Sisi on big-screen monitor listening as John Kerry delivers remarks to Egyptian development conference at the Congress Center in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, March 13, 2015. Wikicommons/State Department/ Public Domain.I never knew Giulio Regeni. I wish I had; his research was important and fascinating, and everyone close to him recalls a funny, warm and deeply humane young man. But when news of his disappearance first spread in those sickening days following the January 25 anniversary in 2016, I felt like I knew him. Part of the reason I felt that way, I think, is that Giulio belonged to a particular class of Cairo-dwellers, one that I’m particularly familiar with because in many respects I belong to it myself.
He was a foreigner who moved to Egypt because he was intrigued – intellectually, politically, personally – by the country, its nuances and its rhythms; he was someone who wanted to understand the struggles of marginalised Egyptians on the ground, not hobnob with bigwigs in the corridors of power. He was in that class of Cairo-dwellers who you tend not to see, for the most part, getting suited and booted for expat receptions at the embassy; you’re more likely to find them downtown, in Stella bar, gossiping and eating termus and looking gloriously scruffy and unkempt.
Those of us inside that community had a complex relationship with state violence, violence which in one form or another (as journalists, academics, employees of NGOs) we often documented as part of our work. By virtue of the fact that we were not Egyptian, we stood out, and in a climate of government-sponsored xenophobia and chauvinistic nationalism, that made us targets. But we were also, or so we thought, protected to some degree by the privilege of our foreign passports and in many cases the particular fact of our whiteness: never exposed to the same degree of danger that our Egyptian colleagues face every day, and never likely to suffer without consequence as non-Egyptians of colour have in recent years – from trafficked African migrants in the Sinai to the Mexican tourists gunned down by Egypt’s army whilst on a desert safari in 2015.
