Wadi Halfa

Climate Change, Nubia, Refugees, Travel

Lessons from the First Climate Refugees

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Lessons from the First Climate Refugees

 

Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, wrote in an August article that We are all Climate Refugees Now.  “This summer’s fires, droughts, and record-high temperatures should serve as a wake-up call.” he wrote. “The longer a narrow and ignorant elite condemns Americans and the rest of humanity to wander aimlessly in the political desert, the more likely it is that we will all end up in a wasteland.” His point is that the politics of climate denial is leading us into a new era which poses grave risks to humanity, including mass migration.

What does this have to do with Nubia?

The Nubians were the first climate refugees, and have a lot to teach the world, as I explore in my upcoming book: The Water Wheel: Reflections on a Submerged Culture and Identity. 

The signs have been there for all who wish to read them.

In 2011 Thailand experienced a flood that was the fourth costliest natural disaster in history at the time, and cost over 800 lives.  In 2013, virtually every building in Tacloban, in the Philippines, was wiped out by a four-meter wall of water that surged over the city during typhoon Haiyan.  The cost of the Thai flood was eclipsed by hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, which has now exceeded $80 billion in economic damage and killed over 4,000.  The United States experienced $300 billion in damage in 2017 and is going through a string of devastating events, including New Orleans, Houston, New Jersey/New York, and California wildfires.

The worst has yet to come.

Sea level rise is expected to continue for centuries. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that sea levels would rise 18 to 59 cm during the 21st century.  In 2013 IPCC raised its estimate to 28 to 98 centimeters by 2100, 50 percent higher than the 2007 projections.  The Third National Climate Assessment, released in May 2014, projects a sea level rise of 1 to 4 feet, over 120 centimeters.

What is clear from these estimates is that not only will our storms be more violent, but also rising seas, and many of our coastal communities will need to relocate. In 2017 water and fish sloshed through the streets of Miami, whose existence is threatened, and climate change has already impacted its freshwater aquifer.  Alaskan communities and Pacific Islanders are confronting the need to move to remain viable as people.   Kiribati has prepared to relocate its population, but we should really be concerned for Bangkok, Manila, Dhaka, Dakar, Saigon, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice, both in Italy and Los Angeles.

There are parallels and lessons.

In 1964 over 100,000 Nubians were relocated, against their will, from the homelands in which they lived for over 5,000 years to make way for a massive lake created by the Aswan High Dam.  Despite the immense importance of the region in history, and that it had not been fully explored by archeologists, the dam was the final straw, after three smaller dams earlier in the century, that ultimately shattered the way of life of my grandparents and their fellow Nubians.  My father’s village is under 60 meters of water, and this blog was written to document the journey my son and I took to understand what happened.

There were more rational alternatives and ways to meet Egypt’s needs more sustainably.  But dam had become a political imperative, a political symbol of a strongman’s desire to make Egypt great again.  Alternatives were off the table.

Nubia had a few years to prepare for the exodus, but until the threat was imminent, there was denial.  The magnitude of the change was not fathomed, not absorbed, not internalized.

The displaced Nubians were initially given the power to choose among resettlement sites, and then the power was taken away.  They had no input over the design of their habitat.  For a community built on self-reliance, this was the deepest cut of all. They had no choice but to board the trains in 1964, to a destination not of their choosing.

The state tried to prepare, but wholly inadequately. They quickly build resettlement villages, each name replaced by a number; Nubian names replaced by Arabic names; the distribution of houses designed to favor the labor requirements of a state agricultural project, not the way people actually lived. Nubian houses in the old country were made of mud brick, painted and decorated, with beautiful courtyards, and since there was no rain, thatched roofs.  These were considered worthless when compensation was offered; today they are regarded as priceless art, and their construction a perfect and sustainable adaptation to the natural environment.  The houses that Nubians received?   Years later, we discovered that the water supply was untreated and dangerous, and the “modern” roofs are made of asbestos.

This loss of agency contributed to denying Nubians the ability to lead lives informed by their full selves.  The relocated Nubians, fifty years after the flood, are barely hanging on to a culture that persisted for five thousand years.  The language is dying. The older generation remains understandably bitter, wedded to a paradise lost, their notions fixed in time and unyielding; unable to fully commit to a “New Halfa.”

Perhaps few who are displaced will have lost a civilization that existed continuously in a narrow parcel of land for over five millennia, but for every community, the loss will be as deep and as profound. A significant share of humanity’s cultural assets is located on coasts. What will come of our sources of culture and identity, when we collectively arrive, to paraphrase the late Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, at our Season of Migration to the North?

