Print

A few weeks ago, the Amman-based program I’m on took us to Cairo for a week of tours, cultural activities, and lectures given by a number of individuals working with the Egyptian government, Egyptian universities, and the Arab League. Of course we visited the typical tourist attractions such as the Pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx. Tourism is an important part of the Egyptian economy—the Pyramids are plagued by gaggles of scantily-clad Europeans riding camels and taking pictures of one another while pretending to lean against the Pyramids or kiss the Sphinx. By far, the most interesting part of the tour of Giza was the fact that a KFC and Pizza Hut—both offering new discounted lunch specials—were directly in the Sphinx’s line of vision. Needless to say, the romance of the place quickly dies when you actually set foot on its grounds.

Cairo does not lend itself well to tour book-led visits. While the Pyramids and Egyptian KFCs are important sites to see, one misses the forceful life that exists in Cairo’s underbelly when sticking purely to the beaten path. Having been to Cairo before while working with the Sudanese who found asylum there, I had some idea of what Cairo had to offer beyond old mosques and piles of thousand-year-old rocks. When on this trip, I decided to reconnect with the Cairene-Sudanese network I had begun building while in Egypt last summer.

One night in the middle of the week, I decided to go to a “disco” known as Africana in the Giza district. An establishment frequented by Sudanese youth living in Cairo, it is a painful example of the way many young Sudanese women are forced to earn their livelihood. The issue of gender is often easy to ignore as a man, and even more so for men in Egypt, where male privilege is stronger and more apparent.
I knew that these kinds of clubs existed before I dragged my two friends to one with me, but it still surprised me to see how open the men and women were about prostitution. Nobody, neither the clients nor the waiters, bothered pretending not to know exactly what the majority of the men were at the club to do.

I was curious to know more about the lives of the men there, and I also wanted to know more about the woman who was the manager of this bizarre form of a support system for women. Conversation did not come easily, but I was able to learn a bit about her and the circumstances that led her to her current position as a bona fide madam. Her story is sadly not far from expected: she has a number of kids to feed and put through school, and while securing employment is difficult for Egyptians in general, it is near impossible for the many Sudanese people there.

This experience only added to what I already knew about the Sudanese population in Cairo. But I came away from this trip with yet another layer of insight into the lives of Sudanese refugees in Cairo. In addition to challenges of displacement, these refugees also often face racial discrimination to which I felt I could relate.

The issue of race in Egypt works differently from what I experience in the U.S. The Sudanese community is a black community living in a place where the majority population identifies as “white.” While this does not seem much different from my own experience, as far as many of my Sudanese friends are concerned, I am as white as the British man who manages the refugee program. This led to an unavoidable rethinking of my own blackness. What does the term “black” mean in a global context? How does it pertain to my life? The Sudanese might not think so, but I still consider myself black no matter what anyone may say. Yet as I travel throughout Africa and the Arab world, I learn to embrace the ethnic ambiguity of my tan-ness.

In the coming weeks, I will begin conducting my fieldwork, entering the community of politically engaged youth. I will have no more coursework and instead will be left to my own devices to research a topic of my choosing. I have decided to research a youth-led movement called “Thabahtoona” (you slaughtered us,” in Arabic). The aim of the movement is national advocacy for student rights in the face of the constant challenges they encounter from the public and private university system.

Amman, compared to Cairo, is controlled and slow, and there is something about this calm that allows emergent movements such as Thabahtoona to reach solutions. In Cairo, every day is new. In Amman, there is traffic, but nothing compared to the streets of Cairo; the number of immigrants there is comparable to Amman’s entire population. It seems that there is no room for these movements in Cairo, yet the struggles to achieve change anyhow have forced me to think about myself, my race, my gender, and my place in this world.