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Iskandar in a cornfield that his family has tilled for generations.
Hand-in-hand with his wife.
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Key
figures, Egypt
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Total population:
67 million (1999)
GNP per capita:
US$ 1,400 (1999)
Agricultural workers as share of total labour force:
33 % (2000)
57 % (1980)
Agriculture as share of GDP:
16 % (1999)
18 % (1980)
Sources:
UN Food and Agriculture
Organization, World Bank. |
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He
was right, the one who said that agriculture is the mother and nurse of all the other
arts.
Xenophon,
Greek historian (430-355 B.C.)
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Iskandar
works his farm on the outskirts of Cairo, earning enough to get by but not enough
to ensure that his children stay loyal to the land
The sail of the felucca
gently subsides. Its hull bumps quietly against the old jetty made out of bits of
driftwood. A donkey brays in greeting. With their sleeves and skirts tucked up, women
crouch at the river’s edge washing kitchen utensils in the murky waters of the Nile.
Embraced by the two arms of the river, Dahab island is an odd place, where life still
revolves around the harvest. Here, the incessant bustle of Cairo, the Egyptian capital
less than a kilometre away, does not intrude.
Iskandar Khalil was born on this five-kilometre spit of land. For the last 50 years,
he has remained with his fields and his crops, carrying on the 5,000-year tradition
of the fellahin (peasants) of the Nile who live in tune with the moods of the river
in the dry and rainy seasons. To get to his farm at the southern end of the island,
you have to follow dirt paths alongside tiny plots of land, go through the village
where nobody has ever seen a car or a tractor and pick your way through the mud.
The outline of a plane or the black hulk of the Kabbah shrine in Mecca1 painted on the walls
of some houses recall pilgrimages to the holy city of Islam, but the faded state
of the drawings suggests no-one here has been able to make the trip for quite a while.
Iskandar’s house has a white cross besides the door. The bell-tower of the imposing
village church dwarfs the nearby minaret as if to remind the visitor that most of
the islanders are Copts. “When my father died,” says Iskandar, “my three brothers
and I divided up his land between us. I got just over three feddans (1.3 hectares)
and half the house. The other half went to my elder brother. Since then, I haven’t
been able to expand.”
Iskandar lives with his wife and children in three rooms. A spotless white-tiled
floor recently laid over the bare earth stands out in the spartanly furnished house,
as does the television that takes pride of place in the living-room, just as in nearly
every peasant home of the Nile valley.
The daughter of the family married at 14 and went off with her fellah husband to
his home village on “the mainland,” near the Pyramids. Three other children, all
boys between 17 and 21, are unmarried and still at home, perhaps for a long time
to come. Getting married is expensive. The groom has to provide a house for his bride
and Iskandar has no savings to help out his sons. “The little money I have goes on
fertilizer or weedkiller,” he says.
In front of his house, in fields that are precisely marked out and irrigated by canals
leading from the Nile, Iskandar grows fodder for his sheep and 10 cows along with
enough maize to make bread for the family all year round. On another plot, he grows
tomatoes and cucumbers he takes each week to sell in Old Cairo’s market, where he
pays a small tax for a stand. He returns to the island with cooking oil, sugar and
an average of a kilo of meat per month.
“On
the island the air is cleaner and there’s no noise to bother us”
Every
morning, his wife milks the cows, Egyptian- bred creatures with high-ridged backs
and big udders. She takes the surplus of about 20 or 30 litres to the opposite bank
of the river to a tanker truck, bringing back about 10 Egyptian pounds ($3.50). These
are the only links the Khalil family has with the world of money. Iskandar has never
been into a bank and knows nothing about credit. He figures that his earnings average
150 Egyptian pounds per month ($55). But saving is out of the question: once he’s
paid for fertilizers, weedkillers and everyday goods, he has the equivalent of $6
left, which he keeps carefully in a wardrobe. This is money for special purposes,
like buying a pair of sandals or a piece of cloth, and for paying the annual land
tax of approximately $14. No wonder expanding is just about impossible: besides the
tax, a feddan of land (0.42 hectares) costs nearly $5,700. The Khalil family, like
all Nile valley farmers, are mainly self-sufficient, eating what they produce and
keeping chickens and geese, who mingle freely with the cows amid the heaps of manure.
In his field of maize, where the plants come up to his shoulder, Iskandar gazes at
the nearby skyscrapers of Cairo’s wealthy Maadi neighbourhood. “Cairo’s very beautiful,”
he says. “I like watching well-dressed people go by. But here on the island, the
air is cleaner and there’s no noise to bother us.”
“We
have to use chemicals to get the earth to produce as much as possible”
Like the other 200 islanders, Iskandar has never lived anywhere else. He married
a Dahab girl who was a cousin. Tall and strong with a radiant look and grey hair
tucked under a black headscarf, she and their three sons help him in the fields all
day. But the land is too small to be divided up between the sons. “I’d like them
to spend their lives here, close to me, but when they get married they’ll have to
go and work in the city. Farming’s too hard now and you don’t earn enough.” Still,
his family count their blessings: no one has ever been seriously ill and they’ve
rarely had to go to a healthcare centre, generally financed by charitable or religious
organizations.
Sometimes Iskandar dreams of another life. If he had been born elsewhere, he too
would have probably moved to Cairo, where he says, “life is easier and much less
tiring.” He does not understand how city-dwellers can envy his life and smiles at
the thought. Manual labour and the heat of the sun have dried up his skin. On market
days, when he loads heavy boxes of vegetables onto his cart, he feels his thin, gnarled
arms are not as strong as they were. In the evening, on his way back from the fields,
he stops to chat with the menfolk of the village. “Copts or Muslims, we’re all fellahin
and we help each other,” he says.
This is the hour when the wind carries the sounds of the big city. The bridge built
across the river a year ago to link the two parts of the city on its south side rumbles
with the sound of traffic. But Dahab sleeps. Here the day begins and ends with the
sun. If he feels like staying awake for a while, Iskandar turns on the TV. “I like
knowing what’s happening in other places,” he says. But he has never heard of genetically
modified food or angry European farmers. “What’s the problem?” he says. “We have
to use chemicals to get the earth to produce as much as possible. I use them. If
I didn’t, what would I live on?”
He and his wife know they won’t starve. The soil of Dahab has always fed the family.
Last year’s harvest wasn’t bad. But Iskandar also knows his dream of building a “comfortable
concrete house, like in the city” where the whole family can live together will never
come true. He adjusts his blue gallabeya robes, strokes his chin and looks towards
the capital again. “I’ll be a bit ashamed when my sons leave the island,” he says.
“They’ll be the first in our family not to be farmers.”
1. The Kaaba
is a shrine within the Great Mosque of Mecca towards which Muslims turn during prayer.
The Black Stone, an object of veneration, is built into its eastern wall. |