Will the old canals of Bangkok, long since covered up to make way for roads and highways, flow again with water against abandoned sidewalks?  Will the old shop houses, bridges, and the skyscrapers peer out from the water like the minaret of the central mosque of Wadi Halfa, a haunting last reminder of our collective failure, until finally giving way to the flood?

Until the urge to maximize at all costs is replaced by a call for balance, our past and our future are lost.  The world is already experiencing a forced displacement crisis of historic proportions.  Syrians, Africans, Afghans, and others are streaming across borders in more significant numbers and far more difficult circumstances than the Nubians who were forced to board trains and rebuild their lives 600 km away in 1964.  Among other factors, a severe drought drove Syrian farmers to abandon their crops and flock to cities, helping trigger the Syrian civil war.

As more and more join the exodus, they will, like Nubians, inevitably confront a profound crisis caused by the contact between the rooted and the rootless.  If the present path continues, that will be many of us.  We are that Syrian child rebuilding her sense of confidence in a youth shelter; the Darfuri boy risking a Mediterranean crossing; the Brexit voter; the Afghan engineer seeking any employment whatsoever.

The modern climate challenge is not only about making agriculture productive in the sweltering heat or preventing our bridges and homes from being ravaged by the untamable forces that we have unleashed. The modern challenge is how to know one another. And to do so peacefully, without regret or loss of who we are.

In a world of transition and migration, this inevitably includes respect for the identity of the hosts as well as the guests.  To join a new society and to be accepted, one must also contribute.  In today’s world, the most significant contribution is that of ideas.  Syria was the center of ideas; home of the world’s most extensive libraries and sources of knowledge, including optics, astronomy, much of medicine, and the scientific method itself.  Nubia was a sophisticated civilization that both rivaled and renewed ancient Egypt, contributed extensively to Sudan’s history and was considered a model of peace and sustainability.  Yet these contributions are not appreciated, not sought.  As the wellsprings of our identity and our ideas are flooded, on what basis will the uprooted contribute?

There was a better way forward.  These questions and some possible answers are explored in The Water Wheel: Reflections on a Submerged Culture and Identity.  The book is with literary agents.  Stay tuned.

 

The Photo is courtesy of Hassan Dafulla, the late Governor of Northern Province at the time of the Nubian Exodus.

 

 

 

Nubia, Sudan, Travel

The Hungarian Kendaka

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The Hungarian Kendaka

Ancient Nubia drew its power from its women.

Even when the King was male, as the Arab historian Ibn Abd al Zahir wrote, “it is the tradition that the Nubian kings be directed by women in affairs of the state.”  Leo Africanus records of his visit to Nubia “they are governed by women, and they call their Queen Gaua.” Ancient Nubia was a matrilineal society, with family identity and inheritance passed through mothers.

After what the scholars of Egypt called the late period, including the 25th and 26th Dynasties in which all of Egypt was reunited and the culture revived by Nubian pharaohs, Egypt regained its lost territory and the Nubians retreated further south.  Egyptian power eventually declined, and it came under the rule of a series of foreign rulers, including Persians, Greeks and Romans. Nubia at this time was known as the kingdom of Kush.

These foreign invaders knew that Kush was the source of Egypt’s gold, and as such made many attempts to invade and conquer this land.  They were repelled time and again.  In this era Nubia’s military reputation was earned both by its famous archers – one of the historical names of Nubia was “Ta Seti”, or “land of the bow” –  and by warrior queens known as Kendaka.  These queens not only held their ground; they would ever so often venture north and attack Egypt to put in check any ideas of military misadventures on the part of the foreign invaders.

One story has it that the Nubian Kendaka Amanitori, riding elephants at the head of impressive battle formations of the famous Nubian archers, intimidated Alexander the Great from venturing southward despite the known abundance of gold.

While little is known about Alexander’s misadventure, more is known about the attempts the Romans made to subjugate Nubia. The historian Strabo recorded that the Nubian Queen Amanishekhato attacked a Roman garrison in Aswan, defeated it, and moved further north to Thebes and defeated yet another Roman garrison.  According to Strabo the Queen “enslaved the inhabitants, and threw down the statues of Caesar.” She lopped off the head of one statue of Caesar and buried it under the floor of her temple at Meroe so that every visitor would walk over it. This head now resides in a museum in London.  The Romans would in fact later sign an agreement in which the Romans paid tribute to the Nubians in order stop attacking Egypt’s southern flank.

