Whenever I visit an African country I am always struck by the great admiration and prestige that Egypt still has in the hearts of African peoples, despite the many years we have ignored the African dimension of our foreign relations. I have just returned from Senegal where I was awarded the African Yasser Arafat Grand Prize for Peace and Freedom by the Association of Senegalese Writers (AES). This was the first edition of the award, which was established by the AES with official support from the Senegalese government and the International Yasser Arafat Foundation. The visit afforded me an excellent opportunity to reacquaint myself with the strong emotional bonds that link the Senegalese peoples to Egypt and the Arabs. AES President Alioune Badara Bèye told me that his association decided to name the award after Yasser Arafat because he was one of the most important symbols of the national struggle in the Third World and had dedicated his life to the realisation of his people's aspirations for freedom and peace. Bèye's remarks contrast starkly with the negative image of Arafat that Israel had been trying to disseminate for decades. After years of labelling him a terrorist, Israeli propaganda portrayed him as insincere in his desire for peace and, indeed, as the main obstacle to a peace agreement. Although it has been 13 years since that alleged obstacle has been removed, Israel has yet to concede to any of numerous international resolutions in order to bring peace within reach. On the subject of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, he has such a strong presence in the hearts and minds of the Senegalese that one might think that they had not learned of his death nearly half a century ago. They regard him as one of the greatest national liberation leaders in the 20th century. Often, they will remind you of the special relationship between Nasser and late Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor. On a previous visit to Senegal, I visited Senghor's home, which had been converted to a museum. The director of the museum explained to me that Senghor loved to collect art works as souvenirs from his favourite countries that he visited. At one point, I came across a lovely painting of an Egyptian woman, but the painting was unlabelled. The director did not know why this was the case, but she believed it was one of the art works that the president acquired as a keepsake during one of his visits abroad. I told her that the subject of the painting was a young rural Egyptian woman and that the work itself was by the great Egyptian artist Ahmed Al-Rashidi, a member of the 1960s generation of Egyptian artists. She thanked me for the information and said that she would immediately print up a label for the painting. In fact, admiration and esteem for Egypt is a common denominator among all African countries. While in Dakar, I met my friend, the Cameroon poet Jean Claude Awono who, whenever I see him, I hail as “Abu Egypt” because he had named his now nine-year-old daughter “Egypt”. I also met the novelist Amal Djaïli Amadou — also from Cameroon — who told me that her mother was Egyptian from Cairo's Boulaq Al-Dakrour district. Incidentally, Senegal has one of the largest foreign student missions at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Anyone truly interested in Egyptian-African relations should read some of the works by the Senegalese intellectual giant, writer, historian, anthropologist and physicist Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986), who devoted his life to the study of the origins of the human race. A prolific scholar, he published numerous works, many of which focus on Egypt and establish that ancient Egyptian civilisation was a quintessentially African one. His seminal, Nations nègres et culture: de l'antiquité nègre-égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l'Afrique noire d'aujourd'hui (Negro nations and culture: From negroid-Egyptian antiquity to the cultural problems of black Africa today, published 1973) is regarded as the foremost authoritative work on the subject. Diop is to Senegalese culture what Gamal Hamdan is to Egyptian culture. When he first began to espouse his theories on the origins of race and civilisation, in 1954, they encountered great resistance in the West. The West was determined to draw a line between North Arica and the rest of the continent, towards which end it disseminated the notion that the Arabs had been slave traders, even though Western nations were the largest users of slave labour in order to build their colonial empires. The 1950s was the period of the great surge in the African liberation movement, in which the Egyptian revolution played a pioneering role and confirmed the ancient historic ties that bind the peoples of Africa. Western studies done decades after Diop established that Africa was the place from which all human beings originate, not just the ancient Egyptians. Sadly, we in Egypt have yet to avail ourselves of the fruit of Diop's work. Our relations with Africa are confined to the political sphere and rise and fall in accordance with political fluctuations from one era to the next. We have not tried hard enough to develop our relations at the cultural level, which have a permanence that is largely immune to political vicissitudes. Egyptian Ambassador Mustafa Al-Qouni was very enthusiastic about my suggestion that Egypt host Senegal as a guest of honour in the forthcoming Cairo International Book Fair and that Egypt be hosted in the Dakar Book Fair. My suggestion was also warmly welcomed by Senegalese cultural officials. Therefore, in my capacity as a member of the high committee of the book fair, I will put the idea to Minister of Culture Helmi Al-Namnam and to Haitham Al-Hagg, director of the General Egyptian Book Organisation, which is responsible for the Cairo fair. Egypt urgently needs to focus on and develop its cultural ties with our brothers and sisters in Africa. We need to capitalise on that asset and on the place Egypt occupies in the African consciousness as a means to halt the expansion of Israeli influence into Africa, the effects of which are tangibly manifested in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project, which threatens Egypt's most vital artery. In my acceptance speech in Dakar, I underscored the bonds that the African Yasser Arafat Grand Prize symbolises. I expressed how proud it made me feel that the jury had selected someone from Egypt as the recipient of the first edition of this prize and that I had been awarded a prize named after one of the greatest freedom fighters in modern history, whom I had the honour to know personally. I also expressed how glad I was that this prize had erased that illusory line between so-called “black Africa” and “white Africa”. I added, to the resounding applause of that audience of political and cultural officials, that there is no white Africa. We have people who are black, brown and tan, but ultimately, we're all coloured. I concluded my speech by dedicating the prize to the unity that has existed among the peoples of the African continent from the time of the Pharaohs to the present day.
