Enid Hill:
A circuitous route to Cairo, political science and the lawMerry-go-round
photo: Randa Shaath
There are some people whose names one just knows. Not literary or political celebrities or movie stars, but people who have taught or been associated with one's friends, or have a published opinion on this or that, or are the colleague of someone or other. I had heard of Enid Hill shortly after I arrived in Cairo in the mid to late-1970s and knew her by sight, but I did not really become aware of her until towards the end of my first Egyptian summer. I was lying on the beach at Agami with a friend. To the left and right of us, as we lay on the beach, were the usual summer throngs. But behind us was the iced-cake backdrop of the (then) gleaming Agami Palace Hotel where we were staying, and we lay, secluded and undisturbed, on its private beach.
It was some time before my friend, who happened to be member of the same faculty at the American University in Cairo (AUC) where Enid Hill was a professor in the political science department, casually remarked that Hill's husband owned the hotel. I thought this was very romantic. What a different thing, especially for a professor.
But Hill is an unusual woman. Her career did not follow the gentle upward slope of many American academics; it was, rather, more of a rock climb with just a chink in an otherwise blocked forward view. For a vivacious single parent who was once a stage-struck teenager the view back over her life must be doubly rewarding.
Hill is not a born-and-raised American. She was born in Vancouver to an English father and American mother, and began life as a Canadian. She dropped Canadian nationality after living in the United States for a number of years. She chose to be American. "I will never go back to Canada to live," she says. "My strongest childhood memories are of long winters and being cold all the time."
After the Agami incident I brushed shoulders with Hill over the years but never had the opportunity to talk to her, even though a long-term house guest of ours visited her daughter, Jennifer, regularly. But the mid-1990s found us both in Hong Kong: I was working on a Hong Kong newspaper while Hill was visiting Jennifer who by then was living there with her husband and two children. That year John Rodenbeck, AUC's now emeritus professor of English and comparative literature, and his wife Buffy came out to visit Time magazine correspondent William Dowell, former bureau chief in Cairo and now posted there with his wife Michèle. Hill was on sabbatical from AUC, and the Rodenbecks' holiday was turned into a Cairo get-together.
Hill stayed in Hong Kong for six months and we saw each other often, meeting for lunch or walks around the city. She enjoyed Hong Kong and the tempo seemed to suit her. She appeared to have forgotten Cairo and threw herself into learning about Asia, making the most of her time there and taking every chance to travel. She visited Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines -- a country which, with Singapore, she already knew well as her daughter had lived in both places. She had also been to China twice before on AUC student trips.
We visited Vietnam together: Hanoi and the former Saigon. Hill insisted that we also see the Mekong River. Our trip together to Vietnam had slightly different motivations -- Hill was intent on learning about its political economy while I had worked for some years in a camp for Vietnamese "boat people" -- but we were both overwhelmed by the people and country. In Hanoi we took the human-drawn rickshaws and found a French restaurant with real French wine. We visited temples and folklore shows, and went to a piano bar in Hanoi and the zoo in Saigon. We went shopping (Hill bought books, at least to the extent that there were some in English about Vietnam). She interviewed an American in charge of courses for Vietnamese.
On our visit to the Mekong we took a motorboat trip, where we were offered dishes of pineapple and banana and shown the elaborate preparations for the expected upsurge in tourism, all of which made it hard to relate to the horror of one of the worst of colonial-inspired wars. On our return stopover in Bangkok, however, I couldn't shift Hill from the hotel poolside and had to pay a solitary visit to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. Swimming is exercise and relaxation for Hill, and she makes time for it in her busy Cairo schedule, usually at weekends. Her life is so crowded that I was even a little surprised when she agreed to meet so I could fill in some gaps in my narrative.
Hill is a collector of books. Almost every available wall space in her Zamalek apartment is covered with volumes, all shelved according to subject for easy reference. What parts of the wall are not masked by books are hidden behind the artwork of Anna Boghiguian, of whose paintings Hill has a significant collection.
The apartment is tidy and uncluttered, rather in keeping with Hill herself who is always carefully dressed but dislikes jewellery. (Her luxuriant thick hair, the envy of so many, she herself dismisses as an unruly aggravation). The room which looks most used is the office, where Hill starts work early in the morning and, unless she is at her office at AUC or spending time with friends, carries on late into the evening.
