Tara Todras-Whitehill/MCT via Getty Images. All rights reserved.Last month scores of Nubians protested at Abu Simbel sanctuary in Upper Egypt to oppose a parliamentary decision that would prevent them from returning to the villages on the banks of the Nile from which they were forcibly displaced more than half a century ago. This latest development is a painful setback to the Nubian activist community, whose incessant mobilisation bore fruit when in the 2014 Egyptian constitution, ‘Nubia’ was explicitly mentioned for the first time, and a return to Nubia within ten years was set out.
The increasing militarisation of Egyptian society and decreasing political space that followed the entrée of president El Sisi in 2014 now puts into question the realisation of these constitutional gains. A decree issued by El Sisi designates many of the villages to which Nubians wish to return as military areas that should not be populated, and it is this decree that the Egyptian parliament now has now reviewed and approved – to the dismay of many Nubians. While the recent parliamentary decision is an obvious blow to the question of Nubian rights in Egypt, in light of the government’s persistent attempts at quashing any public debate or mobilisation to claim Nubian rights, the developments in recent years are nevertheless striking.
Bearing an ethnic identity distinct from Arab peoples, the Nubian people are usually considered the descendants of a specific civilisation as old as ancient Egypt itself, having inhabited villages along the banks of the Nile – stretching from Aswan in southern Egypt into northern Sudan – for thousands of years. After being divided arbitrarily between Sudan and Egypt in 1899, Nubians in Egypt effectively were uprooted during the early and mid-twentieth century when a series of dams were constructed and resulted in the flooding of Nubian land. With the exception of a thinly populated strip of land along the Nile, today old Egyptian Nubia lies completely under Lake Nasser, built by former president Nasser in the 1950s and 60s in an effort to modernise Egypt.
