In this text, Menna Agha describes how “deserts”—a term inexistent in Nubian cosmology—constitute a political process of dispossession of Nubian land used both by European colonialists and the Egyptian state. From the harsh realities of displacement this dispossession triggered, she imagines what Return would mean for Nubian people.
My people say that every street that runs uninterrupted between the river and the mountain is occupied by Jinns. Google calls them mythical creatures, but I was taught that Jinns are peoplehoods of good and bad spirit beings, they have communities just like us; they can help or harm, just like us. That is why we used to build our houses interwoven into each other. This understanding of what constitutes Nubian spatiality is especially common among Nubians living on the west bank of the Nile river. But sadly for us, only a few Nubian villages (especially in Egypt) remained by the river. In the 1960s, almost all Nubians were displaced away from their ancestral land and their beloved river to make way for a water reservoir, in a project that was advertised as Egypt’s key to modernity.
But modernity didn’t change the fact that every street that runs straight and uninterrupted is full of Jinns, especially those linear streets in the displacement villages designed to house thousands of displaced Nubians in Kom Ombo valley, north of Aswan. Kom Ombo valley itself was known as a valley for Jinns. But modernist design has deemed its streets linear and open on both ends. As stories of Jinns disrupting human lives during the first years of displacement were numerous, I grew up listening to them and believing what they told me.
These stories are what qualifies as “myth” in Western epistemes, mostly in a discounted, dismissive, or sensationalist manner. But myths in a Nubian episteme embody a mode of storytelling, functioning as active policies that organize the relationship between people and their environments. Linear streets are broken to avoid wind tunnels and shield houses from descending sand; but more importantly, recognizing, and respecting the possibilities of being and becoming in the surrounding environment. All Nubian villages (except those situated on islands) sit between the river and a mountain. Sand on one side and water on the other. The mountain was full of Jinns, and the river was full of its people, worlds, and creatures that lived at the bottom of the river, as told in Nubian ancestral stories.
The concept of emptiness was not in use within an indigenous Nubian context, and neither was the concept of the desert as it pertains in Western epistemes.
The sandy mountains that Nubians speak about are what maps call “the Nubian desert,” the same term I was also introduced to in English books. Yet it is not a term used in Arabic as part of my formal education—the “Nubian Desert” is the place where I grew up and where my people are. I first learned that our land was a desert when reading travel memoirs of white explorers like Burkhardt’s Travel in Nubia. The term was foreign to the Nubian episteme, so much that I can’t find a translation of the word “desert” or a comparable term in contemporary Nubiin, or Old Nubiin, according to three generations of language speakers and old Nubian philologist Vincent van Gerven Oei.
The term’s inapplicability in indigenous Nubian epistemes did not prevent “deserts”—in their Western sense and desert-making projects—from charting Nubian lands and rendering Nubian people non-geographic through a mere stroke of a line on a map. The Nubian desert started as a colonial construct because it served colonial interests in the 19th century, and the several Nubian deserts that were produced during the 20th century would continue a project of erasing Nubian peoplehood. Deserts were very necessary for projects of dispossession on our land, and here I examine three of the many ways in which desert-making was employed to actively take Nubian land from Nubians.
Archeologists, and most specifically those who identified as Egyptologists, have benefited a great deal from the invention of Nubian deserts, and actively supported projects of desert-making on Nubian land during the 20th century.
The field has derived its foundational knowledge from the doctrine of discovery, as they dig up our ancestors and the stories and values that serve their political interests. It is not a surprising fact that the foundational texts of Egyptology in the 19th century were authored by white supremacists who referred to Egypt’s 25th dynasty, which consisted of Nubian rulers, as “a period of ni***r domination.”
Despite hiding behind the pacifist façades of academia, contemporary and late 20th century Egyptologists have been practicing necropolitics: this means that my people’s death (material or social) is required for us to be able to tell our stories, and our graves are dug without interruption. The displacement of Nubians turned our land into a de-peopled desert to “house” archeological artifacts, in a convenient marriage between Abdelnasser’s state politics and the fantasies of Egyptologists championed by the UNESCO, who helped his regime silence the Nubian story. This focus clearly states their interest in stones, not in people. Therefore, the high dam and its resulting desert came by the design of and benefit for archeologists, whose digging was often disrupted by Nubians who either asked them to stop or claimed ownership over the findings of the expeditions. Regardless, they turned Nubian ancestral artifacts into what they later called “world heritage,” thus making our material inheritance everyone’s but ours.
Among those considered “disruptive Nubians,” is the woman, unnamed and belittled, mentioned in Rex Keating’s 1963 book, Nubian Twilight. He describes: “Each morning with unfailing regularity, an old woman appeared on the dig to lay claim to the property of her ‘ancestors’—as she describes these people who died at least 4,000 years ago. She demanded half of all the pots and human remains found, and claimed ‘but you can keep the cattle horns.’ The old woman could only be silenced by the leader of the expedition, Dr Blanco y Caro, who demanded that she, in return, pay half the cost of running the expedition.”
