The Fayoum cartoons

George Bahgory paints a smile while he and his colleagues open the first Egyptian museum for caricature

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I have been a cartoon artist for nearly half a century, and I have often dreamt of there being a cartoon museum in my country. It was a dream that, most of the time, I managed to banish from my thoughts, since I knew how hard it would be.

Working in my studio one day, I am interrupted by Mohamed Abla, my friend of many years. He comes in, plumps himself down in front of one of my paintings, and starts waving his hands about, a sign that he has a piece of news. "Every time I sold a painting I bought a brick," he states.

The bricks now live in Fayoum, assembled in the shape of a rustic villa. He wants me to go and visit, or exhibit, sometime soon, in a festival or something. I am getting interested. "When?" I ask.

The date he mentions is the first of March. "I am grateful that it won't take place on the first of April, otherwise it would just have been a lie," I commented, joking of course.

Not this time. Abla intends to set up Egypt's first cartoon museum in Fayoum. He has donated the building, and the architect Adel Fahmi has designed it: cupola, greenery, and exhibition rooms, all in the countryside style that Egyptian artists have developed in the picturesque lake-side village of Tunis.

"Come, it'll be fun. A festival in the middle of nature, it cannot get any better." I stare at Abla's oversized moustache, still trying to take in the incredible news. Abla's mentor, Zohdi, tried repeatedly from 1964 to 1984 to set up a cartoon museum and failed, not least because the government disapproved of his political views.

"You're perhaps the most important cartoonist today, not just because you're the best, but because you're the last left standing. The rest of the leading generation are all dead: Zohdi, Salah Jahin, Salah El-Leithi, Bahgat, Nagi El-Ali, Gamal Kamel, Hassan Fouad, Abul Aynein, Abdel-Samie,

and Sarukhan," Abla is coaxing me with an insinuation of mortality.

The museum will have 14,000 cartoons by prominent cartoonists from Egypt's first batch of cartoon greats such as Sarukhan, Rakha, Abdel-Samie and Zohdi, to my generation, which includes Ihab, Hakem, Hegazi, Salah Jahin, Bahgat, Ragaei, Salah El-Leithi and El-Labbad, to a third generation including Gomaa, Ezz El-Arab, Raouf, Mohsen, Diyab, Sherif, Nagi, Mohamed Effat, Sami Amin and Mustafa Hussein.

A few days later I found myself in a chartered bus travelling to Fayoum. On the same bus are some of our best cartoon talents: Samir Abdel-Ghani, Ahmed Abdel-Naim, Amr Selim, Sami Amin, Kamal, Samir Abdel-Khaleq, Batrawi, Makhluf, Hani Abdallah, Said Abul-Aynein, Hamdi, Said Badawi and Talaat. And we finally have women cartoonists: Doaa El-Adl, Nesma and Amina.

It was announced on inauguration day that the museum is to hold an annual contest for the best cartoon portrait.