How hip-hop gave voice to a generation of Egyptians hungry for change | Egypt

From the early days of the Tahrir Square protests, music was vital to the young people making their voices heard. And though the country is taking another authoritarian turn, that spirit of dissent cannot be extinguished

As a child growing up in Egypt, I learned that politics could put you in jail, if not simply get you vanished away. I learned this early on from the way my parents, their friends and our relatives distinguished what could or couldn’t be said. If we broached a subject that was out of bounds, we were brought to silence by stern eye contact from an elder. Rumours were rife about what happened to a classmate’s father; we heard snippets of things but knew we could never ask outright. There were subjects never to be addressed.

Things didn’t change much, even as Egypt became more open in the early 2000s with the arrival of the internet and widespread access to mobile phones. The government had so successfully indoctrinated citizens – partly through patronage, partly through fear – that few dared to speak out, even if asked to. As a journalist working in the country from the age of 18, I was quick to learn the red lines, as we referred to them – the clear parameters of what could or could not be broached. Red lines were considered, tiptoed toward and never crossed. But the Egyptian revolution of 2011 changed this in fundamental ways.

It was a surprise to everyone that the revolution unfurled with the speed and impact that it did, even though there were indications throughout 2010 that something in the political landscape and imagination was shifting – the result of a confluence of predicaments and events. In the span of six months, between the summer and winter of 2010, power cuts had become daily occurrences and the prices of basic commodities rocketed. Grievances were high. People felt pressured by the inconvenience and economic difficulties of managing the basic needs of their everyday lives.

Adding to the backdrop of all this were protests raging in nearby Tunisia, which Egyptians watched closely via satellite television. The atmosphere in my home city of Cairo, and across many of the country’s 27 other governorates, was tense. You could feel it in the air.

In January 2011, Egyptians took to the streets of the capital in their tens of thousands, and in cities and towns across the country. I was part of the protest movement from early on the morning of 25 January, when there were just several hundred of us marching in different groups through the city’s streets. But by late that afternoon, numbers had swelled and approximately 30,000 protesters had gathered in Tahrir (Liberation) Square, in central Cairo, in a standoff with riot police that went on for hours. By the time I left the square, well after midnight, the crowds were still there, with no signs of leaving – neither the putrid teargas that filled the air nor the rubber bullets that were being fired at protesters by the police had any effect. The protesters were steadfast.

Three days later, more than 1 million people joined a march through Cairo and towards Tahrir Square. From that point on, the numbers multiplied by the day. Egyptians demonstrated in the streets of the capital and through cities, towns and villages across the country, camping out in public squares in makeshift tents and temporary constructions. They marched with banners calling for reforms and basic rights; they used pots and pans for percussion; they chanted mantras such as the most popular refrain: “bread, freedom, social justice”. And they broke into song.

In the months that followed, the popular social, political and economic expression that had found an outlet in the streets in the form of banners and chants extended into the mainstream narrative through articles, websites, magazines and books.

Political parties were formed in unprecedented numbers. Manifestos seemed to be everywhere – stuck on lampposts, handed out in public squares and circulated online. Criticism of the government, the president, the ministers and even the long-sacred army became commonplace. Public protest against the government became the go-to means of complaint.

Its form became the marching body, and its message was conveyed in the chants and songs that accompanied it.

For anyone who participated in the 18 days of protests in 2011 that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, the early days of the revolution, when people camped out in Tahrir Square, had the feeling of a festive event, somewhat like a concert. Ramy Essam, then in his early 20s, was one of the singers who brought music to the heart of the revolution. During the height of the uprising, Essam performed in front of the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered in and around the square. He got up on a small platform set up for political manifestos, brought out his classical guitar and started to sing political rock. Slowly he commanded the attention of all those in the square who could hear him. Word spread and the crowds around him grew. He would scribble down his lyrics at night in the tent he shared with friends.

His song Irhal (Leave) became an anthem to the revolution: “We’re all one hand and we have one demand / Leave leave leave down / Down with Hosni Mubarak! The people demand / The fall of the regime / He will leave / We won’t leave / We’re all one hand and we have one demand / Leave leave leave.”

Essam became one of the musical voices of the uprising, and when Mubarak finally stepped down on 11 February 2011, the song Sawt al-Hurriya (The Sound of Freedom) was played on every TV, radio and satellite channel.

But Essam wasn’t the only one. Along with colleagues at a small magazine we edited, Bidoun, I was led to two rappers, Sadat and Amr Haha, performing in a corner of Tahrir Square, riffing on the streets about the revolution and what the people wanted – essentially, why they were there (“in search of a better life”). Sadat was just 18. To get to Tahrir Square he took several buses from the housing project where he lived, which had been built to house the refugees of the 1992 Cairo earthquake.