The Persian king Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, also made the journey up the Nile, occupying but ultimately failing in his attempt to conquer Kush.

It is clear from these stories that Nubian women could hold their own. Centuries later, society has been transformed, but women still play a prominent role.  I think of modern Kendakas like my late grandmother whose century-long journey from the Nubian village to Cairo to California included not a day of rest, my mother who was managed to raise us after my father’s stroke, my other grandmother Miska who recovered from the early passing of my grandfather, and prominent women in the larger family who are or were fighters for social justice such as Souad Ibrahim Ahmed, Magda Mohamed Ahmed Ali, and countless others.

It is fair to say that in all societies, women are frequently the carriers of deep culture and social capital.  So we asked to meet older Nubian Kandaka who I was told had much of the history of Nubia before the flood in her memory. I was told her memory was still vivid. For this important meeting I put away my western clothing and wear my only formal Sudanese jellabia.

We found her in a house surrounded by friends, wearing a blue thob and chatting with lots of energy.  The biggest surprise to us was that she had blue eyes, and was part of the Magyarab tribe.  The Magyarab are the descendants of a Hungarian regiment of the Ottoman army that was brought in to hold Southern Egypt in 1517.  General Ibrahim, who was from Buda (the old part of Budapest), his five sons and many of his troops married local Nubian women and occupied an island within the Nile near Wadi Halfa.  For hundreds of years this tribe lived in relative isolation, retaining parts of the Hungarian language and customs, but forgotten by Hungary itself until it was discovered by Europeans in 1935.  In fact an offshoot of the Hungarian group was recently found in Congo with even more of the Hungarian language still intact.

This Hungarian Kendaka, peering at us with the blue eyes of her Hungarian forefathers, explains with pride about their society prior to the flood.  Life was wonderful; society was harmonious, and people were happy.  As the video shows, she speaks only in the Nubian language, but with some Arabic thrown in and yet more meaning from her hands gestures.  In one of the few Arabic words she uses, punctuated with her hands, she described the extent to which they were “Mabsooooot” or truly happy.

She explains about the various traditions, and what happened when news came of the coming flood.   She speaks about wedding ceremonies and births, and how the earth was formed and covered with a cloth to form a cradle for the newborn.   She explains that life was communal; multiple families would eat together as rather than in their individual homes, what was grown by one family was available to another.  She explains that Fakir Yusuf, a religious figure she holds with a great deal of respect, came to live among the Magaryab and built the first Mosque which became a key part of their community.

The flood meant that the Magyar island would be lost, and they needed to find new homes.  At this time many foreigners came to document the lifestyle of this offshoot of Hungarian society, and she charmingly depicts the motions of photography.  Small samples of earth were taken from various parts of Nubia, including Magyarab island, and she boasts that only the soil from her land was able to be replanted overseas.

This video would be great to have subtitled, if any Nubian speakers would like to help I would be grateful.

I come away from this encounter amazed that there was such a thing as a Magyarab tribe still intact, privileged to have had a chance to be learn from her, grateful to be able to share a little of her story, and honored to have been in the presence of a true Nubian Hungarian Kendaka.

A wonderful meeting

Nubia, Sudan, Travel

The Lost Water Wheel

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The Lost Water Wheel

Emerging from the home of my mother’s parents and grandparents, we follow the path out toward the river, through the cultivated field, through the grove of date palms, and to the edge of the water.   On the way, I ask to see the water wheel.

The farms of the village were watered by a Saqia, the old water wheel that Hamza al Din used to sing about in his gravelly old voice.

http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/nubia-escalay-the-water-wheel-oud-music

The Eskale as it was called the local Rutana language, was powered by an ox, a gorondi, who turned a wooden wheel around its axis, which was geared to a vertical wheel, a goshor, that in its course dipped clay pots, Feshai, into Nile water that, having traveled from the mountains of Ethiopia or Rwanda, found its destiny in irrigating the small but intensively cultivated fields.  The rhythm of the Saqia, the oxen slowly turning the wooden wheel, the sound of the ropes on wood, the sound of clay pots entering the river, lifting, pouring out just enough water and not more, marked time in those villages, marked the day into two shifts of agricultural work, carved the week into work days, the year into the three seasons – the flood, summer and the bitter, cold winter.  And so in the valleys carved by the Nile grew date palms, wheat, oranges and okra (oyai) in abundance, which sustained a civilization, a people called Nubians, since before there were pharaohs or great men or anything called history.

