Two South Africans in Egypt

My wife, Andrea Hurst, and I have just returned from a most informative – and largely enjoyable – trip to (and through) Egypt, and it was unavoidable to reflect on differences and similarities between this Arabic country with its ancient history and our own country, South Africa, in the course of our travels.

On arriving in Cairo, we were astonished to learn, from our guide, that between a quarter and one third of Egypt’s approximately 77-million people live there (the figures provided by different guides varied between 22-million and 25-million – virtually half the population of South Africa).

Driving along the streets of Cairo is a tangible reminder of the struggle for survival that its inhabitants engage in every day. In a street vaguely divided into three lanes in each direction, at any given time, we counted five vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, horse- or donkey-drawn carts) abreast, bumper to bumper with those behind and in front of them, continually jockeying for position laterally in order to gain the advantage in their frenetic forward motion, their drivers incessantly hooting at one another. Meanwhile pedestrians cross – jaywalk, in fact – the road in between the hundreds of cars, deftly sidestepping vehicles from one interstitial pocket of fleeting safety to the next. There is nothing on South Africa’s cities’ streets remotely resembling this melee of motor cars and people. Even New York, which disconcerts the novice NY driver at peak hour with its traffic density, seemed to us relatively ordered and civilized by comparison.

Roughing it in the market districts of Old Cairo – to the chagrin of expert tourist-fleecing guides who continually did their best to persuade us that it is ill advised to travel by Metro and traverse the city on our own – we encountered the counterpart of the endlessly jostling traffic on its roads. Whether it was the fabric market of Boulaq – Egyptian cotton is reputedly among the best in the world – or the general market of Kalil Kallili, both in downtown Old Cairo, or the Nubian market in Aswan, or the tourist market in Luxor, the sheer, ruthless competitiveness on the part of the wide variety of traders, required for making a living, was unmistakable in the urgency with which they entreated us to enter their specific nook or cranny of the densely cluttered market alleyways. And should one show the merest smidgen of an interest, efforts to convince you that their merchandise, or their prices, or both, were unrepeatably good, would be redoubled.

We got into the Egyptian custom of haggling surprisingly quickly, although it is difficult to tell with what degree of success. For example, we managed to get a cotton wrap (shawl) trader to come down from 65 Egyptian Pounds (approximately R120) per shawl to 50 EP each if we bought two, only to discover, a few days later back in Cairo’s market, that the starting price for the identical thing was 45 EP each, which we managed to bring down to 40 EP (obviously still at a profit for the trader)! Not that we minded paying even the higher price – by South African standards these were real bargains: lightweight, but surprisingly warm cotton wraps with beautiful patterns woven into the richly coloured fabric, ideal as gifts for friends and family back home.

Despite the fierce competition among the salesmen (and they were men; we did not witness a single woman selling any goods), it was simultaneously strikingly noticeable that Egyptians look out for each other. “Escorts” of tour companies would conjure up guides to accompany us to pyramids, temples and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings, and guides would advise us on the size of the (ubiquitously expected) tip we should give to our various drivers to and from the hotels where we stayed (and by implication to themselves), as well as insisting that we should not use public transport such as buses and the Metro (train), because it was supposedly “not safe”. Instead, they counselled, we should use taxis to get to our destination in Cairo. In fact, because we know from experience that the way to get to understand a society or culture is to mingle with ordinary people, we used every type of transport, from taxis and the Metro to a bus, and found the latter two modes far less expensive than the taxis – 1 EP per person as opposed to a minimum of 20 EP for a taxi.

Our trip down the Nile on one of the many cruise boats was wonderful – with a big cabin window that afforded a panoramic view of the ever-changing spectacle on the river banks, good food and – as it turned out – good company in the shape of four Americans and two other South Africans – the only other English-speaking guests on the boat, among a fairly large number of Italians, Germans, some Spaniards and a few Peruvians.

Afterwards Andrea remarked on having had the salutary experience of being, for the first time in her life, in a fairly large group of people (referring to other tourists) where English was not the predominantly spoken language. This experience would repeat itself later, in the hotel at the Red Sea resort of El Gouna, which Germans seem to have adopted as (largely) their “own” – we heard one couple speaking English there; the rest of the guests were all German. To cater for them, most of the signs were in German as well as in English, and the majority of the television channels carried German programmes. If a role remained for English, it was that of lingua franca, with people reverting to English when neither Arabic, Italian nor German would work as means of communication.

Some of the differences between South Africa and Egypt should already be apparent from what I have said above – in our country we don’t have a tradition of buying goods through haggling (which, incidentally, I find a far more “human” way of doing things than the customary Western, including South African, unchallengeable fixing of prices; the only possible exception to this being the price of a second-hand motor car). Haggling corresponds with the typically human trait of differing regarding one’s estimation of what something is worth, and in Egypt no one takes offence if the salesman is not willing to come down further than a certain price – even if this is sometimes only for show — as indeed is one’s own “act” of turning away to another stall with similar goods. Invariably, the ostensibly immovable trader follows one with an expression of being deeply wronged on his face and a matching tone in his voice, declaring that he would come down still further in his price, apparently for our sake!

The difference between traffic behaviour there and here, respectively, should also be apparent from what I have said. In fact, some of the more upsetting driving habits of South African motorists (mini-van taxis jumping red lights, for instance, which I witness frequently) seem paltry compared to the way Egyptians routinely seem to drive. On our way to the Red Sea between Luxor and Hurghada – a four hour drive – we sometimes crossed our proverbial fingers that we would get there in one piece, because the drivers (including our own) of mini-vans and buses, driving in convoy, with army and police escort in front and at the back, seemed to be playing chicken, rushing past one another and pushing in unceremoniously when traffic appears from the front (which often happened).