We had no sense at the time that this emerging genre would become so popular. But these young men, who had next to nothing, wove words and phrases with beats so brilliantly that they stuck in your head. Like other rappers, Sadat and his crew also sang about drugs and women, but their main theme was the lack of cash and its related problems, such as not having the means to start a family. These were the types of things one was hearing young people speak about in Tahrir Square, too. The majority of them weren’t really there for the downfall of a dictator – they were there because of the lack of basic needs.

As the revolution began to falter, Sadat also rapped about the return to the status quo. His lyrics tackled police brutality, political assassinations, corruption and the chaos of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule. He called it “the abyss”, “all in the name of religion”. He didn’t stop there, but took on the military next. Sadat became as beloved by millions of fans as he was despised by the regime itself. He had followed in the footsteps of Ramy Essam, as much revered by the people as he was despised by the state.

The events of 2011 had been the impetus for millions of Egyptians to buy smartphones, making internet access widespread in a much more immediate way via 3G. Within months of Mubarak stepping down, the number of Egyptians with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and SoundCloud accounts rocketed. Young writers, artists and musicians were putting out their work on social media. “There was an incredible sense of freedom,” said Sadat. “Everything was changing. It was liberating.”

The frank, hip-hop-inspired music form adopted by Sadat and his peers was growing in popularity. More artists were dabbling in it, and its young audience was growing. It would come to be known as mahraganat, from the word mahragan, meaning festival. Young people were recognising themselves in the lyrics, and felt they were being heard. This music was spreading, but was still kept out of the mainstream because of its “vulgarity” and the ill ease it instilled.

Those of us who partook in the “revolution” or “uprising” never expected the sense of agency to end. But it disintegrated when the army formally came to power after the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013 and the contrived election the following spring of then-defence minister and army general Abdel Fatah El-Sisi.

Muslim Brotherhood members were rounded up in their hundreds and thrown in prison. Politically active citizens were arrested and put through swift trials in military court, without lawyers, and most of them were thrown in jail. A judge sentenced 683 alleged Muslim Brotherhood members to death in a single trial. Gatherings of 10 people or more were outlawed. Police began to stop young people in the streets and search their phones. This had never happened before.

Under Sisi, the red lines of censorship have expanded beyond political discourse to include anything from lurid song lyrics to social media posts that are deemed “morally offensive”.

As I write this, at least six young women are in jail for appearing in videos said to be in violation of “family principles and values upheld by Egyptian society” – one clip involves a divorcee in tight-fitting clothes dancing with her boyfriend. Such arrests are not a matter of state policy per se, but the Stasi-like practice of “citizen patrolling” – of spying, monitoring and reporting against fellow citizens. This policing system has discouraged anything potentially disruptive to the state, including content posted by local social-media influencers.

The content is perhaps less the offence than is the number of viewers who see it. Under a law passed in 2018, social media users with more than 5,000 followers are considered “media outlets”, making them subject to prosecution for publishing anything considered “false news” or “incitement” – umbrella terms that can be twisted to include almost all personal expression. In a state that has deemed itself perennially at threat, there are also no clear-cut criteria – the only constant is that parameters are continually shifting. Who is reported, prosecuted, arrested, released – all this is arbitrary.

Within this political climate, it is telling that Egypt’s independent music scene – and particularly Arabic hip-hop, or mahraganat – has been thriving. Borrowing from US artists such as Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Eminem and Jay-Z, and from the earlier history of hip-hop, these Egyptian artists write lyrics that are grounded in deeply personal, political, sexual and socioeconomic realities – everything the government would prefer citizens not to speak about, and the kind of material that citizen patrols love to report.

The artists rap about their own lives, their neighbourhoods, their rivals, and their personal, economic and political battles, as well as their successes, money, women, dreams. In one song, for example, the duo Oka and Ortega rhapsodise about drinking alcohol and taking drugs – both considered blasphemy in Islam, and the drugs, needless to say, punishable with jail: “You’re sitting alone, idle-minded / Satan is leading you to the wrong path / He keeps telling you ‘Let’s play, dude’ / Let’s play, dude, why don’t you play / Dude, let’s play, dude, let’s play / Dude / You want to be a man of principle / Quit the drugs / And say ‘I’m starting’ / Satan comes and keeps telling you / Drink, dude, drink, dude, light it, dude.”

A growing league of local artists, most in their 20s, boasts millions of followers online. They have sold out concerts at licensed venues, but also at street weddings and private parties, even as the state has repeatedly attempted to shut them down. Many of these artists were too young to properly partake in the Egyptian revolution – most were in their early teens or younger – but they came of age at that moment of rupture when everyone was speaking out. It has, over time, come to define who they are, too – outspoken, uninhibited, independent, free.

Unlike my generation, which came of age in the 90s and was raised in constant fear of speech, the rules of the game for these musicians don’t follow any of the old social or cultural norms. They rap about long-taboo issues.

These singers commanded my attention, and even my envy at first, precisely for their lack of inhibition – for their fierce assertion of independent, nonconformist identities. They are free in an environment that does everything it can to break individual freedoms. They did not cave in, as my generation did.

