CAIRO, April 26 (Xinhua) -- An exquisite French-style courtyard in Ismailia, in the middle of the Suez Canal, was once the headquarters of the International Suez Canal Company during the canal's construction. Today, it is a museum dedicated to the Suez Canal.
The museum houses many historical relics from the time when the canal was excavated, some of which are images of the construction site preserved by the participants in the canal excavation project.
In each picture, you can see the advanced steam dredging boats, the large lifting equipment, and the chatting white overseers, but there are few ordinary laborers. Where did all the workers who dug the canal go?
Muhammad Jamalaldin, a scholar at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in the United States, found that Egyptian laborers were deliberately excluded from the archives by the recorders of the canal's history.
Almost all of the laborers used in the excavation of the canal were Egyptian farmers. In the 10 years between the start of construction and the opening of navigation, Egypt recruited a total of 1.5 million people to participate in the construction, which is 15 times the labor requisitioned by the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to build the largest pyramid of Khufu. In order to meet the requirements of the French for the construction period, the Egyptian governor Saeed even ordered the size of the army to be reduced from 60,000 to 10,000, and let the demobilized 50,000 soldiers go to build the canal.
The reason for such a huge investment is the lack of machinery and equipment. In contrast to the museum's pictures, which show the ubiquity of large machinery and equipment on the construction site, in fact, most of the excavation of the canal was done by workers with primitive tools such as shovels.
Colombian writer Luis Carlos Barragán, who lived in Egypt, believes that European colonizers sought to erase Egyptians from the memory of the canal's history. "The images without Egyptians not only vividly illustrate how colonialism interpreted, tampered with, and controlled the image of Egypt, but also confirmed the (Euro)centrism of Europe's marginalization of the less developed countries. ”
Due to the canal's location in the heart of the desert, lack of drinking water is a major problem for workers. According to the agreement between the International Suez Canal Corporation and the Egyptian government, the project should first build a fresh water canal to divert water to the construction site before starting the canal excavation. However, in order to complete the project as soon as possible, Lessep started construction on the freshwater canal before it was completed. Workers rely on camels to carry water or dig wells in the desert, but this is far from enough to feed the tens of thousands of people, and people die of thirst almost every day on the site.
Harsh living conditions, combined with intense manual labor, led to plague epidemics becoming the norm. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, hepatitis and tuberculosis are frequent. In a cholera epidemic in 1865, a large number of workers died, and the bodies were strewn all over the construction site.
Such poor working conditions belong only to Egyptians. In her book The Suez Canal Construction Site 1859-1869, the French scholar Natalie Montel described two very different scenes around the canal site: on the one hand, foreigners enjoying their own banks, bakeries and bars, and on the other hand, starving workers toiling in agony under the scorching sun.
On the eve of the inauguration of the canal, the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi visited Egypt. He proposed erecting a statue modeled after an Egyptian peasant at Port Said at the northern end of the canal. Bartholdi also sketched the statue: an Arab woman in a robe, holding a torch in her hand, hoisting it alof, symbolizing "Egypt bringing light to Asia."
However, the romantic sculptor did not read the minds of politicians. His proposal was rejected on the grounds of "insufficient funding". After the canal was completed, a statue of the Frenchman Lessep, who proposed the idea of building the canal, was erected in Port Said.
Read the original article: Southern Awakening|A Hundred Years of Ups and Downs in Suez
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