For such a society to persist for seven millennia in such a confined space, it required deep reserves of what Buddhists might call Dhamma-vinaya, or Western philosophers might much more simply call ethics, as a basis for social harmony.   There was a balance between nature, on the one hand, and man’s desire to accumulate wealth on the other; a desire called “Al Takathur” in Islam.  In Nubia this was determined by the simple technology handed down the same way since before the Romans.  The Saqia and the ox turned at a speed that determined how much water could be drawn, and therefore how far away from the river the canals could stretch; and therefore how much land could be worked, and therefore how much each could accumulate and own.  Man’s animal spirits were held in check by the animal’s speed.

Courtesy of Nubian House in Abu Simbel, here is an example:

Water wheel in Nubian House, Abu Simbel

These natural limits forced Nubians to adopt social rules that emphasized cooperation while also maximizing the output from those small plots.  The water wheels and canals could not be built, and the scarce land could not be productive if every individual worked for themselves.  Success required some harmony.  Grandfather Abbas’ father Mohamed and the other families worked together to maintain the Saqia, and the sons and men of those families also helped with the farming.  The farmers that worked would receive their due for their labor, along with the investors that shared in its cost. As such a system which combined community ownership and individual effort emerged.  The Nubians figured a way to jointly invest and build assets, maintain records of the shares that belonged to each, and even trade these shares.  This way the village avoided the fate of many societies, the curse of inheritance dividing and fragmenting the land into smaller and smaller plots, until it could not be farmed productively and left the young generation little choice but to leave for want of a chance.

We walked toward the river, on a path between the fields. Through the grove they point to the place where the water wheel stood.  There is no water wheel.  Only a small remnant of the wheel remains intact, and this piece is being pressed down by a black water pipe that leads directly from the river to the field.

This wonderful technology was gone, and the remnant was now holding up a black pipe. The power of the ox has been replaced by the power of a diesel pump.  it brought water with ease; it surely allows more land to be cultivated, and saves time. But there is no beauty in this black pipe.

What remains of the Escalay
The last remnant of the water wheel, pressed down by a pipe from a diesel pump bringing water from the Nile

I reflect on this.

I wonder how much of our culture and identity was tied to the water wheel. We know culture as the set of beliefs, artistic expressions, knowledge, morals and customs that we acquire as a result of being part of a particular society; it is our collective inheritance. Part of the culture of the Nubians, since at least 200 BC and until very recent times, was this water wheel. But would many small changes like this eventually have eliminated what we knew of the culture of Nubia even without the high dam?

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I cannot blame anyone for wanting to use modern technology.  Nubian men often worked away from their village and left the farming to the families left behind, led by their wives.  It was difficult work.  A diesel pump would make life easier.

But just as this imported technology displaced something genius and home grown, does this imply that the ideas, culture and identity would also be displaced, or would it have been integrated and absorbed into a new Nubian culture?  Has it eliminated some of what bound Nubians to each other; the need for collective effort to maintain the canals and the water wheel?  I don’t imagine songs will ever be written about this black pipe or the beating sound of the diesel pump.

We make some more visits, see stop by a house where another family recalls my older brother Semir who had visited this village in the late 1950s or early 1960s.  We enjoy a wonderful tea and the typically Nubian dried sweetened bread, gargosh, which is taken with tea.  We enjoy a conversation, a recollection of old times.  The people are here for each other.

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Through these changes I still see the outlines of a beautiful culture, a village called Serkametto where 50 years later one can visit and ask about their deceased ancestors, and still find their friends walking around and recalling them fondly.

There is change, but there is continuity.

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New Halfa

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New Halfa

After driving east for six hours from Khartoum, our driver Khatir, Tariq and I arrive in New Halfa.   We meet my cousin Amir in the market, and he guides us to his home.

Each of the 25 resettlement villages is known by a number, not a name.  Each has 250 houses, a school, mosque and some shops within a communal area.    Our destination is village No 18, representing the village where my father’s family was relocated.  Each house is a yellow-brown color, walls of molded concrete blocks formed into four rooms, a slanted asbestos roof, and a courtyard surrounded by a fence.  There were no kitchens in the original homes, many homes have been modified.  The traditional Nubian decorations are absent from the gates, but some are painted brightly.

