say about modernity and modernization?

Perhaps the most modern element at work here is the ability to choose between elements of modernity, and how they will be adapted to a life. To raise a family in a village, while income comes from the city; to use the mobile phone to ease the tensions of that dual-existence -- these are the kinds of negotiations and choices that go on in the modern village. These choices show a kind of sophistication that do not seem as apparent to wealthier consumers. We cannot see the satellite dishes and mobile phones as a betrayal of village life, but as a sophisticated adaptation of the modern to meet traditional purposes.

Intersecting revolutions -- this isn't the first time

It does not sound exactly logical that events in Egypt would affect a revolution in Hungary. What stretches the imagination all the further is that the same historical moment transformed life in Ma’adi.

The events of October 1956 show the historical precedent for the kind of interconnected change we watched unfold in the last two months. A dictator is overthrown in Tunisia, thus sparking the revolutionary zeal in Egypt, then the Gulf, Libya, and so on. Networks of information and ideas exchanged over the internet have undergirded much of that activity. So it appears that while the authoritarian regimes controlled so much of society, they could not stop the airwaves themselves, nor the movement of information through them.

Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union was similarly unable to control information sent through the air. Where we have the internet today, Western powers used the radio to send pro-democracy messages into the Eastern Bloc.

For years Hungarians heard messages from Radio Free Europe, offering the hope of Western military support if they opposed the Soviet regime. The critical moment came on October 23 when students took to the streets of Budapest. Word of their protest quickly spread throughout the city, and soon more than 200,000 people had joined in.

They stormed parliament, demanding the end of the Soviet occupation, fair elections, and a free press. Two days later, Soviet tanks were upon them, opening fire and killing hundreds of demonstrators. The oppressive strong arm was not enough, though, as the revolution spread into the countryside. By October 28 the revolutionaries were swearing in a new government. In the span of a week the Hungarians had done the unthinkable -- toppled Soviet power, and established an independent government.

Then they waited, hopefully anticipating the Western military support that would confirm their revolution, and prevent the Soviets from returning for an evening bloodier offensive. However well-intentioned Western promises, neither they nor the Hungarian people anticipated Egypt would have its own revolutionary moment in the same week.

While Hungarians stormed parliament, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, taking a definitive stance against Western imperialism. Where the British and French might have otherwise aided Hungary, they set their focus on Egypt instead. On October 29, the day after Hungary established its new government, the British, French, and Israeli militaries invaded Egypt. One Hungarian leader later told Nasser, “You stole our revolution.”

Rather than successfully thwarting Soviet oppression, Hungary became a bloody example of what happened to states that balked at their control. By November 11, the Soviet Union once again controlled Hungary.

For Egypt, the moment was more transformational. When the British and French took action, they anticipated the United States’ support. After all, Nasser had shown his own Soviet-leaning sympathies, so it appeared that the Cold War balance would swing in their favor.

U.S. leadership saw it differently. Wanting to avoid Soviet involvement in the Middle East, they sided with Nasser, and demanded that the foreign armies withdraw. To Britain’s chagrin, the loss of the Suez Canal marked the their empire’s setting sun. After Egypt, British power continued to fall throughout Africa and Asia.

This post-colonial turn not only altered Egypt’s position on an international scale, but also deeply affected the personal lives of those living within Egypt at the time. Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Egypt and especially the cities of Cairo and Alexandria had been cosmopolitan hubs. Foreigners from throughout the Mediterranean, Near East, and Europe made homes for themselves there.

Ma’adi was a product of Cairo’s cosmopolitan past. In addition to the Egyptians and Britons living there, its residents hailed from Italy, Greece, Germany, France, Austria, and throughout the Levant. While these various nationalities appear to have coexisted fairly harmoniously in peacetime, their neighborly ties were quickly threatened during periods of global conflict. During the first and second World Wars, for instance, Ma’adi residents saw the homes of Italian and German neighbors quickly become “enemy property.”

So when Britain, France and Israel threatened Egypt, Nasser turned his eye on the British, French and Jewish populations within his borders. He ordered the repatriation of all British and French nationals -- some of whom had lived in Egypt for centuries. The Jewish population was not ordered to leave, but was increasingly targeted by oppressive moves, so that the majority elected to leave.

For a place like Ma’adi, which was home to so many foreigners, its demography was transformed. Stores were shuttered, never to open again. Homes were abandoned, and then sequestered by the government. The synagogue went from being a center of Jewish social life, to a relic of a largely forgotten past.

While Ma’adi remains a haven for expatriates today, 1956 marked the end of an era where Europeans made long-term homes for themselves in Cairo. The gap left by European repatriation was largely filled by Americans. These new residents came with a more itinerant agenda--coming to Cairo for several years, but then leaving again for a new post or to return to their country of origin.

We still see remnants of pre-1956 Ma’adi when walking through the neighborhood. The abandoned villa on the corner of Roads 83 and 14, for instance, was once a lovely home with a large garden. Now it stands as a kind of decaying monument to Ma’adi’s former existence. It is physical proof of a historical change that was at once intensely local, and wholly global.

An inestimable number of lives were changed by the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It marked a new era in national politics -- claiming a renewed role for Egypt as a regional leader. It dispersed European and Jewish populations throughout the world, and it simultaneously dealt a crushing blow to Hungarians’ dreams for democracy.

We have all just lived through a similar turning point in Egypt’s history. I am writing this article, however, not from Ma’adi, but from Oxford, England, where I evacuated to in early February -- creating yet another link between Egypt and the world. Like those Ma’adi residents of 1956, our individual movements into and out of Egypt, the mobilization of local and foreign military power, and the movements of democratic messages through the airwaves are all part of the story. Once again, a revolution in Egypt is a deeply personal, national, and global event.

