While encyclopedias claim the Nile is the longest river in the world, the world has generally seen it as stretching only from the delta above Cairo north to the Aswan High Dam – or maybe a little longer, extending to Khartoum in Sudan. The plays of Shakespeare and the histories written by the Romans and Greeks made the Nile synonymous with Egypt.
That’s the Nile I learned about in books and movies.
The political map of Africa was pretty much drawn by Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. When most of these colonial forces pulled out in the mid-1960s, they left territories defined by coastlines and rivers or lines of latitude and longitude.
From the perspective of the Brits, who designed a lot of the politics and economics of modern Egypt, it made all the sense in the world that the 1929 Nile Water Agreement granted Egypt almost all of the Nile. They allocated a much smaller portion of the Nile to Sudan, where they also had a pretty big footprint. This was only fair, reasoned the Brits. After all, Egypt and Sudan were desert nations, and the people needed the Nile in order to survive.
Clearly, the view of the planners of Egypt’s dynamic future in the Nile Basin didn’t stretch very far upstream. They ignored or avoided the simple fact that this water flowed north from places in the sub-Saharan continent where there were mountains and forest and high rainfall. They ignored the fact that before its waters ever reached Khartoum, the Nile traveled under other names, like Abay and Kagera.
The Europeans’ map of the Nile failed to take into account where the water really came from, who used it, who needed it… They failed to realize that the Nile actually flows in three colors: White, Blue and muddy.
The White Nile rises in the Ruwenzori Mountains to the far south in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s what gave the Nile legitimacy as the longest of rivers. Then, there’s the Blue Nile that thunders down from the highlands of Ethiopia and provides most of the water that ends up in the reservoirs of Sudan and Egypt.
A traditional Egyptian "Felucca" boat sails on the Nile river in the southern Egyptian city of Aswan about 900 km south of Cairo (Reuters image).
By the time the White and Blue join at Khartoum, they are rich in the sediment of a quarter of Africa. They are muddy.
Today, like Egypt and Sudan, these upstream countries have begun to develop industries and big populations that demand more of everything, including water. Hence, the Nile Basin Initiative, comprised of the nine countries that share the shorelines of this great river and its tributaries. They have joined together to rethink the Nile and its benefits, to discuss revised water rights, to recognize the sources of the Nile and to examine new technologies, new human needs and critical environmental conditions.
The decisions they make in the coming years will be difficult. For many decades, experts have estimated that Egypt has used about 55.5 million cubic feet of water, or about 85% of the Nile’s total flow. These numbers are probably only crude estimates, as the world’s longest river embraces ten countries, counting newly-independent South Sudan. That makes up a sizeable chunk of Africa. Not the experts have to recognize that about 85% of the waters of the Nile came from the Blue Nile, the watershed’s major tributary in the highlands of Ethiopia. The figures clearly do not add up.
The Nile Basin Initiative is a test of whether Africans can re-imagine the entire Nile, including all of its tributaries, vast Lake Victoria, the great Sudd wetland in South Sudan and the waters of the Abay that have cut great Ethiopian canyons on the way to Egypt.
The basin neighbors could undo the Nile – or work together to make better use of it. Unlike the European powers that drew the earlier African map, these governments won’t be able to walk away from any problems they might create.
Also, check out David Arnold’s analysis Egypt’s New Democrats Ready to Defend Nile
David Arnold
David Arnold coordinates the Syria Witness project at Middle East Voices and reports on Middle East and North Africa affairs for both Voice of America and MEV. The Syria Witness project publishes on-the-ground citizen reporting, giving Syrians the opportunity to offer to a global audience their first-person narratives of life on the streets of their war-torn country.