CAIRO – The sunset is when the Nile comes to life in Cairo, the party boats sparkle like Las Vegas, the couples on the Qasr el-Nil bridge lounging in the breeze, the riverside cafes tinkling with the trade well past the hour sleeping in most cities.
Around 6 am, when the rest have gone home, the rowers arrive in a Cairo that few people know about: no traffic, no crowds, little chaos. Even the birds are audible at this time of the morning, when the battalions of car horns in the city offer only groggy competition and the winter fog pales five-star hotels along the coast. On the boat, the blades of the paddle stain and scrape the river like knives on cream cheese. Rhythm replaces thinking: dip the oars. Push with your legs. To pull. Repeat.
“Being in the water early in the morning, where you think of nothing but following the person in front of you – it takes you out of town,” said Abeer Aly, 34, who founded the Nile Dragons Academy, a school in the center of Cairo. “Many people think about their shower problems. I think of mine during the rowing. “
Today, Aly’s problems do not include a lack of business. A few years after opening the school in 2013, it had a waiting list of hundreds; now there are so many Cairenes interested in amateur rowing that half a dozen water sports centers offer classes on the banks of the river.
The Nile gave rise to Egyptian civilization thousands of years ago, with its sedimentary waters providing agricultural wealth that built an empire and still supports it. Cairo residents can have coffee at a floating restaurant or board a felucca for an hour-long cruise; Nile water flows from your taps and grows your food. But mornings on the river are as close as most rowers have ever come from the body of water itself.
“When people hear that I’m rowing, they’re like, ‘Rowing? Where? ‘”Said Nadine Abaza, 43, who started rowing three months ago at ScullnBlades, a rowing school near her home in Maadi, a thriving suburb of Cairo. “You see it passing over the Nile, but you don’t think of it as something you can do.”
For most Cairenes, the river without which their country would not exist has become a mere scenario. Assuming it can be seen.
A stroll along the riverside, the corniche, has already allowed drivers to travel from the southern part of Cairo to its northern extension, without interrupting the view of the river.
But in much of downtown Cairo, private clubs and restaurants built over the past four decades on the banks of the river or permanently parked on fixed barges have hidden the Nile from everyone except those who can afford it. Many main points belong to organizations belonging to the military, the police and the judiciary.
It is true that there are other reasons to stay away from a river that collects sewage, garbage and other pollutants for miles before it flows, greenish brown and intermittently pungent, in Cairo. Rowers share water not only with police boats, fishermen and rafts, but also with the occasional garbage archipelago and – at least once – a dead cow.
“If we have existed for many thousands of years because of this,” said Amir Gohar, an urban and landscape planner who studied the Egyptians’ relationship with the Nile, “we are now destroying it and ignoring it.”
Some parts of the corniche are still open for walking, and in the poor neighborhoods of Cairo and other parts of Egypt, people go to the Nile to swim, fish and – if they don’t have running water – wash dishes, clothes and animals. But compared to the Cairenes’ past, today’s residents maintain a much more distant relationship with the river.
Ancient sculptures and models of boats found in tombs suggest that people climbed the Nile to transport supplies, including the huge stone blocks of the Great Pyramids, to celebrate festivals and just to get around. It was by boat, the ancient Egyptians believed, that the sun crossed the skies and the dead went on to the afterlife.
Perhaps this explains why Amenhotep II, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt from about 1426 to 1400 BC, was eager to boast about his achievements in rowing. While Amenhotep’s 200 rowers were “weak, limp and out of breath” after rowing half a mile, says a sculpture, the king – “strong in arms, tireless when picking up the paddle” – stopped “only after having covered three miles of rowing without interrupting your stroke. ”
The Europeans who dominated Egypt in the early 1900s were the first to establish modern rowing clubs along the Nile. For decades, the sport has been reserved for elite foreigners and Egyptians, with races called in French.
After the monarchy fell and foreigners fled in the wake of Egypt’s 1952 revolution, the Nile, like many other things in Egypt, was transformed under the socialist vision of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. As Nasser established new unions to take care of the needs of its members, from housing to health, these unions were given land in front of the Nile to build clubs where members could relax and, in some cases, paddle.
In the 1970s, seeking to attract tourists back to Egypt after a war with Israel, the government promoted regattas that attracted top rowers from Europe and the United States, who ran through the temples of Luxor and central Cairo. Among Egyptians, however, rowing never stood a chance against popular sports like football.
Today, private clubs along the Nile still belong to the engineers ‘union, the judges’ club, the police and others. But, since later governments rejected Nasserism for capitalism, private developers turned much of the river bank into expensive cafes and houses.
This is in a city with less than five square centimeters of green area per resident.
“You are talking about Cairo, which has 20 million inhabitants now, but has very little public space or green space,” said Yahia Shawkat, an urban researcher. “And with everything you have on the Nile, it is not only exclusive, but you are also blind to see or enjoy the river.”
Egyptians appropriate the riverside area where they can, some traveling from distant places in the city in search of what is equivalent to a free pop-up park. Every night, Cairenes gather on the bridges of the Nile to enjoy the view and the refreshing breeze. Some fish. Families buy snacks of cooked chickpeas and roasted sweet potatoes from vendors who set up unlicensed cafes on the sidewalks. Couples take selfies.
Rowing lessons cost about $ 7 to $ 13 an hour, out of reach for most Egyptians. But for young professionals and upper-middle-class families who can afford it, rowing has become a fast-growing niche, some contented themselves with recreational rowing, others sufficiently compelled to join amateur teams.
Water sports schools claim to have enrolled students between the ages of 20 and 60, part of a fitness trend that emerged after the 2011 revolution in Egypt. Social media helped, as did the pandemic: ScullnBlades received twice as many applications after the coronavirus hit, because of its external environment.
“It wasn’t accessible until recently,” said Emma Benany, 31, co-founder of Cairow, a water sports academy in the Dokki neighborhood. When she started rowing in 2011, she found only teams of students or private clubs, almost nothing for amateurs; new gyms, including hers, still work on the club’s docks. “You couldn’t be in your 30s and decide to start rowing.”
You can imagine that you can’t be afraid of the Nile either and decide to get on a boat. However, many new rowers come with questions such as: If I fall, will I not drown? Are there no swirls? Am I not going to catch bilharzia, a common disease locally caused by freshwater parasites?
You don’t go, there aren’t, and parasites don’t do well in moving water, explain the coaches, although the current can be more complicated than swimming in a pool. Ms. Aly of the Nile Dragons Academy said she even drank directly from the Nile to reassure suspicious paddlers.
Those who studied the contamination of the river may not approve. But still: point understood.
“Before, I was afraid of the Nile,” said Mariam Rashad, a trainer from Cairow. “Now I feel that the Nile is an important part of my day.”
Nada Rashwan contributed reporting.