Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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So far the figures I have presented have been literary: novelists, poets or short story writers. Peter Mansfield, whom I come to now, is a journalist, a political writer. But that is not how he began his career. Having finished his studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he joined the British Foreign Service in 1955. He was sent to learn Arabic at the Middle East Centre of Arabic studies in Lebanon. He resigned from the Foreign Service over the Suez Affair in 1956, but he remained in Lebanon until 1962, working as a political and economic journalist.

From 1959 to 1961 he edited the Middle East forum and from 1961 to 1967 he was Middle East correspondent, shuttling between Beirut and Cairo with occasional visits to other Arab countries.

It was at this time that I got to know Peter Mansfield; our friendship has continued until the present. I was always very impressed by his honesty in reporting events and the sympathy he showed for the new Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. Apart from a number of books he has published on Egypt and the Arabs -- in fact one of these books is called The Arabs -- he has been supervising the publication Who's Who in the Middle East.

Peter Mansfield was certainly one of the first westerners to observe and record the changes brought to Egypt by the 1952 Revolution, which he was enthusiastic about. This enthusiasm comes out clearly in his book Nasser's Egypt, a Penguin published in 1965 with many updated editions since.

For a hundred years under khedives and kings, Egypt was little more than a corrupt satellite revolving around Turkey, France and Britain. But under Nasser, as Mansfield thought, Egypt constituted a magnet for the Arab World, a force in African affairs, and an forceful voice in international business.

Nasser's Egypt is the result of many years of study and it can be regarded as an analysis, fair and accurate, of the situation in Egypt before and after the Revolution. Going through the book, one can easily realise where the writer's sympathies lie.

Here as elsewhere in his writings, Mansfield reflects real understanding of the psychology of Egyptians. Egyptian revolutionaries do not have to be classified as Marxists, he says, for the history of Egypt provides their driving force and their goal. For what the young officers who presided over the Revolution wanted most of all was to make up for 2,500 years in which Egyptian history was shaped by foreigners.

I do not intend to summarise or criticise this book; I just want to show Peter Mansfield's attitude towards Egypt as reflected in this book and dozens of articles he had written about the country. His sympathetic feelings for Egypt are reflected in a chapter entitled "The land and the Fellah". It opens with a quotation from Father Arios's well known The Fellaheen of Egypt :

"Here man belongs to the land, it is not the land that belongs to him."

Mansfield goes on to describe the land, the valley and the Delta of the Lower Nile, the serene palm trees, the brilliant green against the chocolate earth and a soft blue sky, the somnolent buffaloes cooling themselves in the canals and the overwhelming impression of ancient fertility carefully and lovingly tended. But the civilised beauty of the Egyptian countryside, as the author calls it, should not conceal the fact that most of the people who inhabit it are poor.

The creators of Egypt's wealth, the fellahin, have been oppressed, neglected and despised for so long that it was not surprising that one of the first acts of the Revolution was Agrarian Reform: the appropriation of large estates and their redistribution among the fellaheen, the creation of cooperative societies to assist the new small holders by supplying tested seeds as well as modern machinery which they could not acquire themselves, the combined units with doctors and agricultural experts attached, and finally the building of the High Dam.

Mansfield discusses the pros and cons of these policies and comes to this conclusion: "And if the central problem of the 20th century is to prevent the widening of the gap between the developed and the underdeveloped nations, the effort of Egypt against formidable obstacles are deserving sympathy.