For sixty years, the zabbaleen had run Cairo’s trash collection system. They picked up the waste door to door, fed their pigs with the rotting organic matter and recycled the rest for cash, trading with a traditional caste of middlemen. But in 2003, as part of a privatization programme overseen by Mubarak’s son Gamal, three sanitation companies—two Spanish and one Italian—were brought in to ‘modernize’ the city’s waste collection.
These outside firms were given cleaning contracts valued at US$50 million a year. Instead of door-to-door collection, they placed big plastic bins on street corners. Instead of recycling 80 per cent of solid waste—as the zabbaleen had managed to do—their contracts required that only 20 per cent be recycled, with the rest tipped into landfill. The transformation of Cairo’s refuse system was to be crowned by the eviction of the zabbaleen, whose slum was adjacent to a new residential property development planned by friends of Gamal Mubarak.
‘The old system worked. The recycling process was one of the most efficient in the world,’ says Ezzat Guindi, born and raised in the slum, where he now runs an NGO. ‘And’, he goes on, ‘people could live. There was no sub-dollar-a-day poverty among the zabbaleen until the multinationals came. Now, about 30 per cent are destitute; and it’s those who’ve been displaced and made redundant by the sanitation companies who are the poorest.’
But the new system wasn’t working. Cairo’s residents refused to use the bins; in fact, many of the high-grade plastic containers were stolen and, with poetic justice, ended up being shredded and recycled by the zabbaleen. People began to dump their rubbish onto the streets or into the disused and abandoned buildings that scar Cairo’s streetscape.
So, the new system needed an extra push. When the global swine flu epidemic broke, in 2009, the Mubaraks spotted an opportunity. The Egyptian parliament, circumventing its own health ministry and in defiance of UN advice, ordered all the zabbaleen’s pigs to be slaughtered. There had been no recorded transmission of swine flu from pigs to humans. No other country in the world had ordered the mass eradication of domestic pigs. But that did not deter Hosni Mubarak.
Across Egypt, an estimated 300,000 swine belonging to zabbaleen households were slaughtered; the government paid between $15 and $50 per pig in compensation, compared to the $80 to $300 they’d been selling for on the market. Soon, two things happened. With no pigs to eat the rotting food, the zabbaleen stopped collecting it, leaving it to pile up on the streets. Then malnutrition appeared among their children. For, says Guindi, though the multinational companies were getting $10 a tonne for waste, and the middlemen $2 out of that, the zabbaleen received nothing from the contract—only what they could make from the sale of recycled waste, and their pigs.
Now something else happened, equally novel: the zabbaleen rioted. They hurled rocks, bottles and manure (there was plenty of that to hand) at the pig-slaughtering teams. In response, Mubarak deployed riot squads into the slums—followed, as always, by Central Security and its torturers.
That is how a mixture of repression, greed, corruption and neoliberal economic doctrine managed to turn the zabbaleen into latent revolutionaries. All it needed was a spark, and that came on 25 January 2011.
Cairo, 25 January 2011
‘Something’s going to happen in Egypt,’ Hossam el-Hamalawy had told me when we talked in a Bloomsbury café two years before. ‘Mubarak will try to hand over to his son, Gamal, but Gamal might lose the next election.’
Hamalawy spoke softly. He’d been detained and tortured by Mubarak’s secret police for selling socialist literature and was active around the uprising on 6 April 2008 in the Delta city of Mahalla. Then, like a tremor that should have warned of the earthquake to come, a city of 400,000 people rioted for three days in response to the suppression of a textile strike and the rocketing price of food.
It was around the Mahalla strike, too, that the April 6th Youth Movement was formed, by mostly young activists, liaising by Facebook, email and Flickr. They were drawn from Egypt’s fragmented opposition: secularist youth from the left, the liberal opposition parties, the human rights community.
When I met Hamalawy in 2009, screwing up Gamal’s election campaign was the limit of his ambition. But in January 2011, once the revolution in Tunisia was under way, the horizon for Egypt’s opposition groups broadened rapidly. Hamalawy (who tweets as @3arabawy) was among those that initiated the call for a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January, again made through a Facebook page.
Meanwhile, the downtrodden and the desperate had begun to react to Ben Ali’s overthrow in more direct ways. On 17 January, three days after the Tunisian president’s fall, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer in central Cairo shouted slogans about food price rises, then set himself on fire. A man in Alexandria did the same. A third man—a restaurant owner—immolated himself outside the Egyptian parliament after quarrelling with officials about the cost of bread. The next day, a twenty-five-year-old business graduate named Asmaa Mahfouz (@AsmaaMahfouz) posted a video blog on YouTube. ‘Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire’, she announced,
to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and the degradation they’ve had to live with for thirty years, thinking that we could have a revolution like in Tunisia. Today one of them has died … People, have some shame! I, a girl, posted that I will go down to Tahrir Square, to stand alone, and I’ll hold a banner. All that came were three guys. Three guys, three armoured cars of riot police and tens of baltagiya … I’m making this video to give you a simple message: we’re going to Tahrir on 25 January.1
During the following days, activists frantically refreshed the Facebook page advertising the 25 January demo, as news spread it was gaining thousands of followers per second. Many had also joined the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ page, dedicated to a youth beaten to death by police in Alexandria for posting evidence of police corruption on YouTube.
The veteran activists knew the stakes. They knew the Central Security would crack down hard on any attempts at demonstration. They had no idea whether the tens of thousands of names on Facebook would translate into anything more than the usual forlorn and harassed protests. That they did was thanks, in the first place, to a new generation of young people—many of whom had previously been active only in student politics, and who simply decided they’d had enough.
Sarah Abdelrahman (@sarrahsworld), a twenty-two-year-old drama student at the American University of Cairo, had never been on a demonstration and had never been politically active beyond the student union. On the 25th itself, knowing that the advertised start-points on Facebook would be mere ‘camouflage’ to fool the police, she hooked up with a friend more experienced in political organization and headed for the slum settlement of Naheya, just outside downtown Cairo.
We had to walk in twos at first—this was my first protest and I didn’t know why, but they said it’s because of the Emergency Law: more than two is illegal. Then someone gave me a paper with lawyers’ numbers ‘in case you get detained’—and I am going: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’
Her eyes whiten as she relives it. She speaks perfect American English, dresses like any student in London or New York, and has that confident tone of voice you hear in the Starbucks of the world:
We were roaming around; people started hiding in alleys, walking in twos and you could look at another two people, the other side of the street and know they don’t belong here. And I’m thinking, ‘I know why you are here’—there’s a moment of eye contact. Someone started chanting and then all of a sudden people came from the alleys and we were about 200 people, in this tiny street. And people came onto the balconies to see what was happening.
Among the crowd she spotted Abd El Rahman Hennawy (@Hennawy89). The twenty-five-year-old is hard to miss: he sports a large beard, a red Bedouin scarf and a t-shirt bearing the word ‘socialism’. He seemed surprised to see her: ‘Before then, whenever Hennawy called us out to protest, in the university, I’d be like, sorry, man, I can’t. He saw me and said, what are you doing here? This is my stuff, it’s what I do!’ Hennawy was part of the core of protesters who knew what was going to happen. On the night before, 24 January, he had attended a packed meeting in a private flat. Then, like all