The Cairo of gated communities
In the early days of the January 2011 Revolution, I witnessed a young man collecting garbage in the middle of Delta Street in the Sporting district of Alexandria. He was sorting through the trash in defiance of the cars whose drivers had reversed away, fearing the new symbols and rhetoric ushered in by the revolution. Shouting “This street belongs to us!” at drivers and pedestrians, the young man echoed poet Salah Jahin’s words from the film “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” In the film, Ali El-Madbouli (played by Ahmed Mehrez) declares: “The street is ours, ours alone. Those other people aren’t one of us.”
After the crowds that had protected the ideas and symbols associated with dreams of liberation dispersed, advertisements for gated communities in new cities returned to TV screens. Now, though, the ads were more in-your-face and arrogant than ever.
There was no longer any regard for people’s feelings nor any fear of the symbolic power they had gained during the revolutionary mobilization. Capital now flirted openly with the rising new class that had emerged after January 2011, and the lifestyle of “Egyptians of 'Egypt'” (with "Egypt" pronounced in English, not the Arabic "Masr") began to crystallize in the villas, streets, and parks of protected cantons.
In Egypt, the words you use for the country itself reveal a stark class divide. To some, it’s 'Egypt'—a globalized vision of prosperity, touted in investment conferences and upscale neighborhoods. To others, it’s 'Masr'—the colloquial, unvarnished reality of crowded streets, rising prices, and everyday resilience.
We no longer need to illustrate the immense class divide between two societies coexisting in the same country. Nor must we explain the clarity of two emergent collective concepts: the residents of 'Egypt' and the residents of 'Masr' in the national imagination. These deceptively simple terms convey the complexity of the crisis.
The roots of this divide date back to the early 1990s, when the state and private sector began collaborating to build gated cities along the North Coast and in the desert, intended for the inhabitants of 'Egypt'—the affluent segment increasingly associated in the collective consciousness not just with luxury housing, but with an entire culture encompassing lifestyle, language, and behavior that set them apart from the inhabitants of the other 'Masr'.
Additionally, there was the extravagance of taming the desert, from the exceptional width of streets and the height of the desert villas’ walls to shopping malls like Mall of Arabia.
The highest form of risk
In a highly significant 2006 study published in “Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East,” urban studies geographer Eric Denis reflects on his four-year stay in Cairo and investigates how gated cities have fragmented Cairo’s social fabric. He views them as harbingers of risk and predicts future unrest as a result.
“[P]erhaps Cairo is a city that ‘models’ neo-liberal fashions in a way which is paradoxically and troublingly ‘ideal’ in a universal sense. Egypt’s gated communities are imposed as the ultimate figure of risk. Yet they generate by their very presence many profound forms of social risk, fragilization and general vulnerability that all the physical and discursive ramparts of neo-liberal geography and luxury housing would like to block out. Walled communities realize, in fact, the national fragility and produce the generalized social risk they claim to secure against.”
Denis creates a fictional character, businessman Ahmed Ashraf Al-Mansuri, a resident of Dreamland compound, to represent the population of 'Egypt', those living behind the gates. He is a composite character, drawn from the real-life personas Denis encountered over his four years in Cairo. Through him, Denis outlines the worldview of these elites and their vision for the new Cairo.
Al-Mansuri owns a small dairy factory. He enjoys playing golf to unwind from the stresses of work. He is married with several children—though their exact number is never specified—and his eldest studies in London.
Denis’s study is not purely speculative. He analyzes Egypt’s economic data, wealth sources, and unjust patterns of distribution. He also dissects how these gated communities entrenched a worldview in which everyone outside the walls is deemed “ashwa‘i”—chaotic, informal, slum-dwelling. The term “ashwa‘i” gained traction alongside the rise of these gated cities and enclaves, which operate their own private democracies, while the rest of the residents of 'Masr' remain mired in congestion, anger, complicity, and corruption.
The life of Ahmed Ashraf Al-Mansuri
The author tracks Al-Mansuri’s thoughts, anxieties, fears, and aspirations during his evening commute from his office on the 11th floor of the World Trade Center overlooking the Nile to his home in the gated compound. He leaves the office, climbs into his air-conditioned car with reflective windows, whose driver avoids downtown traffic by taking side roads.
On the way, Al-Mansuri thinks of squeezing in a round of golf followed by a chat with his friend Yassin from the Ministry of Finance at the club, and perhaps a short walk home after that—a ritual to decompress after a stressful day that began at 8 am.
His business dealings are not going well. He has failed to secure a monopoly on ice cream production, and lost out on an apartment due to the devaluation of the currency and a dollar shortage. His motto is “Everything is fraught with risk.”
What softens the day’s blow is signing a lucrative distribution deal with an international hotel chain to supply milk cartons. He plans to visit the factory the next morning before heading to the office, to accelerate production.
He has had no time to talk with his son, now in his third year at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London—the perfect path for a young man destined to return as a professor at a private Egyptian university, or a researcher studying the very risks facing Egypt’s marginalized, even as he himself luxuriates in the elite world of the residents of 'Egypt'.