Hill entertains often, doing her shopping after she returns from the university and producing dinner for eight in the time it takes most people to draw up a menu. She takes food and wine seriously, especially when they are French -- she has a house in Carcassonne -- and she is a marvellous cook, taking pleasure not just in preparing dishes but in feeding people. This is not put on for show. Watching her with her grandchildren and step-grandchildren one observes that her nurturing side is deep rooted. This quietly efficient domesticity was acquired through years of juggling a job, university courses and being a single parent -- after finishing with her first marriage Hill pursued a Master's degree in Chicago while working as a legal secretary and amusing Jennifer after nursery school and on weekends.
Hill's political science career came about almost by accident, and after a chequered education. After spending her first years in Vancouver she stayed with her grandparents in Maryland and there attended first grade. By then her parents had moved to Toronto where Hill then attended a girls' school, St Clements, staying until she was 17 when she went to the University of New Hampshire.
"That was a big mistake. It wasn't my idea of a university at all," Hill says. She gave it three years but left shortly before completing her English literature degree. She worked during the summer at a summer resort, saving enough money to travel to Paris. She stayed there for eight months, studying French at the Alliance Française and the Sorbonne and working as a baby sitter in return for accommodation. She loved Paris and was having the time of her life. But she needed a degree so she returned to America, looked through university catalogues and found herself a place at George Washington University where she did a BA in speech and drama, using credits transferred from her interrupted English course in New Hampshire and her diploma from the Sorbonne.
When working as a legal secretary in Chicago she considered going to law school, "but the work of the lawyers I worked for was really quite boring." Then she discovered that the University of Chicago had just started Masters degree courses at night in their downtown centre -- in literature, history and political science.
"English literature was the logical choice but that degree required that two courses be taken at Chicago's main campus, which meant daytime rather than evenings. I had to work days. History required two 'areas' for the Masters, but both were American history. I was not interested in American history. So I did political science, which proved to be a fortuitous choice."
Hill took a course with Leo Strauss and he agreed to supervise her MA thesis. The MA led to teaching posts at the University of Illinois, in one of the Chicago junior colleges, and at Roosevelt University. "At one point I was teaching 15 hours at one and six hours at the other."
This meant she had enough money to take herself and Jennifer to Europe the following summer. She bought a car and they went touring in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. One day she saw an advertisement in the Herald Tribune for teaching jobs with the University of Maryland Overseas Programme in Spain. So she applied, put Jennifer in a Swiss boarding school and moved to Seville to teach American air base personnel about American government. The post was classified part time but she taught 18 hours a week and stayed only four months.
"Maryland University overseas had a policy then not to hire women on a permanent contract so there obviously was no future there," Hill says.
When she was asked to spend the winter term in Northern Germany she refused and returned to America.
Back in Chicago she found a job in the legal counsel's office of the University of Chicago and worked on her PhD dissertation, which she also did with Leo Strauss. A year later she was working at the West Side branch of the South Side Chicago Teachers' College where she taught "all sorts of things: social studies methods, geography, history". The second year she was offered the one political science position in the History department when its incumbent retired.
After two years at the college she had completed her doctorate from the University of Chicago and was ready to enter the serious job market. She was determined to go overseas.
"The choices at first were New Zealand and Ethiopia. Then along came an announcement of a job at the American University in Cairo in my preferred fields, political theory and comparative European governments."
Hill applied but received no response so she went on interviewing. Although she was offered positions the universities that wanted her were all in the heartlands of rural America, so she did not accept. "Then out of the blue I was contacted by AUC's New York office saying that then President Tom Bartlett would be passing through Chicago the next day and would like to interview me."
She met him for dinner, he interviewed her, told her about AUC and offered her a contract which she enthusiastically accepted. "That was on 1 May 1967. I remember because before I left the house to meet President Bartlett the radio had been talking about the large military May-day parade in Cairo. When I mentioned it to him he said, oh yes, they always have a big military parade on 1 May. It's very impressive."
That particular display of military hardware was shortly to prove significant. Even after war broke out Hill continued to prepare to leave for Egypt. She was finally allowed to enter Egypt in January 1968, two weeks before the beginning of the second semester. While waiting for the semester to begin she joined a Nile cruise especially arranged for AUC faculty members. That cruise week to Luxor and Aswan, including train fares, cost her LE27.
