IT IS THE HEIGHT of arrogance to attempt to pass judgment on any people, after two or three months’ study, even if that study has been fairly intensive.
Beautiful and marvelously fertile, the Nile Valley and its people have inspired visitors from Herodotus on; old Herodotus, who apparently went around with a tape measure and a note book and who thus—I hope unfairly—describes a religious journey to Budastis:
“Men and women sail together. Some of the women make a noise with rattles, and some of the men blow pipes during the whole journey… If they pass a town on the way they lay to, and some of the women land and shout and mock at the women of the place, while others dance and make a disturbance.”
For thousands of years the Egyptians have occupied the Nile Valley. In that time the country has been overrun by Ethiopians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks, but inter-marriage has not affected the physical type. Like China, Egypt has assimilated her conquerors, and has made them her own.
Even animals, imported into the country, after a time take on the physical characteristics of the native stock. It may be said that the Nile puts its mark, indelible and lasting, on all that it touches.
Dark of skin, from the olive of the north to the brown or deep bronze of Upper Egypt, the straight black brows, dark heavily fringed eyes, slightly receding forehead and high cheek bones of the Egyptian type remain today as they are shown in paintings and reliefs on the walls of the earliest tombs.
Peasants, or fellahin, form the great bulk of the population. Hard-working, sober and often tragically poor, their food is simple, even meager. Save during the feast days following the fast of Ramadan, they are practically vegetarians; maize bread, broad beans, lettuces and onions, cucumbers and pumpkins form the bulk of their diet, with goat, sheep or water-buffalo milk, soured or converted into cheese.
Their sheep and goats provide the wool for their cloaks and blankets; their body clothes are of cotton, and their houses of mud bricks dried in the sun. A few mats, some cooking utensils and dishes form the furnishing of these houses, which in that climate are only shelters for the night.
On the bent backs of these people, hard-working, resigned, but of recent years showing a certain sullenness, the structure of modern Egypt has been built up. So far they have been merely passive resisters, taking blows sometimes rather than pay their taxes, but content to talk and smoke in their rare leisure, rather than take steps for their betterment.
Disorganized and illiterate—less than ten per cent of the entire population can read and write—in touch only with the regions to the immediate north and south of them, bound together by no bonds of patriotism as we know it, they justify the statement that the Egyptians are a race rather than a nation.
The attempt of the British, therefore, to give a constitutional government to these people has naturally been a failure. The high-class Egyptians, cultured and with vision, watched with trepidation the experiment of sending to the Parliament at Cairo some six hundred unscrupulous and ignorant deputies, and were not disappointed.
Last March (1925) Zaghloul Pasha, whose platform is based on the immediate withdrawal of the British from Egypt and the Sudan, was triumphantly elected, and the British were threatened with an attempt at eviction by the very government they had formed!
Only threatened, however. King Fouad, placed on his throne by the British, promptly disclaimed the election and dissolved the Parliament, and has at the time of this writing been ruling peacefully—and illegally!—ever since.
Not so easily can democracy be placed in the hands of those who are still unfitted for it. And unless America is prepared to support by arms her contention that small nations have a right to determine for themselves their form of government, far better that she had never formulated it.
That the position of the British in Egypt is precarious cannot be doubted. The emissaries of Zaghloul and the leaders of the Nationalist party are constantly working on the fellahin. Their word of mouth propaganda goes up and down the Nile, growing as it travels, and an illiterate people hears and believes.
That the British intend to steal the Nile for use in the Sudan is but one of these stories. A low Nile this year, and one can see the fellahin watching. And little groups squatted around doorways in village streets, ominous, waiting. For the Nile is life to them; a foot of decrease, tragedy.
That the British used Egypt during the war for her own ends is another. They saw the Turkish suzerainty abolished, and no bar to their nascent nationalism but the British. The British were to get out, and leave them free. But the British did not get out, and they feel that they have exchanged the corruption of Turkish rule for something no better, and possibly worse.
So much for the rank and file. It does not concern them now that the British for forty years have given them a masterpiece of colonial government; have run their railways on schedule time, dug them their irrigation ditches and greatly increased the national prosperity. They neither like nor understand the British, and the British neither like nor understand them.
“I liked the old Turk,” said one elderly farmer. “When I visited him in his office, he would ask me to sit down, and. inquire about my family. And maybe send out and order coffee.
“But now I go into the office. An Englishman has his feet on his desk and his pipe in his mouth. He says: ‘Hello there, Ahmed! What the deuce are you after?’
“And he will do what I want, if he can. Probably the old Turk wouldn’t. But somehow I liked the old Turk!”
Not the least of the British errors in colonization and occupation has been the tactless assumption that a conquered people is an inferior people.