“At the center of this new way of life are Egypt’s elites, themselves connecting together the archipelago of micro-city communities that they administer as if they were so many experimental accomplishments of a private democracy to come. The gated communities, like a spatial plan, authorize the elites who live there to continue the forced march for economic, oligopolistic liberalization, without redistribution, while protecting themselves from the ill effects—of its pollution and its risks. In the same way, these elites rejoin the trans-metropolitan club of the world-wide archipelago of walled enclaves.”
Al-Mansuri’s other children spend the August afternoon at the amusement park with Maria, the Ethiopian maid. They return late with their mother, who had been out on “foray” to a shopping mall. Now they splash in the compound pool, guarded by bodyguard Mahmoud.
The narrative shifts briefly to Maria, who sleeps in a small windowless room behind the kitchen. After tucking the children in, she returns to help her employer receive the evening’s guests.
Grasping the tail of the future
As the car pulls away from downtown and Al-Mansuri heads home, the businessman’s morning anxiety fades. The author notes the driver winking at the traffic police officer at the start of the ring road, heading towards the gated city in the 6 October settlement. He passes over the residents of 'Masr', to whom he pays no attention and to whose world he is oblivious—a world housing farmers and inhabitants of red-brick unplanned settlements.
Denis steps inside Al-Mansuri’s mind, offering him a fleeting chance to glimpse the other Egypt, to turn his head towards the neglected majority and perhaps avert the looming catastrophe. But this does not happen. Even if it did, Denis insists, Al-Mansuri would feel no empathy. He would only reaffirm the wisdom of living far from that chaotic, backward world which he believes disfigures Cairo’s image. “At any moment, he thinks, this crowd could mutate into a rioting horde, pushed by who knows what manipulating sheikh’s harangue.”
Al-Mansuri’s choice of the compound, Denis argues, is his way of grasping the tail of the future.
The businessman’s car passes the pyramids, then enters the desert, finally arriving at Dreamland. “From this point on, living in the desert is no longer conceived of as a departure toward the periphery, but as a relocalization of the city center and new focus on places of innovation. This acts as a visible show of the reconcentration of the spaces of power that in part accompanies the expansion of the gated communities.”
He sees Abu Mahmoud, the golf caddie, wrapping up his workday and waiting for a microbus to take him home. He shares a 40-square-meter apartment with ten waiters and workers in the oldest neighborhood of 6 October City, perched on the western desert plateau.
The life of Michael K
Denis draws a potent parallel between these gated compounds and apartheid-era South Africa, where invisible gates separated people by color. “These real estate projects, the gated communities, are marketed as the ideal post-metropolitan lifestyle, crafted somewhere between the sprawling cities of fortress America and the new risk-Apartheid of Johannesburg.”
In Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s “The Life and Times of Michael K,” which is set in 1980s South Africa, we follow a colored gardener in his thirties named Michael K, who cares for his ailing mother. She dreams of escaping the violence of Cape Town under apartheid and returning to her rural birthplace to “die under blue skies.”
Michael, born with a hare lip and limited intelligence, drops out of school. His appearance prevents him from befriending women and he lives by the motto that “he had been brought into the world to look after his mother.”
He buys two train tickets for their departure in two months time, but apartheid regulations require him to get a permit to leave the city. The state controls the unemployed masses from the countryside, often fueling looting and riots. Michael K calls them “that sea of hungry mouths.”
Return to the countryside
When denied the permit, he builds a handcart from a crate and a pair of bicycle wheels and hauls his mother, who is suffering from dropsy in her legs, along the backroads. To avoid the police, they sleep the first two nights in the abandoned home of her former employers, which has been looted by street gangs. Michael K is content to sleep in its luxurious bathroom.
A roadblock stops them on the highway, forcing them to take more dangerous routes, where they face being robbed. Eventually, a truck driver helps them get closer to their destination. But after all this, the mother loses her will to continue. Her illness worsens, and she dies in a hospital. Her body is cremated, and Michael receives her black coat and a bag of ashes.
He sets off on a new journey, carrying the ashes for three days as he experiences hunger and feels he is being hunted. He makes his way through the dark veld and sleeps under bridges and in unknown fields. He eats wild plants and birds, all to fulfill his mother’s last wish and take her ashes home.
When asked by the children of a man who helps him along the way what he plans to do with the ashes, he says, “I am taking them back to where my mother was born long ago. That was what she wanted me to do.”
He finally reaches her village, now a deserted ruin, and scatters her ashes over the ground.
Michael K carrying a bag of ashes crosses many invisible, racial gates. Only death allows his mother to complete her journey. But in doing so Michael frees himself from the hold of maternal obligation and begins his own journey towards freedom, living life on his own terms and farming the land.
Two return journeys: one by the fictional businessman Ahmed Ashraf Al-Mansuri back to his cocoon behind guarded gates in Cairo, like a return to the womb; the other by Michael K, towards the countryside to scatter his mother’s ashes and, in the process, liberate himself from her and all the gates in his way.
Today, Egypt has seen a proliferation of gated compounds. Meanwhile, in South Africa, since Mandela’s election in the 1990s, the country has been working to dismantle the legacy of apartheid, foster economic growth, and build a democratic climate—“South Africa is one of the most successful democratic transitions on the African continent.”