Profile: Not by the book
When the exotic becomes the everyday
Luxor was the beginning. Karnak, its columns dramatically outlined against the azure sky, the Luxor Temple, the West Bank, the Theban necropolis, Al-Deir Al-Bahri... the Valley of the Kings.
"Sakkara and the Giza Plateau were next."
She pauses, playing with her charming African-inspired necklace. It is as if her mind is adrift on the Nile... Philae.
"Aswan was much later, even though it is the most romantic place of all."
She takes a deep breath and sighs. Her recollections provide beautiful snapshots of different aspects of the most majestic civilisation of antiquity.
Chance brought her to Egypt at a high point in the country's long history. Egypt was fast changing, the old feudal country was being swept away to be replaced by a new breed of professionals and technocrats, among whom was her husband, Nabeeh Kamil.
The optimism that seized Egyptian society after the 1952 July Revolution, agrarian and land reforms, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the subsequent repulsion of the British, French and Israeli aggression in 1956 was in full swing.
Kamil moved to Egypt in 1956 as the young bride of an Egyptian Copt at the precise moment most foreign residents were leaving the country. Moreover, there were relatively few tourists visiting Egypt.
The absence of tourists meant that a few privileged people like Kamil were able to wander virtually alone among the splendid monuments and the great temples.
Kamil's circle of friends included some of the most distinguished Egyptologists at the time. They were Egyptians who welcomed the arrival of a young English language native speaker to edit their work. She, in turn, was awestruck by their knowledge and professionalism. She felt especially privileged working with and learning from the country's most dedicated Egyptologists. These men nurtured Kamil's archaeological interest in Egypt.
Together they explored the reaches of the River Nile from Cairo to Aswan and beyond.
"I've been on top of Table Mountain, South Africa, I've climbed the summit of Sinai's Saint Catherine's, Jebel Shoeib, Egypt's highest mountain, and the foothills of Kilimanjaro. But of all Africa's impressive localities the one which to me is the most seductive and alluring is the Nile Valley," she says with a wicked twinkle in her eye.
Jill Kamil is a woman with a story to tell. She has told it many times to many people. She was born and bred in the breathtakingly beautiful landscape of Kenya's White Highlands. Her idyllic childhood in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, was spent criss-crossing its leafy lanes.
At 13 Kamil left Kenya for South Africa where she attended a boarding school. After she completed her secondary education she enrolled at the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg.
Her memories are of a child effusive and happy in her insular African idyll.
As a young woman she fell in love with an Egyptian in England. He was 18 years her senior. He brought her to Egypt and she fell in love with the country. She has lived in Egypt ever since. "I cannot imagine living anywhere else."
It has been quite a journey for Kamil, this passage from the playing fields of Kenya's White Highlands.
"My husband charmed me. He introduced me to Egypt and I fell in love with the country and its people. It was easy for me to fall in love with Egypt. The warmth of the sunshine, the cheerfulness of the people. I was in Africa again."
Evoking the wintry claustrophobia of a sun-starved Kenyan white in the grey and dreary London of the 1950s, Kamil stresses how uncomfortable she felt in England.
"I never liked England. It was cold and the people were unfriendly." A daughter of colonial Africa, its laid back lifestyle still appeals to her.
"I thought I was English. My father spoke of England as home," Kamil explains. But in England she felt like a foreigner. Her husband was godsend.
They met in London, where he was writing his doctoral thesis. Her husband's PhD thesis was entitled The National Characteristics of the Egyptians. He introduced her to Egyptian customs and traditions.
Intellectually Kamil says that she is indebted to Egypt -- to her late husband, his family and the group of Egyptologists she befriended in Egypt. Kamil's first introduction to Egyptian society was through her husband Nabeeh's family. A brother-in-law, Saad, was a lawyer, and another, Waheeb, an historian. Both Saad and Waheeb introduced her to the Coptic community of Egypt. Her husband's cousin Murad was a member of the delegation from the then German Democratic Republic sent to Cairo in 1959 to work on the Coptic Gnostic codices from Nag Hammadi and she was given access to his extensive library.