Now that we were sent away to displacement villages, our land is emptied and turned into what they call an “open-air museum.” This woman, along with the rest of my elders, was displaced to another desert. Nowadays, archeologists continue to dig the graves of my ancestors and impose a story on me, while working under state protection on my ancestral land to which I don’t have access. My only consolation is the fact that our donkeys—those donkeys we were not allowed to come with Nubians to displacement villages—still roam our land, bothering and disrupting archeological digs.
Nubian people, on the other hand, are engaged in a continuous struggle to return back to their ancestral land. They refuse their site of displacement and refuse to see their land as a desert.
The first successful wave of return took place in the 1970s, when a sympathetic Sadat supported Nubians on the Egyptian side. All the support, including that of infrastructure and economy, disappeared when he died while in office in 1981. The early returners started feeling despair, gradually leaving their ancestral land again and going back to the displacement villages. A notable exception is Hagga Tahra, a woman from my village, Qustul. Hagga Tahra refused to return back to the resettlement site, and lived in what is deemed a desert for more than forty years, where she was the only inhabitant in sight.
She became a fetish for journalists and filmmakers, especially after filming equipment became easier to transport for the long trip necessary to reach her. You can find her featured in films such as Nefertari’s Palm Trees (2014) by Ahmed Nour, and A Woman from Land of Gold (2015) by Fayza Harby. She initially welcomed visitors, but after realizing this attention proved futile to her cause, she refused to meet any journalists and focused on only inviting Nubian activists and youth to come to visit her and take back their land. Tahra was there standing between our land and desert(ification).
She inspired several waves of return and was a starting point for larger agricultural projects. I grew up amid these waves. The most prominent was in 2010, when Nubians formed cooperatives and bought patches of their land from the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture. The cooperation project faced many struggles, particularly as the state weaponized environmental regulations pushing them away from the Nile, and making irrigation without state support virtually impossible.
But the eruption of the 2011 Revolution bolstered Nubian efforts, and Tahra was there to receive caravans of Nubians who successfully pushed for the inclusion of their return in the new Egyptian constitution. The years that followed marked a defeat of the Revolution and the rise of military rule, which instated the 2014 presidential Decree #444, designating a 125-kilometer-wide swath of land along the border with Sudan as a military zone. Decree #444 embodies another state-sponsored, desert-making apparatus enforcing emptiness. Even then, Tahra stayed.
The inauguration of the Qustul dry port—a few kilometers from her house—was a boost to movements in her direction and mended the ruptures between Nubians in Egypt and Sudan who were separated by the dam. The port opened in 2014, between the old and displaced Nubian villages of Qustul and Eshkeet. Hagga Tahra’s house was a lighthouse for Nubian return, a rest house for those visiting their ancestral land, and a guest house for travelers passing Nubian land, until Tahra’s passing in 2021.
Eshkeet and other Nubian villages in Sudan’s Halfa valley were also displaced by the dam, but our cousins further south were lucky enough as the dam reservoir didn’t reach their shores. This means that Nubians in Sudan were fortunate to raise generations by the river. However, these Sudanese Nubian villages were slowly turning into population repellents, due to further damming projects and economic blight. The remainder of Nubian land by the river has been struggling with environmental changes. The biggest issue facing Nubian villages by the Nile is desertification. By that I mean the crawling sand from the east and the west of the valley that is burying the built environment and agricultural land.
These crawling sands are a result of climate change and governmental policy that forced economic prosperity away from these village, and more importantly, the new land property laws that make it more beneficial to turn the agricultural land into pieces of real estate by the river.
Desert(ification) takes another form in Sudanese villages as they are submerged under layers of sand, losing agricultural land in the process. Sand is a beast slowly swallowing houses and land while Nubia shrinks every day—this is how a desert is imposed upon our land. Such movement of sand is a result of drought in some areas, as well as dams like Meroe Dam—all caused and perpetuated by Sudanese state politics.
Nubian researcher and environmentalist Samir Bokab offers an analysis of desertification situated in a Nubian episteme, as he insists that Nubian desertification is a problem of land claims as much as it is a macro-political issue. He posits that our land claims in their different forms are a necessary shield for Nubian land, whether it’s planting palm trees, or the presence of Nubians on their land through waves of return.
Palm trees have been icons of Nubian livelihood, and the backbone of Nubian economies. Some records show that Nubians had as many as forty-one palm trees per capita. Nubians estimate their palm trees on the original land to be in the millions. This high density of palm trees was due to proximity to the river, and a distinctive system of irrigation that sustained a lush and dense bank of date palms throughout history. The lush forest acted as a shield against the crawling sand. However, many of these forests were obliterated by fires since the 1990s, which pushed more Nubians to abandon their villages and move to cities.
Nubian activists including my late father, Aly Agha, would repeat the word “Six million palm trees” whenever the issue of Nubian return was brought up, as if this is a condition for Nubian land to become what it used to be. Tahra’s house was surrounded by palm trees that she planted in the 1970s. Even my mother in her small garden outside of Cairo has palm trees. For displaced Nubians in Egypt, the lush fields of palm trees are an unwavering dream that inhibits the calls for return too. ■