Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Going through Wilton Wynn's book A Typewriter and a Dream memories of old times came back to me. Though Wynn came to Egypt in 1945, it was only in 1956 that I first met him. He was at that time the Cairo Bureau Chieg for the Associated Press (AP). I was then responsible for censoring cables by foreign correspondents covering the 1956 Suez War. It was what one might call blind censorship. Correspondents used to take their stories to Marconi, the company responsible for transmission to their respective newspapers. This system went on for some time until one of the London newspapers discovered that it was paying for words much more than the ones received and it lodged a complaint. I was convinced that we were more or less cheating them and I introduced open censorship.

The correspondent brought to me his or her cable and I would go through the text and suggest removal of passages classified information. This new approach had two advantages: it fostered mutual confidence, and on a personal level it gave me the chance of getting to know personally many foreign correspondents. This turned out to be an asset for me when I became head of the State Information Service. Indeed some of those foreign journalists, including Wynn, became friends.

Wynn's book is more than a memoir, as it contains insightful analysis of the political situation in Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen as well as in Italy and the Vatican. In this column I shall concentrate on Egypt and his take on both presidents Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat.

"The Search for Identity" is the subtitle of his section about president Nasser. "Nasser of Egypt," writes Wynn, "was the giant-killing hero who in the Arab eyes challenged the once, mighty Western imperialists and struck terror into the hearts of the Israelis. Personally, Wynn "had become mesmerized [...] by the Nasser drama." The encounter becomes more intense, Wynn goes on to say "when I came to know the man personally and to live much of the drama myself."

Wynn describes Nasser's powerful charisma that hypnotised the entire Arab world and admires his modesty: "As a president of Egypt, he had the right to move into one of Farouk's former royal palaces, but he stayed in his old house because 'my children would run up and down the corridors and break all those rare art pieces, and I would have to pay for them.'"

To write a book about Nasser, Wynn used to meet him often and once he needled him with questions about the lack of democratic freedom in Egypt: "He answered frankly and without any show of irritation. 'It's true' answered Nasser 'that we do not have democracy in the Western sense, that is a luxury we can't afford at the present stage of our development. Yes, we make a lot of mistakes, we behave emotionally rather than rationally. But, you must remember that we Egyptians have lived for centuries under foreign rule and that has given us a feeling of humiliation.'"

The author describes the popularity of Nasser. "All over the Arab world, huge photos of Nasser were plastered on the walls of buildings up and down the streets of Tangiers, Tunis, Beirut and Bahrain." Whenever a speech by Nasser was broadcast on radio, the entire Arab world would fall silent and stand still as the masses gathered around radio sets in cafés, schools and mosques.

Under the title of "The Death of a Dream", Wynn describes people's reaction to Nasser's death. There were outpouring of grief without historical precedent, there were symbolic funerals in cities all over the Arab world and mourning Arabs swarmed into Cairo for the actual funeral. He says if Nasser on earth was a failure by the standards of this world, in the sky, he was a demi-god, the epic hero who had given them a dream.

As for Wynn's chapter on Sadat entitled "The Saga of Anwar Sadat" I shall deal with this next week.