In the cross hairs of global events - Ma'adi's solar engine

It didn't seem the right timing to post this earlier, because the revolution and my own evacuation were still unfolding. It seemed more pressing to put my immediate thoughts to words, and recall my experiences. I was thinking about it today, though, and this article perhaps should have been among my first posts. It's my Maadi Messenger article from the February issue. Unfortunately, I have yet to see the hard copy, but the theme that month was 'desert.' I wrote about the solar-powered engine that was built in Ma'adi in 1911.

The article is below. What I don't fully elaborate on there, however, is the extent of the First World War's impact on Shuman's invention. His work was backed by both British and German financiers -- a relationship that became untenable in 1914. Then Shuman himself died in 1918. Even if he had managed to coral new support, he was no longer around to carry out his vision for harnessing the Sahara's solar power.

What strikes me about it now is how accidental it all seems. Here is a man working successfully to find a sustainable energy source, yet as his work progresses he runs headlong into "the war to end all wars." The conflict was so devastating, his project was left almost wholly forgotten. Shuman's work somehow appears less relevant after the war. Why is that?

As we continue to hear about this new era in the Middle East, most of those affected were caught by surprise. For me there is an accidental feeling -- How did I get here? What is going on? You think you are living one story, and come to find out things are very different from what you previously supposed. I think the same was true for Shuman -- at once he is an up-and-coming inventor, and then because of a variety of circumstantial factors that were completely out of control, that part of his story just ends. With that, here is the Maadi Messenger story from February:

"Harvesting the Sun: Maadi’s early-twentieth century solar engine"

Much of Maadi’s history has been about expansion into areas that were otherwise desert. Throughout the twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries, Maadi participated in greater Cairo’s outward spread, as the city gradually swallowed up its surroundings with people, roads, buildings, and lights.

In Maadi’s early years, however, before the automobile dominated Cairo’s traffic, and when coal still burned within most engines, Maadi’s desert surroundings provided the opportunity to capitalize on a largely untapped energy source -- the sun. By 1911, Maadi was home to one of the world’s first industrial-sized, solar-powered steam engines. The machine pumped Nile water into the land south of Maadi, so that it might sustainably convert the desert into agricultural land.

Understanding how this story began requires a trans-Atlantic trip to Tacony, a neighborhood south of downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, on the corner lot of an average-looking residential street, stood a large, three-story, red-brick house. Enclosed under its gray roof was the home and workshop of American scientist and inventor Frank Shuman (1862-1918).

Shuman began work on a solar-powered engine in his Tacony workshop in 1897, hoping his invention would curb coal consumption. He started with a series of ether-filled pipes, ether having a relatively low boiling point. The pipes were strung through a series of water-filled boxes, which were then heated by mirrors, angled to reflect the sun. The construction generated steam, which then powered a water pump in Shuman’s backyard. In favorable weather, the pump could lift 3,000 gallons per minute to the height of 33 feet. To prove the pump’s durability, Shuman left it running continuously throughout the winter and spring. Even on cold days, so long as there was sun, the pump worked.

After this initial success, Shuman founded the Sun Power Company in 1908 and began plans for expansion into warmer climates. Three years later construction began in Maadi. This time, rather than putting ether in the pipes, Shuman used water. No longer constrained to the dimensions of his backyard, this new engine was significantly bigger, so that the total heat-catching area was more than 10,000 square feet. It was capable of pumping 6,000 gallons per minute.

Popular Science reported at the time that Shuman had “suddenly amazed the world by constructing a sun-power plant which promises to turn the deserts of the tropics into centres of industrial activity.” The magazine projected that the area 20 degrees to the North and South of the equator would be ideal for the engine’s use.

When the engine was formally unveiled on a sunny June day in 1913, Lord Kitchener, the consul-general and head of the Egyptian government, attended. Kitchener was hoping to expand cotton cultivation in Egypt and the Sudan. While coal-powered irrigation pumps seemed the only way to increase agriculture in areas remote from the Nile, upon seeing Shuman’s engine, Kitchener ordered the construction of a similar apparatus in Khartoum.

Another British observer, J. Astley Cooper reported back to the Foreign Office in England, suggesting that the solar engine be employed throughout Africa and India. “How valuable this invention will be, in the Tropical parts of the Empire where irrigation is required, and fuel rare, I need not point out,” he wrote.

While it appeared that Shuman’s success was imminent, solar energy was not without its competitors. In 1908 -- the same year Shuman founded the Sun Power Company -- oil was first discovered in Persia (present-day Iran), and served as the basis for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the progenitor of BP. One of the company’s biggest customers soon became Great Britain’s Royal Navy.

In 1914 Shuman said of the human impact of his work, “One thing I feel sure of, and that is that the human race must finally utilize direct sun power or revert to barbarism.” Prescient words when one considers that the world erupted into a bloody war powered by oil and coal by July of that same year -- little more than a year since the Sun Power Engine’s unveiling.

Shuman did not survive the First World War, passing away in 1918. It appears that his solar-powered engine and the hopes associated with it died with him. Today, discussions of energy extracted from the desert continue to focus on oil rather than the sun. Similarly, no physical trace remains of Maadi’s solar engine. Its site has been built over as the city found a different way to conquer that section of desert.

For more information on Maadi’s Sun Engine, also see:

www.sun1913.info

www.eoearth.org/article/Shuman_Frank

www.renewablebook.com/chapter-excerpts/350-2