A City Consumed

URBAN COMMERCE, THE CAIRO FIRE, AND THE POLITICS OF DECOLONIZATION IN EGYPTBy Nancy Y. Reynolds

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8126-8

Contents

List of Illustrations.................................................................ixList of Abbreviations.................................................................xiAcknowledgments.......................................................................xiiiNote on Transliteration...............................................................xviiIntroduction..........................................................................11 The "Ever-Melting" City.............................................................172 Department Stores and Downtown Shopping.............................................473 Anticolonial Boycotts and National Trade............................................784 Socks, Shoes, and Marketing Mass Consumption........................................1145 Postwar Commodity Parables and the Cracking of Late Colonialism.....................1456 The Cairo Fire and Postcolonial Consumption.........................................181Conclusion............................................................................220Epilogue..............................................................................228Notes.................................................................................233Bibliography..........................................................................317Index.................................................................................345

Chapter One

THE "EVER-MELTING" CITY

IN EARLY OCTOBER 1922, a man calling himself "a Tramways Victim" complained in the local press about the poor quality of public transportation in Cairo. The author described himself as "from the class of workers obligated to use public transportation," because he was "not rich" and had lived for the past fourteen years in a neighborhood ('Abbasiyya) far from downtown Cairo where he worked for a utilities company and socialized in the evenings. He claimed to ride the tram four times every day. In addition to commuting to work, he was also, "like not a few of the young people in my quarter, a lover of the theatre, concerts, cinema, etc.," as well as a member of many societies and associations that required his attendance downtown several evenings a week. Since the trams closed long before the cinema and theater showings were finished, he was frequently obliged to take a taxi home at a much higher cost. "What advantage do I have," he asked, "of living far from the city center and in a second-rate building except for the benefit of lower rent?" He declared that nighttime car and taxi fares cost him 50 percent more than his rent.

The Tramways Victim was not alone. In fact, his complaints centered precisely on the overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions of the tramways caused by the enormous demand constantly placed on them by the legions of mobile urban residents. Massive population growth in outer areas of the city, such as 'Abbasiyya, Heliopolis, Shubra, Sakakini, Bulaq, and Sabtiyya, had recently expanded ridership exponentially. "Building had not stopped" for the past three years in 'Abbasiyya, the Tramways Victim contended, and "the population had surely grown by 50 percent" The Cairo Tramways Company, owned by Belgians, had not maintained its existing cars or replaced those damaged in the recent war and the nationalist and labor demonstrations that followed it. "I dare you," he challenged the editor, "to arrive to take the tram from [Zahir to the city center] between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning. It is a crowd, a crush, an unimaginable struggle" Trams arrived at their first stop full from the terminus and did not bother to stop again until reaching the train station plaza in downtown Cairo. Tram ridership in 1914 reached fifty-three million passengers a year; by 1917 ridership had grown to seventy-five million. Since Cairo's population in 1917 stood at roughly eight hundred thousand people, many of these tram fares were likely purchased by the same people, who used the system several times a day as the Tramways Victim himself did.

This testament to the daily crisscrossing of the city by hordes of residents evokes an urban mobility that differs completely from common images of interwar Cairo as a city radically divided and compartmentalized by its experience under colonialism. The idea that the force of colonialism most powerfully expressed itself spatially in the creation of a dual city comes from the experience of French settler colonialism, especially in North Africa. There, French colonial planners deliberately sought to control local populations by containing and paternalistically preserving elements of indigenous culture through sharp demarcations in the built environment. Physical markers separated the old city from the new administrative and industrial city designed to lead the colony in modernization and development. "The dual structure of the colonial city," Zeynep Qelik contends, "is a fragment of the broad discourse of colonialism which accommodates the exercise of colonial power by an 'articulation of forms of difference.' Separation plays an important part in defining otherness and allows for a critical distance needed for surveillance" It was Frantz Fanon, spokesman for mid-twentieth-century decolonization, who did the most to popularize the notion that the "colonial world is a world cut in two" The bifurcation between the contiguous towns of the settlers and of the colonized in what he called "the generic colonial city" revealed the disparities of power and of standards of living that sustained European colonialism:

The settlers' town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler's feet ... are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler's town is a town of white people, of foreigners.

The town belonging to the colonized people ... is a world without spaciousness; ... their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light.

Fanon forged his view of colonial urbanism primarily in French colonies such as Martinique and Algeria. Although Egypt shared with Algeria many experiences of colonial rule, urban development in Egypt resulted less from deliberate planning enacted by colonial state policies than from the actions of complex and shifting coalitions. Khaled Fahmy argues that the growth of Cairo into what appeared to be a bifurcated city "happened by default rather than by design," if indeed it happened at all.

Following Fahmy, this chapter also moves beyond the analysis of static built forms, cartographical representations, and assumptions of division to understand the colonial city instead as a built environment defined by movement and mutability, a space of complex navigations and rapid changes, one experienced as interconnected despite its differences of architecture. Magdi Wahba remembered interwar Cairo in just this way for its "infinite complexity ... crowded with people of vastly differing backgrounds,...