Behind the Correspondent's Curtain
95
girls. One of them, short and plump, with gold earrings dangling from pierced lobes, read a paper on "Debts of a Dead
Man." Class was over at noon.
"Would you like to meet any of the professors?" Gamal
asked me. I said no. I wanted to give the police no reason to
report that an American was agitating among them. Gamal
left me for a while to seek a friend, and I found myself surrounded by some of the students—all male—who spoke English. I told them at the outset that I would not. answer questions. I was a "guest of your government," and it would not
be proper for me to make any comments.
"It's not a government, it's a dictatorship," one of the boys
shot back. If I wanted proof, he said, in the 1945 elections,
the Saadist Party, then in power, had so terrorized the opposition, the Wafdist Party—which stood for a progressive type
of Egyptian nationalism—that the latter had refused to participate. The Saadists had been easily re-elected. "The election
was a joke. The police had orders to beat anyone suspected of
wanting to vote against the regime. You can get anybody
killed or elected here," he said bitterly. "All you need is to
have money and to know the right officials."
This seemed bold talk to me, but I found the students with
whom I spoke, unlike the generally lethargic populace, to be
alert and socially conscious. They were ashamed of the backwardness of their country, resentful at continued British occupation and intrigues, hateful of wealthy landowners who
perpetuated the feudal system, and they were constantly demanding drastic social reforms.
"We've just had another cholera epidemic," one of them
said angrily. ''More than ten thousand died. Some of your
American serum saved the rest, for which we thank you. They
gave a banquet for the minister of health because so few had
died. That jahsh—donkey—said that he still doesn't know
how the epidemic began. We can tell him. It began in our
own filthy cities."
"We want you to know the truth." This speaker was a well-