The Nile

"Collins is one of the leading historians of the Sudan. And he is crazy about the Nile. It is almost a biography of the Nile – from its farthest headwaters to the Mediterranean. Throughout the book he provides pieces of human and geological history and the stories of the engineers and technocrats who tried for 200 years to exploit it. Collins is a very fine writer. He describes Nasser’s struggle to control the Nile. The Nile is an existential issue for Egypt – civilisation would not exist there without it. The age-old question was how to get more water from the equatorial lands up to Egypt. Ideas had been bandied about for decades, and the more practical ones used the equatorial lakes of Uganda, where there’s plenty of rain and cloud cover, as reservoirs that would hold excess water and send it north when needed. When Nasser came to power, the question for him was: ‘Why would I leave my water in a lake in Uganda?’ He built the Aswan High Dam to secure the water for Egypt, even if it meant that billions of gallons would evaporate each year into the cloudless sky of the Nubian desert. And his anti-imperialist stance only went so far. While railing against the colonial powers, he held the newly independent states of east Africa to a colonial-era treaty that basically allocated them zero per cent of the Nile waters. “The Nile is an existential issue for Egypt – civilisation would not exist there without it.” Given the chaos that enveloped Sudan and Uganda in the years following independence, you could say Nasser made the right call. There were years when the Nile was extremely high but the dam held it back, preventing flooding. In the years of drought that caused widespread death elsewhere, Egypt didn’t suffer. The costs were great, but it did the job. At the same time, a hundred-thousand Nubians were forcibly moved to make way for the dam’s reservoir; more money went into the rescue of Egyptian antiquities than to humanely resettling these people. It’s a wound that is still raw today."