"I felt at home in Egypt from the beginning," she says. "It seemed to be a mixture of France and Spain, both places I fancied living in." The Belle Époque architecture in Cairo reminded her of Paris, and other parts of Egypt seemed to have some of the ambiance of southern Spain.
Hill lived in Maadi for a year but eventually settled in a flat in Youssef Al-Guindi Street. Jennifer left her Swiss school and became a boarder at the Schultz School in Alexandria, spending weekends and holidays with her mother at the Agami Palace. "We used to walk on the beach with the dog," Hill says.
As for the hotel, she tried to make changes but soon gave up. "It worked in spite of itself. If you tried to make it work some other way it didn't happen."
Changes in Agami meant the hotel had some of its best seasons. "After the '73 War when the Sumed pipeline was built we had the welders and other workmen who were brought in to construct the oil tanks at Sidi Kreir staying at the Agami Palace. They were of 21 different nationalities. It was very good for the hotel because that meant for two years the hotel was working year round."
After 14 years of living downtown Hill moved to Garden City and then to Zamalek. Jennifer, who had returned to America and was then working for Motorola, came with her two children to stay with her mother again in Cairo but only briefly as she was soon to move permanently overseas herself, first to the Philippines, then to Singapore. For the last 10 years she has been in Hong Kong. But Jennifer continues to have fond memories of Cairo.
"Egypt is a great place for teenagers," Hill says. "There are a lot of fun things for them to do. In Jenny's day they all went to Agami. Now they go to Sharm El-Sheikh."
Since she first became interested in Egyptian law and the courts in Egypt Hill has been collecting published legal material. She has several historical editions from secondhand bookshops. She has a nearly complete set of the Bulletins of the mixed courts. She has written extensively about Egyptian law and in particular about the courts, with her first book, Mahkama! Studies in the Egyptian Legal System, having become a basic reference for English speakers who want an introduction to the Egyptian legal system. Her book on Sanhuri, Al-Sanhuri and Islamic Law, led to her being asked to write his entry in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. A manuscript about the laws of Infitah is due for publication in January.
Hill also writes on political economy. In 2001 she took a year's sabbatical which she spent at University College, London, where she registered for an LLM in Law, with courses in jurisprudence and European law. Her main interest now is to start a graduate programme in international and comparative law for graduates of Egyptian law schools. She is currently coordinating two law programmes in the political science department: the undergraduate specialisation in public and international law, and the Master's degree in International Human Rights Law.
"The planned LLM degree in international commercial and comparative law now has start-up funding and we should be able to get it up and running shortly," she says. "Egypt needs it. No Egyptian you talk to fails to recognise the need for such a programme. As part of the global economy Egypt will be at a severe disadvantage if it doesn't have lawyers with expertise who can compete internationally."
The political science department's MA programme in International Human Rights Law, whose establishment Hill masterminded, has been very successful. Now in its third year it has 40 students working for a degree.
Will Hill herself be taking any more degrees?
She laughs. "I shouldn't think so."
Hill looks back with satisfaction on her record as chair of the political science department, a post she held for seven of the past 13 years. "When I first became chair in 1990 there were six faculty members," she says. "But at the last faculty meeting there were 19 full time faculty sitting around the table."
Though no longer chair, she is proud of her contribution to the department. She has also noticed changes in the students. "The students have changed," she says. "There is much more openness politically, and this has even increased in the last couple of years. A large number now want to do papers on the Emergency Law. Quite a change."
Hill travels frequently: to conferences, to visit her daughter and her family in Hong Kong, and to France where 10 years ago she bought an old village house in Carcassonne. It has taken almost all that time to restore it -- an experience she might have grown accustomed to after living in Egypt.
"It's incredible," Hill says. "You go there in summer, and in the summer people stop working as they are all on holiday or preparing to go on holiday. So it's taken years to get things done."
Her life there easily makes the hassle worthwhile. Her close Cairene friends the Rodenbecks live a little way up the mountain. "The place is full of vineyards, full of history. It's gorgeous country. Albigensian country, Cathar castles -- the biggest restored castle in Europe is at Carcassonne. The castle is for tourists but people live and work there. It's a fantastic place for grandchildren. There's even a Victorian era Mary Poppins merry-go-round."
Hill is so busy with the law programmes and other work at AUC that the idea of her retiring to settle in France seems far-fetched. Her life has been full of unexpected twists and turns. For now, though, she is not planning to make any changes.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 11 - 17 December 2003 (Issue No. 668)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/668/profile.htm