Republic or Death! (34 page)

*

Samia Jahin, bulgingly pregnant, is propped up on a sofa in her Cairo flat. She's Salah Jahin's daughter (and Bahaa's sister), and she's been chatting animatedly for the past half-hour about Egypt's anthems past and present. But for the last few moments she's drifted into melancholy, staring into the middle distance like I'm no longer there, as if she's picturing somewhere else entirely. ‘Sorry,' she says, ‘I can get lost thinking about it – remembering that there was a moment when we were just sitting in Tahrir, not afraid of what would happen, just singing, chanting. How happy everyone was. It feels like it was another lifetime.'

It's 28 February 2015, the fourth anniversary of Egypt's most recent revolution – the day the Arab Spring succeeded here, when protestors in Tahrir Square brought down Hosni Mubarak, the general who'd ruled the country since Sadat's death in 1981. It was on that day that ‘Bilady, Bilady' was sung in celebration louder than ever before, including by Samia who was one of the most vocal figures there (there were dozens of ‘songs of the revolution', but everyone agrees the anthem was in the top handful). But, as Samia says, that day now seems like very long ago. During the last four years, Egypt has experienced government under the Muslim Brotherhood, a military coup, the election of the man who ran that coup (Abdel Fattah al-Sisi), and then a severe crackdown on all opposition, including multiple death sentences (Samia, who now works as a human rights activist, says she's been threatened with prison many times, her father's name the only reason she hasn't been locked up).

Cairo today doesn't exactly feel like a place of celebration as it was back then. The huge teardrop-shaped Tahrir Square is now surrounded by coils of barbed wire, ready to be pulled across the roads if needed; tanks sit menacingly outside the Egyptian Museum on its northern side, ready to roll into action, almost daring tourists to try to take a photo of them; while newspapers are filled with warnings about extremists and the ‘foreign forces' behind them (that explains why people think I'm a spy). You only have to be in this city for a few moments to realise everything the Arab Spring hoped to achieve has failed.

It's because of that fact that Samia drops into a reverie whenever I ask her about Tahrir – even when I just ask if she sang ‘Bilady, Bilady' while protesting there. ‘Of course we sang it then. Every day. Many times,' she says. ‘And when we sang it, it actually meant something, for the first time I think. I used to sing it all the time in school and it never meant anything, but singing it then when people were sacrificing their lives for the country – getting killed by the police – it felt different.'

‘Didn't you feel like you were singing the anthem of the very government you were protesting against?' I ask.

‘Yes, of course,' she says. ‘But we were singing it to re-own it – to say “This is our country; not yours.” We didn't sing it the gentle way they sing it. We sang it like “BILADY, BILADY, BILADY”.' She shouts every word at me. ‘We were taking it to a different place. Sometimes it felt like my heart was going to pop out of my chest when I heard everyone sing it, or my father's songs. But that's all another time now; that's the sad part.'

I ask how she feels about the anthem today. ‘When it comes on the radio, we turn it off. Not just the anthem; all the songs we sang at Tahrir. We don't want to listen to them. That's how bad things have got.' She takes a deep breath as if to steady herself. ‘This is not my country any more and this is not my anthem. Maybe you've caught me on a bad day, but I don't feel romantic about it now. I'm too hurt to feel that way.'

Samia knows that the majority of people don't feel as she does – about the country, or the anthem – even those who have every right to share her views. Earlier this morning, I'd got talking with the young owner of a washing machine shop, his gigantic beard and the deep prayer bruise on his forehead indicating he was a devout Muslim. He would have once been the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood's target audience. ‘Things have changed since 2011,' he said. ‘We' – he pointed at his beard – ‘are looked on differently now. We're not to be trusted. But whatever happens, I'll love my country. I can't stop doing so. You want me to give you reasons, like one, two, three, four, five? I can't explain it like that. I'll always love Sayed Darwish's songs too,' he added. ‘His music was about the normal people like me.'

I tell Samia about this man, but she just says that for her things have become ‘too personal' to think like him. I ask how many of her friends were killed during the revolution. She stares off into the middle distance again. ‘These weren't close friends,' she says, ‘just people I got to know, that I respected.' She takes another deep breath. ‘There's Mena, Ahmed …' a slight smile comes across her face as if she's just recalled something funny one of them did, ‘… Karika, Ali …' I look down and suddenly realise she's counting each person off on her fingers. ‘… Sheik Emad – that's his picture over there, they graffitied him on to one of the walls around the Square …' I can't look away from her hands. ‘… Mohammed, the son of a friend of mine …'

The list goes on.

*

It's a few days after meeting Samia, and I'm standing outside what I think is Sayed Darwish's house in Kom el-Dikka, the slum in Alexandria where he was born. I've come to see how the city remembers its most important son, the composer of its anthem. Unfortunately, the man at the doorway – silver-haired and stooped, smiling but sceptical – doesn't seem to want to let me in. He and my translator are deep in conversation. ‘Does he think I'm a spy?' I'm about to ask wearily. Over the last few days, I'd been ordered out of a tube station while tying my shoelaces, had my bag searched while on a tram and even been asked to sing ‘Bilady, Bilady' to prove I wasn't on the payroll of MI6, so I could quite believe this man assumed I was up to no good too.

Fortunately, my interpreter saves me from looking paranoid. ‘It's his wife. She's inside and, y'know …' He mimes ‘uncovered'. After a few minutes, we are let in and the man leads me up a rotten ladder to the roof, then points down at the building next door. ‘Sayed Darwish,' he says, smiling. The tiny, square building where Sayed was born has no roof itself – it barely has what you'd call walls – and it's being used as a rubbish tip. It's actually quite colourful, filled with bright blue and green plastic bags, and with an old sofa collapsed in a corner like a drunk who can't get up.

