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“‘If you wish to employ Englishmen you must do so at your own risk…’: Hashish, Murder, and Boundary-Making in the Foreign Cemeteries of Alexandria”
Abstract
In a little hut in the imperial military cemetery of Alexandria, the British caretaker, Mr. Dunn, had coffee, tea, and a glass of arak with an unknown “native” as he cooked dinner in the darkness of night, 6 November 1927. As Mr. Dunn turned to take a pot of macaroni off the stove, his dinner guest knocked him to the ground and proceeded to “throttle” him to death, breaking all of his ribs and causing “amazing” internal injuries. In the immediate aftermath of his murder, the British community in Egypt – including colonial, governmental officials, local Alexandrian consular employees, and members of the Imperial War Graves commission - struggled to determine what lessons they should draw from the brutality of Mr. Dunn’s demise. The investigation into Mr. Dunn’s murder revealed an extensive hashish ring operating out of the foreign-national cemeteries at Shatby, led by indigenous Egyptian caretakers. These hashish dealers had access to the military, Jewish, Free Thinkers, and Protestant cemeteries. Mr. Dunn was deemed to be too friendly with natives, having perhaps invited his own death. These cemeteries, worried British officials, with their temptations of “native” associations and their link to a criminal network, were too dangerous for Englishmen to stay in at night. Possible rectifications included the firing of all Egyptian employees, the posting of police at the entrance of every cemetery, and the arming all British caretakers. This paper takes the murder of Mr. Dunn and the subsequent investigation and negotiations between the British consulate, the Imperial War Graves Commission, the Alexandrian police and government, and the Egyptian national government as its starting point to ask questions of criminality, the classifications of the dead, and the social and physical boundaries built in 1920s Alexandria. It seeks to explore the rhetoric of separation, wherein British officials declared the sanctity of British and military graves and the protection of British life to be in contradistinction to the passive, inherently criminal network of all Egyptians. The foreign-national cemeteries thus served as physical ramifications of the dangers of British/Egyptian association, and the cleansing of all “native” employees was sought as the ideal solution. In an attempt to monitor and protect their countrymen, British officials sought to impose strict social and physical boundaries that would definitively control both the Egyptian living and the foreign dead.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries