The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths

The plural nouns of the subtitle sum up the book's thesis, namely that "The Nile River is one water system, but it is not a homogenous geographical, climatic, or ecological unit." More specifically, "no single culture has ever managed to disseminate itself throughout the entire Nile Basin." For a river that traverses over 4,000 miles and a huge variety of peoples, this statement may not sound surprising, but it is so. A long parade of interpreters ("builders of ancient civilizations, disseminators of monotheistic religions, imperial conquerors, local modern nationalists, revolutionary visionaries, missionaries, scientists, distant romantic admirers, Orientalist observers, and contemporary advocates of Afrocentrism") have tried, all in vain, to create "one Nile, one reality, one legend." In so doing, the editors hold, these render this great region "one-dimensional."

The Nile's interest lies in the details showing this not to be so. Perhaps the single most important obstacle to unity was the so-called Nubian Dam, meaning not a physical structure but the inability of the Muslim conquerors of Egypt for over a millennium to defeat the Christian Nubians to their south (they breached the dam only in the 1820s). This permitted the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia to survive and very much slowed the advance of Islam into Africa, with huge consequences for that continent.

One particular gives a sense of the Nile River's huge diversity: in contrast to Egyptians, who since antiquity have universally expressed gratitude bordering on reverence to the waters that make their habitation possible, Bairu Tafla reports that Ethiopians have of late come to see the same river, for converse reasons, as a traitor that steals over a half-million tons of fertile soil, cuts deep into the earth and obstructs communications, and then dumps water uselessly in a distant land or in the Mediterranean Sea, leaving Ethiopians to die of thirst.

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