by AZZURRA MERINGOLO
Cairo – A team of football players darker than Pelé. A class of artistic education where so many small black Venuses design clothes that could be worn by models on the catwalk. Music at full volume that is mixed with the irrepressible shouts of lively children. Thin, tall, impish, the few tired ones sleep on a bench, sheltering themselves from the sun with their long curly hair. Welcome to Sakkakini, an enclave of South Sudan in the in the bustling metropolis of Cairo.
The bell rings, the students leave their classes in a disorganized manner. The children run, but few want to return home, preferring to stay and play on the grounds of this school that Comboni missionaries created in the Abassya quarter to welcome the Sudanese arriving in Cairo. “Over the years it has grown exponentially and it has pushed us always higher. Now we missionaries sleep in what was originally the terrace of the house,” said a laughing Father Cosimo, the school’s founder. Since he arrived in Cairo in the 1970s, the number of Sudanese has grown exponentially and for this reason, the missionary began to build new classrooms next to the church. Father Cosimo, who speaks fluent Arabic, remembers how at the beginning of the ‘80s, the Sudanese community in Cairo was primarily made up of students, from both north and south, who were on scholarships at Egyptian universities. Following the outbreak of the endless civil war, the deteriorating situation in Sudan brought about an increase in those coming to the mouth of the Nile in search of refuge.
From fraternal guests to ghettoized refugees
In October 2011 there were about 44,000 refugees acknowledged by the United Nations in Egypt, about 25,000 of who came from South Sudan. Until 1995 the word “refugee” was not an expression the Egyptian government attributed to the Sudanese, whom they also considered children of the same Nile. Since the signing of the Wadi el Nil treaty in 1976, Sudanese were permitted to live in Egypt without requiring a visa. “The civil war upset everything. It is not a simple case of conflict between a Muslim north and Christian-animist south,” explained Father Cosimo. Even if this is the most evident tip of the iceberg for those who see the Sudan from afar, in reality there are many more causes that have made this civil war a tangled mess difficult to unravel. The north-south division was created primarily by geography and climate. The north is a desert expanse marked by the 10th parallel which for thousands of years has been tied to the civilizations that have followed one another in the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula. From ancient Egypt to the development of Arab Muslim civilization, for about 5,000 years, those who have ruled Egypt have considered Nubia, the area that extends from Aswan to Khartoum, their natural hinterland. The south remained excluded from these dynamics because of a natural barrier made up of the sadd, quagmires and swamps of papyrus that grow on the Upper Nile. It was only towards the middle of the 10th century that Egyptians, looking for the source of the Nile, were able to penetrate the sadd, opening up the south to adventurers, merchants, missionaries and slave traders. The two parts, which for centuries were also on the opposite side of the slave trade, were administered separately by British colonizers, who were there until 1956.
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