When is a journalist not a journalist? When he isn't Egyptian, discovers Gamal Nkrumah Was there an air of finality hanging over the Mugamaa the day I went to claim my Egyptian nationality? The forbidding -- some would say Stalinist-like -- government complex in the heart of Cairo looked a tad grimmer than usual. I collected my pitiful pile of documents and rushed to Abbasiya to complete my naturalisation papers. Little did I know that the battle to claim my Egyptian identity was far from over. It's odd being sentimental about something you have never known. I have lived in Egypt since 1966 and though, technically, I was not Egyptian, Egypt has been my home from the age of six. I was a foreigner in a land I loved. My aunts and uncles were Egyptian, my cousins and friends the same. Everyone was Egyptian, it sometimes seemed, except my siblings and myself. The children of Egyptian mothers married to foreign men are at once alien and familiar. But though I held neither an Egyptian passport nor ID card I felt I could claim a native acquaintance with Egypt. Then the new Egyptian nationality law was promulgated and my life prospects changed. I received the news with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. As it slowly dawned on me the process of becoming an Egyptian was going to be a tough slog. I began to feel that I could well be setting myself up for a bitter disappointment. Whether children born to Egyptian mothers and foreign fathers should qualify for Egyptian nationality became the subject of an impassioned debate in the press. In the end critics of the move conceded, with more than a little reluctance that yes, it was possible, we might become Egyptians. The widespread ambivalence over whether the sons and daughters of Egyptian women married to foreign men should be allowed Egyptian citizenship assumed many dimensions. But the bottom line was always the same -- claiming Egyptian citizenship was never going to be made easy. The children of these mixed marriages are not a homogeneous lot. There are some who live not so much in one culture or another as in the cracks and crevices between. Others have known no country other than Egypt, and yet they were not regarded as Egyptian. The irony is that many half- Egyptians seem more Egyptian than their full-blooded counterparts. Granting Egyptian women the right to pass on their nationality to their children was a long overdue move, bringing the law finally in line with Article 11 of the Egyptian constitution which grants equal rights to men and women. The wives and children of Egyptian men have always received Egyptian citizenship as an automatic right, and there was something inherently unfair and sexist about the old law. Egyptian women were, to all intents and purposes, being penalised for marrying foreign men. In the olden days, long before I became an Egyptian, I would often find myself explaining that my father was not Egyptian, though my mother was. Such explanations would often be met with ambivalence: Egyptians tend to treat those who hold dual nationality with the same equivocation with which they treat Egyptians with foreign- sounding names. Like many other societies the Egyptian approach to "half-castes" has been fraught with contradictions, strange given the fact that Egypt has been a melting pot since time immemorial. In Egypt I could move around unobtrusively, unnoticed except on those rare occasions when I was asked to produce an ID card. Then I would begin my explanations all over again. After producing a few letters of recommendation and soliciting the sympathy of highly-positioned bureaucrats, hurdles such as my inability to produce my maternal grandfather's birth-certificate were conveniently overlooked. But I still had to amass other documents and papers that might strengthen my claim to being Egyptian, a laborious process involving endless visits to the Mugamaa. It was tedious but I complied. It seemed the right thing to do. The greatest hurdle, I discovered to my horror, would be acquiring an ID card. Even after receiving an Egyptian birth certificate and an official document from the Ministry of Interior acknowledging that I am an Egyptian, the quest for the blasted card dragged on for months. They were months in which the thinness of the line between being absolutely Egyptian and absolutely foreign was consistently driven home as I hovered nervously before various windows in the Mugamaa, watching anxiously as officials slowly processed a staggering amount of paperwork. Appeals on the basis of my being a family man with a high- flying working Egyptian wife and young, hopefully soon-to-be Egyptian, children went nowhere. My two sons were born in Egypt, and apart from a few weeks on holiday abroad, know no other country. But the boys, under Egyptian law, must have all my names on their birth certificates. In Ghana, as in Britain, there are surnames and forenames. Not so in Egypt. For starters, there is no such thing as a surname. In Egypt you simply list your forename, followed by your father's forename and then your grandfather's forename. Some families then add a surname, but this is optional. Most people are known simply by their forename followed by their father's forename -- a concept completely alien to people in countries like Ghana, Britain or the United States. Moreover, in Egypt you cannot legally have more than one forename, or a double-barrelled name. Now, thanks to the new nationality laws, an Egyptian can have a foreign-sounding surname. So what is to become of all those naturalised Egyptians with foreign- born fathers who bear double-barrelled surnames or who are unfortunate enough to have been given more than one forename in the tradition of their father's people? Egyptians have an almost naïve belief in uniformity. Non-Arabic names are dismissed as unpronounceable balderdash. Most Egyptians cannot contemplate the notion of an Egyptian with a foreign-sounding non-Arabic name. There are no literal transliterations of foreign, non- Egyptian names and my Ghanaian name Gorkeh had been transcribed into Arabic in a variety of ways on official documents, something that led to a host of complications. I explained that since it was not an Arabic name there was no precise way in which it should be transcribed, just as in English there is no exact English spelling for Arabic names such as Hussein/Hussayn, Mohamed/Muhammad or Khaled/ Khalid. In the end a compromise was reached. I had to get a letter from the Ghanaian Embassy in Cairo that stated that the Arabic rendering of the name Gorkeh on my birth certificate was the same as the one on my marriage certificate and that I was, therefore, the same person mentioned in each. Foolishly, I breathed a sigh of relief. Then came the realisation that I could not state my profession on my new ID card. My Ghanaian passport says I am a journalist. At any rate, I have been working as a Cairo- based journalist for the past 14 years. "No," thundered the man behind the counter. "According to Egyptian law you are not a professional journalist. You cannot have 'journalist' as your profession on your Egyptian ID card because technically you are not an Egyptian journalist." "So do we put unemployed?" I ventured. At some point I lost my cool. "You are not listening. You are not hearing me," I protested. And before we know it he was raising his already loud voice louder and I was raising mine. Then I backed down. Anger management was in order. I eventually collected my Egyptian ID card. Was it worth the hassle? On some levels it was a matter of principle. On others it will make life here easier for myself and my family. That's the short answer. The long answer is, of course, more complicated. But of one thing I'm convinced. I may be armed with a new birth certificate, passport and ID card but for many of my compatriots I will never be really Egyptian. Soon I will be brushing up on 40 years worth of explanation.