Any attentive reader would have noticed a conspicuous difference between the two countries in the previous paragraph – the reference to military and police escort. In South Africa tourists are not customarily accompanied by such an escort (although some may argue that they should be). We questioned a number of people on this clear indication of security-consciousness, but mostly received evasive answers. Apart from the military and police escort, the convoy had to pass through military checkpoints every twenty miles or so, too, where heavily armed officers would scrutinise the vehicles as they passed. We suspected that this was a precaution in view of the terrorist attacks against, and abductions of, foreign tourists in Egypt in the course of the last five or so years.

Even before this escorted convoy journey to the Red Sea we had concluded that Egypt is virtually a police state, however. On every street corner, in Cairo and elsewhere, there are either ordinary policemen or clearly identified “tourist police”, armed not merely with batons or pistols, but with sub-machine guns. This is very different from South Africa. I, for one, would not like to live in a “police state”, but at the same time I believe South Africans would benefit hugely if the SAPS were to be more visible in the form of policemen and -women visibly patrolling the streets on a regular basis. Mostly they are invisible in our country, although I have seen the odd group of police walking down the street where we live, in central Port Elizabeth.

Talking about police raises the question of crime and of safety, of course, and this was where the most tangible difference between South Africa and Egypt emerged. Although we spent hours in throngs of Egyptians – on packed trains, in streets overflowing with people, day and night (one night we walked about nine kilometres from the Metro station to our hotel, to look at the little shops and other street phenomena on the way, occasionally going into little Egyptian smoking, coffee and tea shops for a glass of delicious Egyptian tea) – we never, and I mean never, felt in any danger at any time, even when we were pestered by would-be guides, taxis, boatmen, horse-buggy drivers and the like, offering their services. The same can hardly be said of South Africa. A friend of mine recently walked less than two kilometres through central Port Elizabeth, from a coffee shop to his house, and was mugged, robbed and severely beaten up – a tale that would, I know, be echoed by many readers, either from their own, or their friends’ and families’ experience. In Egypt, it seems, this does not happen.

The question, why this is the case, seems to me to have a complex answer, one part of which has to do with the ubiquitous presence of police, especially “tourist police”. Clearly, because tourism is such a huge source of income for Egypt, they make it very obvious that foreigners are to be kept safe, even if they go out of their way to try and fleece them in legitimate ways. But there is another reason for this feeling of safety, I believe, even in Cairo, one of the most densely populated cities in the world. About 80% of Egyptians are devoutly Muslim (judging by the pervasive sounds of praying surrounding one every evening, and especially on Friday mornings) the rest being largely Christian. And although extremist groups such as Al Qaeda have given Islam a bad name among many westerners, by and large its followers appear to me to be peace-loving practitioners of a religion-based moral code. The internalisation of this moral code, I would argue, is a more fundamental reason for Egypt being a country where one feels safe from criminals. (Not that this is the only possible ground for a moral code or consciousness that disposes one to act with benevolence towards one’s fellow-humans, but it certainly seems to help.)

To conclude this brief sketch of our Egyptian experience, a note on a similarity between the two countries – Egypt and South Africa. Just as, in our own country, one witnesses harsh contrasts between the filthy rich and the abjectly poor, such contrasts are only too evident in Egypt. In Old Cairo, for example, the struggle for material, physical survival is in your face, and there is little evidence of wealth (except in the bigger fabric shops, which bear names such as “Jahila Palace”, and hotels on the banks of the Nile), but in New Cairo, especially the area around the airport, there are buildings that seem to exceed conspicuous Sandton wealth in Johannesburg.

The severest contrast between extreme poverty and obscene wealth seemed to us to manifest itself in our experience of the inner city at Luxor, where desperately poor people stared at us from doorways, or from behind makeshift washing lines, surrounded by wretched-looking dogs, donkeys and goats, on the one hand, and the Red Sea resort of El Gouna, on the other, which, we were told, belongs to ONE man (a tycoon who also owns Mobinil, one of the three mobile phone companies operating in Egypt). El Gouna looks like a movie set, with recently constructed canals, streets, “downtown” area, stylistically uniform luxury hotels and villas along the banks of the canals or looking out towards the Red Sea (which is not really red, but the most beautiful aquamarine; its surface looks red because of the red reflection of the surrounding desert, as well as the shallow coral reefs).
One might say that a very conspicuous, unequal distribution of wealth is very noticeable in both countries. Most of the Egyptians we spoke to about this, inquiring for the reasons behind the stark contrast between rich and poor, despite the fact that Egypt has significant sources of income through the Suez Canal, tourism, oil and electricity generated at the Aswan and Nasser dams, were reluctant to comment (for obvious reasons), but one did speak up, and out, against what he saw as extreme (material) injustice, which should not go unchallenged.

When Andrea asked me, on the way back to South Africa, what word I would use to sum up our Egyptian experience, I retorted “eye-opening”, to which she responded with “Educational”, which means roughly the same. As always, this visit to a foreign country has made us notice important features of life in South Africa – some with a sense of relief (such as our comparatively “civilized” traffic); others with one of regret and despondence (for example our comparative disadvantage as far as crime goes).