By Gamal Nkrumah You don't often come across a paper emanating from the Arab world as doggedly determined to stretch out such a capricious notion of authentic perspective articulated in an alien tongue -- English, with all the disquieting connotations of colonialism, neo- colonialism, imperialism that that language holds -- as Al-Ahram Weekly. As I sit back and reflect on our long road, working under the current Editor in Chief Assem El-Kersh, whose trenchant wit contrast with my devil-may-care insouciance, I look back fondly at my first days at the Weekly. Patriotism, an unquestionable adoration of the Motherland provides an irresistible motive for writing. Yet the richness of allusion sometimes loses out to the intricacy of the political and social setting. This paper has conventionally been stamped with the curious insignia of "semi-official" while simultaneously charting the upsurge of liberalism -- in the best sense of the word -- and civil rights. I personally started working at the paper as an alien, a foreigner, and ended up as Egyptian thanks in large measure to the radical advances in the very perceptions of citizenship rights and the legal implications thereof. I cannot pretend that I did not pay a price for being born of an Egyptian woman caught in the meshes of a patriarchal society that confers citizenship exclusively to the progeny of Egyptian men. But this did not hold me back. I cannot reclaim the past and neither must I mourn over blighted ambitions. But mine, in all humility, is not a tale of lost innocence and late- flowering grief. Who else could pick up the phone, quietly present my credential, and be immediately connected with such standing as Mohamed Hassanein Heikal or Muammar Gaddafi? I would wax nostalgic about the Weekly 's making and in particular at its bacchanalian pinnacle -- oddly enough in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Amid the confused hell of terrorism that leaves us with no illusions about its horrors, we disgorged a barrage of articles including my own "Giant's Feet of Clay", laying the responsibility for the world's current malaise squarely at the sole superpower's feet. It still isn't entirely clear to me why the proliferation of Egyptian English language papers in the post-23 July Revolution period was never as robust a process as in the 1990s. Al-Ahram Weekly was one such paper with the onus on the patriotic, but sufficiently different not to be accused of reworking an old seam. Language strongly affects our understanding of cultural perspectives. The Egyptian nature and national character has always been more written about, observed from a distance, than expressed freely in an entirely natural Egyptian sort of way. That, after all, is the way of all historically subjected nations. And that is where I managed to make a connection. Those of a squeamish disposition may wish to look away from the controversial concept of the South. Not me and not the Weekly.. And as far as I can work out, Al-Ahram Weekly had a propensity to embrace a conception of the South -- at first patently right-on -- eventually less so. Racial stereotyping played a part, and so did a name. But then there was always the nagging question: who cares about all that? There was the unspoken menace of securing a place in the making of contemporary Egypt by being unmissably African, rather than Arab. If the writing hadn't panned out, I would have made my way back to multicultural London. But there was plenty to look at in Cairo and Egypt as a whole. South entered the cultural cannon of contemporary Egypt as a symbol of the underdog. And, like all things Egyptian, it zipped along at a fine old pace. "There was no English language publication in Egypt that rightly projected Egypt's place and political weight in the international arena when Al-Ahram Weekly was created," Ibrahim Nafie, former CEO of Al-Ahram now chairman of the Union of Arab Journalists, told me. "The decision was entirely my own. I never succumbed submissively or blindly to orders from above," he added hastily. "The decision to launch Al-Ahram Weekly was mine, and mine alone," he scrupulously recapitulated as if for added emphasis. Nafie is pragmatic by nature. He doesn't go for gimmicks and he broke no moulds in the form of the publications he launched. But perhaps, Al-Ahram Weekly was an exception. The same, but different. "President Hosni Mubarak never interfered personally in the internal dynamics or office politics of Al-Ahram," Nafie noted pointedly. "I never launched a publication with specific directions from above." Yet Nafie spoke of the sense of euphoria that gripped the powers that be with the instant success of the publication at its inception. I myself saw officials beaming radiantly and acclaiming the paper while covering a visit by President Mubarak to Washington in the mid-1990s. I overheard some bigwig personally congratulating Nafie for the professionalism, confident fluency, variety and originality of Al-Ahram Weekly, much I dare say to the consternation of the assembled editors of other publications of Al-Ahram. Nafie spoke fondly of the late Hosny Guindy, his handpicked choice for the prestigious post of editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly. "Guindy himself was surprised, a little taken aback, I suspect. He hesitated to take on such a tremendous responsibility, he confided in me," Nafie reminisced. "I delegated the responsibility of choosing the cadres that would guide Guindy and work closely with him to the man of my choice himself," Nafie chortles with a pinch of mischief. Nafie's retelling of the legend of Al-Ahram Weekly is a meditation on remembrance, and it is playful as well as poignant. He feels quite at ease with the paper's unsettling surrealism. "Choosing a Christian to head such a publication never crossed my mind. I promoted many Christians in Al-Ahram, not because they were Christian in a predominantly Muslim institution, but because they were proficient professionals. Hosny Guindy was head of Al-Ahram 's foreign desk before assuming the position of editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly. Salwa Habib, too, was a capable Christian woman -- another head of the foreign desk. There were others, Samir Sobhi, Kamal Naguib, Yunan Labib Rizk and many other Christians who made their mark and left an indelible byline on the paper." He giggled at his good fortune. "I understood the readership of the paper. I knew all too well their expectations. The tenor of criticism was quite shrill, even as far as the 1990s were concerned," he expounded. Nafie knew he did not want an English language publication that was mediocre or even borderline respectable. Eye-catching headlines were welcome, cheap thrills were not. Bombastic and brash reporting was discarded in favour of deep analytical commentaries, some irrefutably entertaining, if sometimes inadvertently so. The wit, style and erudition of "failed or pseudo-academics" was creatively deployed to the full. The paper was where one encountered colleagues whose articles were closely researched and splendidly written, but even more importantly whose moral temper was so close to my own. With the encouragement of former editor- in-chief Hani Shukrallah, the "South" desk, with myself as editor, was launched. Faiza Rady, a very special friend, soon joined the fray. It was not the first time in our lives that the professional and the political intersected. "South" later metamorphosed into "International" where I was ably assisted by photo-journalist Jihan Ammar, who moved on to greener pastures in neighbouring Cyprus, working for AP. Philip Luther, a talented British journalist-activist joined us for two years, enough to inspire him to go on to work with Amnesty International's North Africa Desk, which he now heads. According to Deputy Editor-in-Chief Mona Anis, it was in the spring of 1990 while she was on holiday in Egypt, that she read an advert in the Arabic daily Al-Ahram asking for translators and copy editors for an unnamed publication. As it happened it turned out to be Al-Ahram Weekly. She was introduced to Hosny Guindy and told him she was searching for a summer job before returning to England to resume her studies -- incidentally precisely the same scenario was to be recapitulated in my case a couple of years later. Like me, she thought she would have a transient experience in the paper. As it turned out, it was far from transitory. From Guindy's office, she was promptly dispatched to the seventh floor of Al-Ahram where she met a group of expatriate British copy editors. They gazed at her from across the room -- David Tresilian, Nigel Ryan and Jill Kamel were at that time the core team of their supervisor Mamdouh El-Dakhahny, the kernel of the copy editors of the paper. Both Tresilian, who left for New York to work on his doctoral thesis at Columbia University, and Ryan who remained in Egypt ever since, are perhaps the two most influential copy editors the paper has ever known. They were a source of inspiration, instructing their underlings in the fine art of belletristic flair and style. The paper's earliest beginnings commenced with a fiery potpourri of attraction and animosity between local and expatriate, and mellowed somewhat to maintain the fiction of one "big happy family" as Guindy himself discerningly contended. There were damsels in distress galore, and the few daredevils held on ever more tenaciously to the journalistic dreams of derring-do. Anis, after kicking off with the rather tedious task of Egyptian press review, turned to the cultural section collaborating closely with Ryan, Nur Elmesseiri, Amina El-Bendary, Hala Halim and Youssef Rakha on the proviso that if she dabbles in politics, she'll still claim a secure place in the cultural arena. Not so long after that pact, Anis and myself were introduced to the late Faiza Hassan and her then undergraduate 19-year-old daughter Pascale Ghazaleh, now professor of history at the American University in Cairo. El-Bendari and Halim are today also accomplished academics, proud holders of PhDs. Rady's vitriolic defences of valiant Cuba and its enduring stand against the glowering Uncle Sam now alternate with equally fiery analyses of Eurasian post-Soviet political and economic developments by Eric Walberg, a recent addition to the Weekly 's South- cum-International page. As the world's focus has shifted eastward in the