The black nile by Dan Morrison

Author:Dan Morrison [Dan Morrison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Voyage
ISBN: 9780670021987
Published: 2010-08-17T07:00:00+00:00

Malakal owed its largesse to the Nile. The city’s location on a high bank ten miles below the river’s confluence with the Sobat made it an ideal spot for British (and later Egyptian) engineers to track the river’s volume. On the north end of town a complex of weathered buildings marked the Egyptian measuring station, once the city’s true center of power. Its bureaucratic offices and other buildings had dwarfed the British governor’s home during the colonial era. I wanted to see the grandeur for myself, so the next morning I walked through the compound’s rusting gate to what was still, despite the weedy neglect, an elegant old house with a broad front porch. Inside, I introduced myself to one of the surprised engineers and was passed to Mohammed Abdelaziz, the director of the station. I asked if he might give me a tour of the compound and he shook his head. “It is forbidden to speak of the Nile.”

Egypt has for millennia viewed the Nile as its property, and Egyptians have been tracking and manipulating the river since the dawn of civilization. Business cards at the Egyptian ministry of irrigation and water resources sport the motto, “Since 4241 BC,” and they aren’t kidding. The Nile was, truly, a matter of national security.

But forbidden?

“It’s right there,” I said, pointing out the window. A hundred feet away, down a grassy slope and past a vegetable garden tended by a shy-looking Shilluk woman, the Nile was shining like gun-metal. Green patches of hyacinth coasted on its surface.

Abdelaziz, a big meaty man in shirtsleeves and dark slacks, had devoted his life to the Nile; as a member of the world’s oldest bureaucracy, he just wasn’t authorized to share. “I cannot help you,” he said. “You must send fax to Cairo for permission.”

“I’ve been to Cairo. The director promised they’d help and hasn’t returned my calls since.”

Abdelaziz seemed unsurprised. “I am sorry.”

“It’s right there,” I said again.

He made a polite gesture toward the door with his hand. Seething, I followed it out.

Egypt’s long shadow over the Nile dated as far back as its business cards boasted. Egyptian forces had followed it deep into present-day Uganda before the British established their colonies in East Africa, and Cairo’s nineteenth-century wealth was derived in large part on the extraction of slaves and ivory from Sudan. Egyptians still looked at the darker-skinned tribes to their south—Arab and African alike—as their little brothers, rightful subjects to be civilized and exploited. It’s a sentiment that persists in Cairo today: Sudan was Egypt’s property and patrimony, stolen away by British colonialists. Sudan’s independence from Britain was opposed by Egypt on the grounds that Sudan was rightfully hers. The Sudanese civil war had been sparked in part by an Egyptian-backed project, the Jonglei Canal, which would have drained the Sudd marshlands, adding an additional sixteen billion cubic meters of water—enough to irrigate two and a half million acres of Egyptian farmland—to the White Nile’s flow, while draining traditional cattle watering grounds. John

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