It's a scene that should probably cause me to make a pithy comment, to say it shows that all anthem composers – even one as renowned as Sayed Darwish – are largely forgotten compared to their songs. But it wouldn't actually be true in his case. On my way to this flat, I saw graffiti of him near a football stadium, his lyrics sprawling out along the length of the walls. I also saw cafes named after him, while the city's opera house carries his name too, as does a nearby school, his unmistakable face – quiffed hair and disjointed nose – pictured on, or inside, them all. The reason his birthplace is so derelict has more to do with politics, as has seemingly everything else concerning Egypt and its anthems (most of the world's anthems too, really). Sayed's grandson, Iman, told me earlier he'd offered to turn one of Sayed's former homes into a museum, only to be rebuffed by the authorities, who preferred to demolish them all for new flats, almost as if his song's status was memorial enough, or perhaps as a subtle reminder that they could use his image and his song whenever they needed to, and that they could just as easily discard them.

I clamber back down the ladder and the man insists that my translator and I stay for tea. His wife, now covered, brings out some jam biscuits she's made. He takes us into their living room-cum-bedroom, which has water dripping down the walls, and proudly turns on his small black-and-white TV. The news is on. It's about President Putin's state visit to Cairo. There's a shot of Putin and al-Sisi, the Egyptian president, strolling along what I can only assume is a red carpet; then there's another of them standing before a military band. Then the Russian anthem starts up and I immediately start laughing. It's one of the worst renditions of an anthem I've ever heard. If this wasn't a Muslim country, I'd be sure the band had tried the orchestral equivalent of method acting beforehand and had a few vodkas each. Actually, scrap that: they sound as though they've definitely all had at least half a bottle. They wheeze in and out of tune, some going up in pitch while others go down, the melody falling apart more and more with each note. The screen cuts to Putin's face. He doesn't look happy. It's a national embarrassment. An inquiry has been set up to look into what on earth went wrong, the newsreader says. The band's rendition of ‘Bilady, Bilady' was even worse apparently, and it doesn't look as if the channel can bring themselves to show it. I want to laugh some more, but everyone else in the room looks so stern, I have to just sit there with my jam biscuit, trying to imagine what Sayed Darwish would have made of it all. I think, to be honest, he'd be as amused as I am.

 

NANA ZAJIJI, LARGE-EYED
and crop-haired, has to be the most patient language teacher in Johannesburg. For the past ten minutes, she's been trying to teach me just one word: ‘Xhosa' – the name of the language I've come for a lesson in – and she's somehow yet to swear or throw her arms up in defeat. ‘Almost!' she shouts encouragingly, quickly following it with a ‘Nearly' and a ‘Keep trying', before going back to the start as if on a loop.

Anyone overhearing us would think I'm the most inept student imaginable, but in my defence the thing that's causing me so many problems is that ‘Xhosa' starts with a ‘click', one of those unfathomable sounds that make some African languages so beautiful. The Xhosa language features three of them: one you make against the top of your mouth; another against your front teeth; a third against your cheek. It's that last one I just can't get right. In theory it should be easy – ‘It's just like saying giddy-up to a horse,' Nana says – but actually doing it is something else. ‘Put your tongue to the side of your mouth,' she says at one point. ‘Is it behind your teeth? Great, now … click.' I do as I'm told. ‘What?' she cries. ‘That was the top of your mouth! How did you manage that? It's like you've never used your tongue in your life.'

‘Do I actually need to know how to click to sing the anthem?' I ask.

‘Of course not,' she says, ‘no white person would be able to sing it if it had clicks in,' and then, unprompted, she starts singing South Africa's anthem for me, the world's only one to feature five languages – that uniqueness the reason I've come here. ‘
Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika
,' Nana begins in Xhosa, ‘
Maluphakanyisw' uphondo lwayo
' (‘God bless Africa, / May her glory be lifted high'). ‘
Yizwa imithandazo yethu, / Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo
,' she adds in Xhosa's close relative, Zulu (‘Hear our prayers, / Lord bless us, the family of Africa'). ‘
Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso
,' she goes on, speeding up as she jumps into Sesotho, another language entirely. She races through three more lines of that, but then suddenly grinds to a halt, only halfway through the song. There are still verses in Afrikaans and English to come. ‘I'd prefer it if those verses weren't included, to be honest,' she says, embarrassed. ‘I feel like … Well, the majority of people in South Africa are black, obviously. And also there's this terrible history here – of apartheid – and the lines in Afrikaans are from the old apartheid hymn. It just doesn't feel great, sorry.'

It would be easy for everyone to just learn the Xhosa, Zulu and Sesotho and leave it at that, Nana adds. ‘I mean, it's not like they're hard to sing.' She asks me to parrot back the first line. ‘
Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika
,' she sings.

‘Unkosea sickeleila eeeAfrica,' I reply.

‘Er, yes. Let's not worry so much about your pronunciation for now,' she says. ‘Let's just try to get all the way through.'

*

South Africa's anthem is one of the world's most important songs, let alone anthems – perhaps the only piece of music that has helped reconcile a country with its past, and bring it peace. It's actually a combination of two anthems: ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika', the military march that was South Africa's anthem during apartheid (a song detested by any black, coloured or Indian person who heard it – the three groups non-whites were split into) and ‘Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika', the African National Congress's anthem during those same years (a song some whites thought was a war cry against them). But it's not just the melding of those melodies that makes the anthem special; it's the five languages it contains, the way the anthem almost forces everyone in South Africa to engage with each other's cultures in a way they might otherwise not.