We arrive at around 3 pm, and are greeted with a wonderful Sudanese lunch by cousins, Amir and Mohamed Abdel Bashir.  We have never met before, but it is like a long-awaited reunion.  We share our condolences, since their mother, my aunt, has recently passed away.  We see old pictures, including one of my sister visiting the common grandmother that we share, another of my mother in college around 1960.  There is a painting of the train that took them on their exodus.  They are extremely hospitable, and we will stay with them.

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My cousins work the land that the families were allocated in the resettlement.  Mohamed was elected by a people’s committee to manage the water supply, which is unfiltered and used for everything from agriculture to human use.  Every day he goes to the well, which is fed by an irrigation canal from dam and puts in 30 water purification tablets to reduce the chance for water-borne diseases.  The same happens in all 25 villages.  An electric pump elevates the water so that it can be distributed to the houses.

30 of these tablets are used every day in the water well that supplies village 18.
30 of these tablets are used every day in the water well that supplies village 18.

Neighbors in Wadi Halfa were resettled together to the extent possible.  We set out to visit to the neighbors, taking time especially to talk to the elders who are old enough to relate the experience of “Al Hijra”.

It was an emotional day.  The conversations with the older Nubians evoked a deep sense of loss over a world and community that they loved.  Amina Hassan spoke about a place with no diseases, with easier agriculture, of date palms and orange trees, gardens, fresh water and clean air, the closeness of people to one another, and peace.

In New Halfa longing for the old life
In New Halfa longing for the old life

“Even if I go to heaven,” said Abdel Aziz Saleh Shalabi, “I will still long for the Nubia that I lost.”

“When I dream at night, the world I see is the Nubia of his youth 50 years ago,” Hassan Abdel Halim explained,  “My children are there with me, although they were born in New Halfa. The new land never appears.” Ustaz Rushdi, a retired educator, was brought to tears by his own reflections of how life was, and how it is.

It is hard to express the deep sorrow that resides in the hearts of those that experienced the exodus.  The hearts of the older generation, those who carry forward the culture, have simply been shattered.  There is no other way to put it.

They sense that they were betrayed by fellow Sudanese and Egyptians, and that no one cares about their fate today; that they were fooled by many promises that went unfulfilled.

They explained that the Sudan was newly independent and unprepared in the years ahead of the exodus.  The President came to visit the Nubians after signing the agreement that sealed their fate, only then realizing the value of what he lost.  The President promised them that they would choose their new home.  The Nubians formed a committee, visited all of the sites and selected one.  But the government chose another.  Many chose to relocate to the capital, Khartoum, or like my family even further.  We visited the house allocated to my father.  Two guava trees grow in its courtyard; one bitter, one sweet.

Father's house, in which one date palm and two guava trees grow
Father’s house, in which one date palm and two guava trees grow

As Tariq explained, agriculture is different.  In Nubia, families were able to get high yields from small plots because of the fertile soil and water, and the weather that allowed year-round rotations of crops.   In New Halfa, plots of land are very large, and required much more labor.  After a few good years, the land now requires frequent fallow and is less productive.

Irrigated Field New Halfa

Some of the younger Nubians who were born after 1964 did not know the old country and don’t see the need to look back.  There is value in this – those who look forward seem more ready to build a better future, and there is clearly opportunity in this productive area.  But among others is a clear sign of a lack of hope; young men standing around without purpose.

Anyone displaced must feel a sense of injustice. The Nubians chose neither migration nor their destination.  Words were spoken at the time of the migration to put them at ease.  There was the idea that the Nubians were sacrificing their homeland for the greater good of Egypt and an Arab nation emerging from a long history of colonization.  The unity of the Nile Valley resonates with many Sudanese.  Winston Churchill once said that the Nile is as a palm tree, with its roots in Africa and its fronds and fruit in the delta.  But to the Nubians I met, those words must now seem as hollow as the reeds that line the Nile.

It is clear that the culture is dying. The language is rarely spoken, replaced by Arabic.  The traditional dress of Nubian women, the “jirjaar,” a long black dress with a train behind, is gone. A train was possible in old Nubia because the ground was sandy and would fall off easily. But in New Halfa, they tried to shorten it to account for the more muddy soil, and then gave up.  They still enjoy Nubian music and weddings, but this is rare now.

Only 85 of the original 250 houses in Village 18 still belong to Nubians.   As this generation of older Nubians pass from this world to the next, I sense that the idea of Nubia will go with them.  Only then will have realized what we have lost.