Written by Kseniya Kniazeva   

I met Maan Alhasbane, a Syrian-Belgian activist, in the hostel on my first evening in Cairo, a little more than three months after the Egyptian Revolution first broke out. It was his birthday. He gave my friend Meredith and I free beer. He had the most positive disposition, and like objects that fall to the earth unabated, his gravitational pull attracted a stationary sphere of guitar players, omnipresent Egyptian cats, and general gaiety. He asked me my story. I told him I wanted to speak to the poorest inhabitants of Cairo for a Masters paper I was writing. My paper was due in less than a week.

Maan said he knows where such a population lives. He’d take me there tomorrow, and interpret. Then we toasted. And drank.

Early the next afternoon, we took a taxi to Manshiat Nasser, or Garbage City, a predominantly Coptic (Christian) community of garbage collectors called the Zabaleen. The community scavenges the city for recyclable materials and brings it back to their porches and garages to sort. They live on the pennies recycling earns: in complete destitution on less than two dollars a day.

A rat scurried out of the corner of my eye as we walked through the City’s looming gate and down its dusty main street. There were walls of flattened cardboard on each side of me, the corrugated paper crowding together in leaning towers of sepia.

The permeating poverty perforated my nose like a prime peperoncino pepper, the remnants of which remain on my hands long after I finish chopping its sanguine flesh, and often end up burning my nose after a careless itch. Ca m’a pique! The stench of rotting garbage was so overwhelming it hurt.

“It’s worse in the summer,” Maan told me when he saw me crinkle my nose.

I wanted to find out definitively whether my theory that Facebook's integral role in mobilizing the people for the Revolution would have necessarily marginalized the participation and the voices of the poorest and most uneducated of Egyptian society. Rationally, it would make sense. Is a technological means only accessed by 21.2 percent of the population capable of forging “democracy through infrastructure?” Can something accessed by an educated, quasi-wealthy minority be inherently liberalizing and democratizing?

It turns out it can’t. Which is why the recently completed first round of Egypt's historic presidential election was and continues to be so important.

We spoke to 25 individuals (women and men, old and young) in the Garbage City that day—May 2nd, 2011—about their participation in the revolution. None of the women had been to school past the third grade, the men couldn’t read or write, and the children had been working as garbage pickers for years. (I saw a ten year old driving a pickup garbage truck, for Pete’s Sake!). They all owned cell phones but none used the Internet. Facebook (was this not touted as the "Facebook Revolution"?) was irrelevant for most. They got their news from TV, much of which was under state control. In fact, the community was working when the first riots erupted, and only heard about the start of the revolution by the same means and at the same time the majority of the rest of the world did: via television on the 25th of January. And only one individual out of 25 actually participated in the Days of Rage, while the rest did not know anyone who had even taken part.

The chasm between the rich and poor isn’t just an American phenomenon. Here, it means wealthy, recently graduated young adults can afford to spend 18 days camping out at Tahrir square while the truly poor must work every day, all day, just to put dinner on the table. (Interestingly, this chasm of inequality also prevails in the microcosm of the Garbage City. The sole individual we spoke with who joined in the protests—four days after the revolution had officially begun—was a young Zabaleen in his first year at Cairo University. He spoke English. He heard about the Revolution while he was 'outside' collecting garbage one day, and since he splits his time between working and attending university classes, he was at liberty to go and participate).

The Copts’ future was a shimmering mirage reflecting their daily preoccupations. When we asked what the interlocutors wanted (demanded) from the revolution, many did not answer us. They couldn’t, really. Most only spoke of their day-to-day needs and fears: their work; the necessity to go outside their community and return safely with the trash; the fear that as the minority Christians in a Muslim-dominated state they would be persecuted and further marginalized if the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists took power of the presidency; the threat that the Baltagiya would come back and kill more of their people and prevent them, again, from going outside their community to work[1]. They desired stability and the freedom of movement so they could continue to work and support their loved ones. This was their whispered revolutionary request.

These parochial goals contrasted drastically with the standard “revolutionary ideology” demanding civil and political rights, or what Trostky would call “a prepared plan of social reconstruction.” These more specific needs of the very poor were “voiceless” in the revolutionary dialogue, partly because the Zabaleen did not have access to the internet, partly because they were removed from the social [digitized] network of the young, middle-classes, partly because they were too involved with meeting their daily needs to worry about their own social progress, and party because, even if they wanted to, they could not have participated because they just didn’t have the time. And no one asked them the right questions, nor informed them of the option to amplify their voices from the podium of Tahrir square.

But this was a year ago.

The pressing question now is if the Zabaleen (or the other 20 percent of Egyptians living on less than $2 dollars a day) had had the opportunity to participate in the first competitive election in modern Egyptian history? Most are illiterate; would they have been able to understand the candidates’ merits penned on scuffed campaign posters ubiquitously plastered across the city or springing off Page One of the Egypt Daily News? Had they had the time off work to cast their ballots? Had they had the means of getting to the polls? Were they aware of the voting registration procedures?

A democracy is only viable if each voice, weak or strong, is heard. Measures should have been taken so that the poorest and most marginalized population of Egypt has the opportunity and the information to cast a well-informed ballot. Now that the first round of presidential elections has passed, if the poorest Egyptians hadn't had the opportunity to cast an educated vote, procedures must be taken to make sure the run-off vote between Mr. Mohamed Morsi and the soon to be decided second candidate is more egalitarian, with members of every class, rich or poor, participating. Otherwise, Egypt’s fledgling road to democracy will be doomed before it starts.

The New York Times recently reported that lawlessness is the most salient issue of Egypt's presidential campaign. Many of the Zabaleen we spoke with parroted individuals like the recently quoted Mr. Mohamed Ibrahim Yousseff, 63, (Kirpatrick, NY Times, May 22, 2011) who pines for the perceived security of the Mubarak era. The West can't allow lawlessness and disorder to foster nostalgia of dictatorship within the Egyptian poor. And to prevent this, measures need to be created for the needs of the silenced voices to be heard and their votes to be counted.

Not everyone has a Maan Alhasbane to facilitate communication. But we are all, after all, Khaled Said.

[1] Repeatedly we were told the story of how the Baltagiya, what they called the Muslim gangs, invaded the Zabaleen community about a month after the revolution began. Flanked by the Egyptian army (which the Zabaleen realized too late had not come to intervene and protect them, but stand back and do nothing), they killed 11 members of their community. They surrounded the compound and prevented members of the community from leaving, and no one could work for several days.