Outside the family circle her chief mentors were Abdel- Moneim Abu-Bakr, then dean of the faculty of Egyptology in Cairo University, and Labib Habachi, another distinguished Egyptologist. She was fortunate to find many friends in Egypt who shared her interest in Egyptology.
"All the people who have impressed me most, who have profoundly influenced my life have been Egyptians," she says.
Abu-Bakr instilled in her a deep appreciation for the monuments, the history, the dynasties and kingdoms. Kamil went on countless field trips and archaeological surveys with him.
"What inspired me most was work in progress -- be it excavation or restoration. I'm interested in digging through layers, through different strata to uncover and reveal what's hidden. And removing layers of murals to get the very earliest version, to discover what's hidden beneath it all."
"Labib Habachi taught me how to dig through the layers."
He also taught her to be patient, persevering, persistent. Habachi, formerly director of fieldwork of the then Egyptian Antiquities Department, taught her what to do at an archaeological site, how to excavate. By the time she met Habachi she was already published. For several years they met every Monday at his house in Heliopolis. He edited Kamil's books for historical accuracy.
For Kamil the labour of workers and specialists in the field -- and not the monuments as such -- provoked strong emotions. Kamil was terribly excited about the work of Egypt's well-known restorer of antiquities, Hag Ahmed Youssef, and his assembling the funerary barge of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu discovered by Kamal Mallakh in 1954. Kamil attended many seminars on Egyptology with Kent Weeks at the American University in Cairo.
"I was preoccupied with Luxor and then Saqqara," she explains. Habachi was her guide to Sakkara and the Giza Plateau. She marveled at the wonder of it all: the splendour of the magnificent palaces of Cairo, the Citadel, the mortuary temples and pyramids.
"The monuments in themselves, as impressive as they are, attract me less than the people at work on the dig, than the actual excavation or restoration of an ancient work of art or the piecing together of an object," she says.
The sight of professionals at work, making the past come alive, is often the strongest of the visual memories she holds dear. Kamil has always been fascinated by the sense of continuity between the past and the present in Egypt.
"During my early visits to the monasteries of Wadi Natron I registered surprise that educated monks offered exapertise in agricultural development, cattle rearing and medicine, and Labib Habachi pointed out that high priests in the House of Life in ancient temples served a similar function," Kamil explains.
Her husband appraised her of different aspects of contemporary society and the fundamental relationship between past and present.
Abu-Bakr was her first teacher and guiding light as far as Egyptology was concerned. "With Abu-Bakr I saw the monuments of Nubia before they were inundated. We knew that they were going to disappear."
The tour of the area now submerged under Lake Naser was the subject of a book she wrote later about Aswan and Nubia.
"What inspired me most was work in progress -- be it excavation or restoration.
Kamil dresses in earth-toned colours, warm browns, olive green, beige and cream. "I am interested in a decent appearance," she says. That, in her book, entails smart suits in coordinated colours. She is very fond of ethnic jewelry and scarves.
Beneath this easygoing exterior is a disciplined and hardworking researcher. "I am a compulsive note taker," she explains.
"I accumulated so much material and I mentioned to Abu-Bakr that I was thinking of writing a book. He laughed, I was taken aback and asked him why was he making fun of me. But he wasn't. He explained that he was laughing because scholars like himself were bogged down with too many facts. It was only a laywoman, like myself, who'd write books for laymen to read," she chuckles.
Kamil sees herself as African in spite of her colour. She is a daughter of the continent and does not feel at home in England, where she met her husband, nor in Canada or the United States were her son and daughter and their families live. Kamil remembers the day of her arrival in the country. She did not know what to expect.
"It was in October and I was told to expect cold weather and there was a heat wave," she muses.
