Who shouts there? Egypt!

It dips its delta-mouths into the Mediterranean Sea because its sources are from highlands of eastern and central Africa. Since January 2011, dins and screams of political ‘’spring’’ against Hosni Mubarak and political “winter’’ against Mohammed Morse have rung out of its low lands and the Nile’s delta and shaken skies across Africa. Who hears […]

It dips its delta-mouths into the Mediterranean Sea because its sources are from highlands of eastern and central Africa. Since January 2011, dins and screams of political ‘’spring’’ against Hosni Mubarak and political “winter’’ against Mohammed Morse have rung out of its low lands and the Nile’s delta and shaken skies across Africa. Who hears them, and what they hear, are vital questions for the continent’s future.
In 1952 a conspiratorial self-styled ‘’Free Officers’’ group used their barracks in Sudan to plot capturing power from a government in Cairo considered a puppet of British imperial dictators. The coup rode on the crest of protests nurtured by the Moslem Brotherhood’s quest for a state ruled by Sharia Law. At inception in 1938, the Brotherhood anchored its political vision on non-violent challenge to foreign rule and building membership made strong by educated awareness and conviction. Its younger leaders, however, periodically rebelled and resorted to violence by assassinating British officials and a prime minister.  Its organised structures; repeated nationalistic political education; mounting protests and instigating workers’ strikes gave the Muslim Brotherhood the edge in attracting angry youths looking for hope and a sense of mission. Gamal Nasser and Anwar Sadat were members before their military coup.
Unlike liberation movements in Algeria, Kenya, southern Africa and Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde – who learnt military warfare outside government structure, Egypt’s military nationalists came from the barracks. From Nasser’s own account, plotters were assigned tasks of learning about sectors of government policy in preparation for assuming power – a secret version of Britain’s ‘’Shadow Cabinet’’. Power would come not only from barrels of guns but from pens and books too.
 They had read books obtained by the Brotherhood’s from the Nazi Germans preaching self-determination against Western imperial rule; from British and American agents preaching the merits of democracy, and spies from the Soviet Union preaching economic justice and economic planning. It was the Brotherhood who first advocated for the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Nasser would later do so as their loyal student and enemy.
When in 1962 Che Guevara visited, Nasser talked about the ideological chasm between the Brotherhood and the leadership of the Free Officers. The Brotherhood wanted women banned from wage labour. Nasser saw it as a trick for keeping women poor, dependent on husbands with latitude to inflict domestic violence and indulgent divorce. Nasser also wanted Egypt to draw strength from educating talents in women and from turning new cultural imports from other peoples into tools for building Egypt’s power. Banning cinemas and opera would subject Egyptians to cultural darkness. Facing an Israel that was being injected with new ideas from the Americas, Europe and Russia, it was suicidal for Egypt to wallow in intellectual isolationism. Nasser’s charisma and arousing speeches were vital tools.
The Muslim Brotherhood educated the military with the notion of social engineering towards a vision. It preached a long-term view in a marathon race to win power in Egypt.  That marathon would be run on building schools that give quality education to develop human talents that would run their hospitals and clinics; manufacture pharmaceutical drugs; produce lawyers to defend legal interests of the movement. As Zainab al-Ghazali argued, the Brotherhood would pluck Egypt like a ripe mango if 75 per cent of Egyptians became its members. The huge angry crowds now supporting Morsi send a loud signal that the dictatorship of their numbers is a clear prospect in the horizon of Egyptian politics.
Nasser preached secular ‘’Arab Socialism’’. The Brotherhood preaches a justice-based community, not a narrow unholy ethnic Arab identity. These two rival anchors of power within Egyptian nationalism had no equivalent in the training of most of Africa’s colonial armies. Bedel Bokasa; Idi Amin, Mobutu and Samuel Doe  shared pains of being orphans and mothers insulted as ‘’prostitutes’’. Doe hated the mulato skin colour of Americo-Liberians. They attended primary schools and cherished murdering those who went higher. Their politicians were loose rabbles without disciplined activities for building the economic power, education and health care of party followers. Emperor Bokasa wept lavishly at the funeral of President de Gaulle because, as he wailed loudly, his ‘’father’’ had died.
 The colonial militaries they came from were rooted in impunity in slaughtering African peoples defending their power, nationhood and land. They were local colonial mercenaries; a far cry from the angry nationalism of Egypt’s Free Officers. They lacked Anwar Sadat’s Yom Kippur heroism against Israel to earn the toga that ‘’the Egyptian army is the protector of civil society; will not betray the people’’.
Much changed under Sadat. American academies vigorously trained military officers who embraced privatisation of health care, education; ending food subsidies; importation and de-industrialisation,  and electoral politics based on restricted numbers of political parties with primary emphasis on keeping out ‘’socialists’’ and economic patriots. Civil society groups obtained funds from Euro-American donors but do not share the mobilisation goals and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. University graduates from poorer families remained unemployed, frus-trated. Morsi missed the chance of exploiting this mess. He rushed Islam into politics and economics.
African leaders faced with the violence that is promised by massive unemployment by youths who constitute 70 per cent of the population flex muscles to silence measures to build social justice.