period following the Soviet collapse, the Weekly has responded by positioning its analysis of US geopolitical moves in the new multipolar context of BRIC, SCO and the enduring Nonaligned Movement. There is no equivalent English-language publication which abjures kowtowing to America in its onward march to greater world dominion. Throughout my work at the Weekly, we have welcomed inquiring khawagas passing through Cairo who wish to try their metal by tackling topics dear to them. Vibrant, young American and British women curiously have predominated, undaunted by Western propaganda about Islam's supposed chauvinism. It is heart-warming to help such enthusiastic budding anti-imperialists find their feet in the slippery world of glitzy Western commercial media. Many such hopefuls have gone on to academia. The Weekly has played a signifcant role in bridging the journalistic-academic divide, vital to a robust defence against unremitting pax americana. There have been far too many accounts telling the story of Al-Ahram Weekly from a personal perspective. Perhaps the paper was a pioneer in Egypt in this particular genre of journalistic writing. Does the reader need another tattle-tale expose in this age of virtual reality? I think not, and seen no need to gossip here, though the Weekly has its fair share of adventurers and adventures. Sometimes I wish I could team up again with some colleagues long gone. Mariz Tadros joined the Weekly as a teenager; she had been Ryan's student when he was a primary school teacher before she moved to Australia and then back to Egypt. Today, after obtaining a PhD from Oxford University, and after a stint teaching at AUC, she lectures at Sussex University where I myself schooled. Some of the paper's most enjoyable moments are spent during congenial encounters between such characters. Certain moments in our lives, the paper reminds us, should never be forgotten. For me the paper has ingeniously given the nostalgia of the distant past a new degree of realism. Jill Kamel, the mother of a classmate of mine at Victoria College, Maadi, is now a colleague and dear friend. The motherly solemnity of yesteryear has been replaced by the swashbuckling smirk and the knowing smile of a seasoned chronicler of facets of life in ancient Egypt. A veteran of half a century of Egyptian life, she is both archivist of the Pharaonic period and Nubia's glorious past. She often jokes with me that "We are the only two Africans at the Weekly ", alluding to her birthplace in the Whte Highlands of Kenya. Nesmahar Sayed, another colleague, by sheer coincidence the daughter of Captain Sayed Aly, the officer who received the Nkrumah family at Cairo International Airport in February 1966, after fleeing Ghana in the aftermath of the coup d'etat that toppled my father's government, is likewise now a precious friend. It was a special pleasure for me to work with my sister Samia Yaba, now the Convention People's Party MP for Jomoro, my father's seaside home constituency in Ghana, who wrote on Europe and African affairs. And so it has been with my dear friend and colleague Peter Daniel, perhaps the best of Al-Ahram Weekly 's translators. And so it is with Al-Ahram as Egypt and perhaps the Arab world's premier publishing establishment. It is now dismissed by some as something of a dinosaur of the old order. However, Al-Ahram Weekly has managed somehow to reinvent itself perhaps far more than the other publications of the Al-Ahram Establishment. "The birth of Al-Ahram Weekly is to my mind remarkably reminiscent of the launching of the old Arabic language Al-Ahram newspaper some 140 years ago," former managing editor of Al-Ahram Salama Ahmed Salama, one of the Arab world's foremost political commentators and a regular columnist with both Al-Ahram Weekly and Al-Ahram Arabic language daily. Not only was Salama one of the first pundits to claim a fixed column with Al-Ahram Weekly, but he was also rumoured to be one of those first favoured for the post of editor-in-chief. "The paper was published in the English language but it unfailing succeeded in projecting the Egyptian spirit in the English language, reflecting the Egyptian disposition and idiosyncrasies. That is no easy task," Salama says. Al-Ahram Weekly mirrors the Egyptian mood in a manner that is not necessarily parroting the official line. It has been a paper of broad horizons, yet it resisted succumbing to the sensationalism of yellow journalism that sadly predominated with the blossoming of the peculiar culture of the open door policy in the closing years of last century." Numerous newspapermen now pull out all the stops, wallowing in a supercharged playground mired in the muck of immorality and licentiousness. This is an approach that Salama detests. "After years of rigid restrictions and uncompromising censorship, the temptation for immoderation was a powerful driving force among the less disciplined journalists," Salama explained. "Yet Al-Ahram Weekly has tackled engagingly and responsibly pertinent issues such as corruption, citizenship and human rights, democratisation and political reform. Many of these subjects were considered taboo as far as people of my generation are concerned," he recalled.
