Rethinking 1919: The Afterlives of a Contested Revolution
Panel 108, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 15 at 2:45 pm
Panel Description
Public protests during Egypt's 1919 revolution were stage-managed in minute detail. Leaflets dictated the routes to be taken through Cairo's embassy quarters, the order of those marching (men of religion at the front, schoolchildren and labourers at the back) and which slogans were to be chanted and which avoided. That is to say, the revolution has been marshalled into a neat, unified narrative and its actors ranked and ordered since the very moment it took place. Participants, state actors, military regimes, and both local and orientalist historians have established a narrative which is centred around the modern nation in content, chronology and causality, and casts elite men, along with some elite women, in its leading roles.
Yet this narrative did not go unchallenged at the time. As two papers in this panel demonstrate, Egyptian peasants and workers conscripted into the British army expressed their growing dissent against both land-owning elites and imperial powers in a large and diverse repertoire of songs, jokes, and stories, whilst peasant women who had been raped by British soldiers took their grievances to both the local Egyptian police and to the British military authorities, leaving a rare set of first-hand testimonies which were later taken up by the nationalist movement. Nor has the nationalist narrative remained static in the intervening century, as two further papers show. 1967 saw 1919 repurposed as an agit-prop story of peasant resistance which aimed to counter post-Naksa disillusionment; more recently, the Egyptian military has attempted to establish an inventive new account of WWI and 1919 in which popular resistance is replaced by Egyptian military prowess.
Building on recent scholarship that has highlighted both preceding and concomitant subaltern struggles, this panel examines how different actors have sought to document and historicize their own experiences of 1919—thereby challenging the nationalist narrative or inserting themselves into it. Methodologically, the panel asks how subaltern voices travel through time, space, and genre, and how they might be traced to reveal a more complex understanding of the role of subaltern groups in the 1919 revolution. It also scrutinises later iterations of 1919 to help us understand processes of narrativisation, question the relationship of these processes to their present, and build a critical approach towards dominant historiographies of the anti-colonial struggle.
“They call it a World War, but it is actually their own”
Records of the Egyptian peasants who were taken to WWI as part of the British Military Labor corps, are as fragmented and dispersed as what is known of their experiences at war. Ranging from tens to hundreds of thousand of workers were posted in Egypt, Palestine, Greater Syria and as far as the fronts in France, leaving behind them a trail of archives that is as diverse in genre as it is in voice. In this presentation I try to trace their ‘voices’ – I trace the growth of discontent amongst the workers through songs, jokes, and stories that appear through military reports, village memoirs, informant records, LP discs and popular Upper Egyptian memory. The ‘trail of voices’ and one particular recurrent song, appear in the locations of different posts creating an alternative cartography of the war based on the experiences of these workers. This cartographic trail challenges imperial war cartography in documenting the workers’ association and political interaction with their North African counterparts – subalterns in the French Military – to discuss homeward longings, strikes and forms of resistance to military superiors. In tracing these voices, I reveal the experiences of war, and the political consciousness and strategy that resulted in a pivotal but little known revolt culminating in the summer of 1918 in Egypt. Methodologically, I ask ; How do subaltern voices travel through time, space, technology and archive, and how can they be extracted through 100 year archives? What of the biography of the 1918 uprising, can be traced through these cross-cutting geographies of struggle? How could the interaction between subalterns on the front, in prisoner of war camps contributed to the uprisings of 1917-1918 in Egypt, Algeria, Upper Volta and other colonies towards the end of the war? What new legacy do these forms of peasant entitlement, resistance and uprising create for the origins and nature of the 1919 revolution?
This paper examines incidences of rape during the ‘revolution’ of March 1919 in Egypt. I demonstrate first of all that the uprising was the occasion for multiple incidents of sexual violence which have received relatively little scholarly attention. This violence was overwhelmingly, but not solely, perpetrated by British soldiers, notably in a number of villages in Giza. As Beth Baron has demonstrated, accounts of these atrocities were taken up by the nationalist movement, who regarded them as synonymous with the ‘rape of the nation’ by the British. They attracted worldwide press coverage as calls for Egyptian independence grew louder—though what captured European imaginations in Egypt was the rape, real or imagined, of white women by ‘native’ men. Other incidents attracted scarcely any attention at all, since, I argue, they presented no political utility to anybody, for example the rape of Armenian women by Egyptian men, ostensibly in revenge for Armenian collaboration with the British.
I next examine a number of documents in which Egyptian women who had survived rape by soldiers directly confronted the British authorities with their claims. I argue that the British response was primarily determined by the political imperative of acquitting their army of any accusations that might bolster the case for Egyptian independence, demonstrating how this response was structured in practice around a combination of classic ‘rape myths’ of the kind which informed British law and legal practice at the time, and cultural stereotypes about Islam, the Orient, and the reliability of ‘native women’. In the aftermath of the events, these impressionistic claims about the Egyptians’ allegations took precedence in British discourse over even the highly tendentious versions of events established by official enquiries, thereby completing the silencing of the Egyptian women who had testified about their rapes.
This paper deals with a play about the 1919 revolution performed in the wake of the Naksa. In al-Masamir (The Nails, 1967), Sa‘d al-Din Wahba revisits the history of 1919 in a mode that has little to share with previous canonical literary and cinematic narratives about the revolution. Unlike ‘Awdat al-Ruh by Tawfiq al-Hakim or Bayn al-Qasrayn by Naguib Mahfuz, the story is not that of a victorious nationalist struggle narrated from the perspective of the urban middle classes. Rather, the events are set in a small Delta village and narrated through the perspective of its deprived peasants, who end up defeated despite their courageous resistance. Al-Masamir’s rewriting of the past is at once a mirror of the disillusion of the present, and a tool to counter it: Wahba uses the 1919 revolution, I argue, to comment on the contemporary context in an agit-prop mode, appropriating the voices of the past to encourage people not to lose hope, and urge them to resist.
In 2013, the Egyptian army suddenly started a new tradition of celebrating the First World War. Over the following five years, from 2013 to 2017, lavish celebrations were held every November under the auspices of the Military Research Unit of the Egyptian Armed Forces. In these celebrations speeches were delivered celebrating what was claimed had been heroic feats of the Egyptian Armed Forces in various theaters of operation during the Great War. Given the fact that the Egyptian army was under British command during the War; that this army did not participate in the War; and that it was Egyptian peasants, not Egyptian soldiers, who assisted in their thousands in the war effort, this paper argues that behind this bizarre claim is an attempt to distort the historical record not only of Egypt in the First World War, but also of the very nature of the 1919 Revolution.