Kamil has written extensively on the Copts of Egypt. Her latest book, Christianity in the Land of the Pharaohs, is about the Coptic Church and Coptic history, communities and traditions. But she will never forget the day she first officially became a member of the Coptic church.
"A beaming bearded priest led me towards the baptismal font in the Cathedral of Saint Mark the Evangelist in the Ezbekieh district of Cairo. I was seven months pregnant and about to become a member of the Coptic Orthodox Church."
The Kamil's civil wedding in Germany was not recognised by the Egyptian authorities and the couple were obliged to go through a second marriage ceremony upon arrival in Cairo. "Unable to produce the necessary proof of my Christian faith I agreed to be baptised according to Coptic tradition: total immersion."
Kamil's first taste of Egypt was actually in a flat in London. Her introduction to Egypt was something of an aesthetic affair. A compatriot played cupid.
"I shared a flat in London with a fellow Kenyan who wanted me to accompany her to hear a famous Egyptian musician and watch him being painted by an Egyptian artist."
Kamil was struck by the idea. For the first time in her life she was exposed to the lyrics and strains of Egyptian music. But what impressed her most was the huge easel of her husband-to-be Nabeeh Kamil who spent the evening painting the celebrated Egyptian singer, Mohamed Abdel- Wahab, playing his lute. Her ear has never quite attuned to Egyptian music, though, she confides.
The musical evening, a welcome diversion from her emotional dislocation in London, was a foretaste of the dusty, ancient land that so captivated Jill Kamil.
While Kamil was never enthused by Egyptian music she does love Egyptian food.
Kamil's first job in Egypt was to condense English literary classics for schoolchildren.
Her writing career developed with her interest in Egyptology.
Kamil's first archaeological tour was a chance experience. Her friend Abu-Bakr invited the Kamils to accompany him and his students on a tour of all the monuments of Luxor. Abu-Bakr wanted to take the Kamils' on a field trip to Luxor to introduce them to the monuments, the temples and wall reliefs. Her first reaction was to decline, because of her daughter Tamara.
"Timmy was a toddler," Kamil says. She was being carried around by Abu-Bakr's students and was just about talking at the time. In a Theban necropolis tomb some students were whispering, much to the annoyance of Tamara who yelled, "Be quiet. Abu-Bakr is talking." Abu-Bakr beckoned and took Tamara in his arms. She looked as pleased as Punch.
I remember Tamara and Ricky from my schooldays when we were all at Victoria College, Maadi. I remember Jill Kamil silhouetted against the refrigerator with a note book and papers in her hands. We often visited Ricky and Jill served us refreshments, invariably cheese and cucumber sandwiches. Little did I suspect she and I would be colleagues at Al-Ahram Weekly three decades later.
It was at Al-Ahram Weekly that she began working again with an old family friend, Mursi Saad El-Din. They worked together on the Afro-Asian Writers publication Lotus, which came out in three languages -- Arabic, English and French.
"I wake up enthusiastic, I'm a morning person," Kamil says. "I've got papers all over the place. I work on my manuscript at home."
Her study contains two computers and printers clustered with papers. In the evenings she'll often pick up a history book, even one she has read many times before. "I'll happily go through it again," she says.
Her book, The Ancient Egyptians, is today considered a classic. Kamil is prolific, and writes regularly for Al-Ahram Weekly and is the paper's archaeology and heritage page editor. Kamil has written extensively for Archaeology Magazine, Cairo Today, the forerunner of Egypt Today, and Middle East Times.
Kamil's guide series include Upper Egypt and Nubia, Sakkara and Memphis, and Luxor, reprinted in 1983, 86 and 96. Kamil was also a contributor to the Inside Guides series Egypt 1988 and The Nile 1992.
"My books are still in print, a remarkable feat in this day and age," Kamil points out.
She should be given credit for being at home in two worlds at once: west and east, past and present. "This is who I am ..."
Recommend this page
Send a letter to the Editor
Printer-friendly
