the regime and the protesters. In the hospital there was a revolutionary mood. Even those who supported Mubarak knew the situation could not go on. I started a petition, with some of the demands I’d been hearing in Tahrir Square: all the doctors signed and then, amazingly, nurses started coming to me, saying: ‘You are demanding a cut in hours and an increase in wages—what about us?’
Shafiq describes what happened next as ‘the collapse of invisible walls’: the nurses, the technicians, the porters added their demands.
Then he returned to Tahrir: the last days of Mubarak, followed by days of chaos and celebration, were frantic for the medics. But when he went back to the hospital in mid-February, the workers asked: ‘What happened to our petition?’ By now the entire workforce of 750 people, including managers, had signed it. They formed a cross-professional trade union. The nurses staged a sit-in over unpaid wages. The doctors also joined: junior doctors in a public hospital earned just LE300 a month basic, while hospital administrators could earn LE2,000. Shafiq says:
The manager in every hospital is like a small dictator, they are a ‘Mubarak in the workplace’. But we’d just decapitated Mubarak! After four weeks we decided to sack the manager. We told him not to come to work, and told the security guards to lock him out. He went to the ministry and complained—but the union ran the hospital for two weeks until we elected a new manager. It was the height of dual power except it was not dual power, it was only one power, and it was us.
When I meet Shafiq in April, he’s hosting a delegation of British trade unionists, sweating into their souvenir Tahrir t-shirts in the garden of the Doctors’ Union. The doctors are about to launch a national strike call, but the union is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which doesn’t want to strike. Another young doctor comes over.
‘My colleague favours an immediate all-out strike,’ Shafiq informs the British postmen and train drivers huddled under the palm trees. ‘But I favour a warning strike to start with. What would you do?’ A bloke from London Underground asks: ‘What are your plans for picketing?’ Both men look blank. There is further puzzlement among the hijab-clad young female medics who have joined us. After a few minutes back and forth in Arabic and cockney, the Brits explain the idea of blocking access to the workplace to prevent strike-breakers. ‘This had not occurred to us,’ say the Egyptians.
On May Day 2011, as Shafiq and the secular medics jostle with the Brotherhood for control of the stage at the Doctors’ Union, workers begin filling Tahrir Square. It is, says Hossam el-Hamalawy, the first real May Day since 1951. The red flag does not predominate: instead people arrive with homemade banners, always with middle-aged men in the lead, chanting and singing. One banner says: ‘Fight for social justice, not your own demands’. At the edge of the square, the top-selling items on the souvenir stands are A4 posters showing Mubarak and all his ministers in orange jumpsuits, with nooses around their necks.
A loud delegation from the Masry Shebin El-Kom textile factory surrounds me. Mahmoud el-Shaar, who’s led a thirty-five-day occupation at the plant, says:
We’re striking to remove the imperialist presence of foreign elements. Mubarak privatized the company to Indonesian owners and they’ve shut four out of seven units. We want the prosecution of the corrupt officials who ran the cotton industry, and we want to terminate the contract with the Indonesians because it’s destroying our lives. Our average wage is between LE360 and LE700 a month.
The company was the target of a classic Mubarak-era deal: the Indorama group paid LE174 million for 70 per cent of the assets, the state kept 18 per cent and the NDP-run trade union would own 12 per cent. ‘The old, Mubarak union did nothing but corrupt the situation: we’re finished with them,’ el-Shaar says.7 Rifat Abdul, in the t-shirt of the public transport union, grabs my arm. His banner demands a minimum wage of LE1200. What’s changed?
I feel free. We all feel we can say what we think without getting detained for it. At work, though, nothing has changed: wages, conditions, work hours, nothing. But there is a spirit of optimism between all workers, in every sector. During the revolution, we were here from day one. But now it’s reached the point where we look around and we recognize these other delegations from the days in Tahrir Square, people from totally different sectors: we know each other’s faces, we shake each other’s hands, we slap each other on the back.
His mate, Wasim, rips the baseball cap off his bald head. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘We’re not going anywhere. I’m 100 per cent sure the whole world is behind us. We’ll stay here in the sun and heat until it’s done.’ But it’s not done yet.
The question for Musa Zekry
Back in the Moqattam slum, Musa Zekry’s future revolves around a single type of shampoo, brand name Pert. To prevent counterfeits, Procter & Gamble pay the zabbaleen to shred every Pert bottle they collect, in return for cash. With the cash—supplemented by money from Bill Gates—they run a school. At the school the kids learn Arabic, English, computing and how to shred the Pert bottles. Zekry learned English at this school and now mentors the kids.
They are bright-eyed and cheerful, but decide to sing me a doleful Coptic song whose refrain asserts the inevitability of being poor and the certainty of salvation. One kid, aged thirteen, explains his daily routine: ‘I go rubbish collecting from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., and at 8 a.m. I go to school.’ With free English lessons he’s one of the lucky few, so what are his ambitions? ‘To collect so much rubbish we can pay for another school.’
Will he leave the slum? He shakes his head. The combined efforts of Bill Gates, Procter & Gamble and thirty years of Mubarak’s rule never managed to raise the aspirations of the Cairo poor beyond a better kind of poverty. By contrast, twenty-one days of revolution have brought freedom.
And freedom poses questions philanthropy does not bother with. Will Musa Zekry get healthcare, a living wage, free education for his kids as of right, instead of through charity? Will the ‘Mubaraks-in-every-enterprise’ be toppled? Will Egyptian society be scarred by rampant corruption and inequality forever? Or will they get something better?
These are questions which, for twenty years, the policy elite believed were closed. The great surge of freedom that carried Musa Zekry into Tahrir Square has reopened them.
But I’m rushing ahead. We need to backtrack, to the old world, where everything was stable and imagination was dead …
Nobody Saw It Coming: How the World’s Collective Imagination Failed
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on 14 January 2011. By 11 February, Hosni Mubarak was gone, and protests were spreading across the region: to Yemen, where the first ‘day of rage’ took place on 27 January; to Bahrain, where protesters occupied the Pearl Roundabout on 14 February. Then, on 17 February, security forces started shooting marchers in Bahrain and the Libyan people rose up against Gaddafi. On 25 March the long, tortured battle for freedom in Syria began.
Nobody had seen this coming. Nobody with any influence, anyway. The stock image of Arabs in the Western media was of a passive but violent race, often filed under the categories of ‘terrorism’ and ‘insoluble problems’. The Middle East specialists in the diplomatic and intelligence communities worked with a scarcely more sophisticated version of the same view. The Economist magazine’s celebrated yearbook, published in December 2010, contained just four predictions for North Africa and the Middle East: Sudan would split; Iran’s economy would suffer; Iraq would continue to be a headache; and there would be new peace talks over Palestine.1 Mubarak, Ben