About 60% of Egypt’s population, or 65 million people, are under the age of 29, so it is no surprise that these young musicians have millions of fans at their command. It is those fans, influenced by the artists they revere, who are the future of the country – and who will essentially define what Egypt comes to be.

Marwan Pablo is among Egypt’s most popular and successful young rappers. He was young when the revolution erupted, but old enough to know what it promised for the lives of people like him. For the 18 days that Egyptians had been camped out in squares across the country, it was clear that most of the youth were there for the promise of better lives, better homes, better neighbourhoods.

These promises had essentially dissipated by 2015, when the government’s witch hunt against the Islamists reached its peak. Between 2013 and 2015, in neighbourhoods across Alexandria, where Pablo is from, as well as in other governorates, masked special forces stormed buildings, kicked down apartment doors, dragged out men and, on occasion, women, and took them away. Crackdowns were violent and extreme, and these incidents were rampant.

It was not easy to be a young man at that time, and certainly not one from the working class or from a conservative neighbourhood.

The threat of being persecuted by the state was constant, and decent jobs were hard to come by. Pablo, in his mid-20s, worked several jobs, enough to make a basic living. In 2018 he released a song, Sindbad, that expressed how hard it was for someone like him to beat the system and make a future: “A year that smells like money / Smells like alcohol, smells like lessons / It went fine, I’m not in jail / Thank God.”

The success of Sindbad brought Pablo gigs. Everyone could understand his plain language and his talk of money. But the song was also highly political, even as it steered clear of direct political commentary. Sindbad had echoes of Jay-Z rapping as a Black man subjected to racism, but in Egypt Pablo was rapping about class. The government’s repressive security apparatus had always persecuted young, poor men, framing them, using them as scapegoats and simply keeping the population fearful by being ruthless as a matter of messaging and policy. Sindbad, the character in the song, was rising above the circumstances that plagued young men like himself to buy himself freedom. The leading Cairo mahraganat producers took an interest. A series of songs followed, in addition to an appearance in an Arabic documentary on the genre. Pablo’s collaborations with the Cairo-based producer Molotof (after the molotov cocktails that were used by young protesters during the 2011 revolution) heralded his rise in the charts.

Pablo’s most popular track, Free, became something of an anthem for the freeing of the mind through a state-of-consciousness that can only come under the influence of drugs (“If you go crazy then you are free / We drive the world to Mars / We drive the world with no benzene / If you go crazy then you are free”), and it was beginning to be streamed millions of times online. Young people driving tok-toks (three-wheeled taxis) started playing Pablo’s song from thumb drives, which was the ultimate measure of fame. The song was a breakthrough in terms of reach, and the government took note.

The video for the song was shot in Alexandria. It features atmospheric cinematography of the city: Pablo in a car, at a graveyard, on the corniche, smoking, singing, dancing and drinking. Together with Molotof, they roam the city that nurtured the creativity that set him “free”. Pablo critiques the country’s suffocating circumstances and touts the liberation that comes with mind-altering substances.

Songs such as Free made Pablo one of the most popular rap artists across Alexandria and Cairo. He had no fear of what people might think, of cultural taboos or of how the ultra-conservative and religiously inclined government and community around him might respond. But as his listener numbers climbed, giving mahraganat a broader reach, people began to talk about cultural values changing. Something was shifting.

When I set out to write about the mahraganat scene several years ago, I believed that the music was spawning a movement that would generate political change. It seemed like a vast and important shift – this young generation of artists who were speaking about realities and opinions that preceding generations had been too fearful to explore publicly. Here, finally, was a sizable segment of the population being vocal about relationships, drugs, alcohol – issues that were never previously deemed appropriate for general conversation.

What was even more striking was their willingness to talk about the political realities suffered by tens of millions of Egyptians – the economic hardships, inequalities and the extreme control of public opinion and debate. It was a massive break from the past. It seemed like the core ingredient for change would be what was conceived in Tahrir Square: the ability to discuss problems openly, publicly, with resonance. Only then could a public consensus be gained and solutions collectively reached. Music seemed like a solid starting point.

That hope has been complicated in part due to the rule of Sisi, who has constructed a parallel system to the government that is commanded by the army and steeped in censorship and control. Although the music scene has been somewhat uncontrollable, with its reliance on international platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify, every other means of public debate and expression has been quashed. The hope for a pluralistic political system was given up on long ago – when the president ran for re-election, every potential opposition candidate was threatened, arrested or otherwise intimidated by the state. Opposition, which is a prerequisite for a healthy political environment, has been all but shut down. Public consensus no longer matters to the government. (In a recent interview, Sisi said that “the country is being rebuilt and the stories of individuals can’t factor into that equation”.)

More and more, the situation feels like a political timebomb. As Sisi pours billions of dollars into megaprojects that line the pockets of his entourage and their business allies, the country is facing its most severe economic crisis in decades: debt is at a record high and inflation has soared. The extreme wealth of a new class of multimillionaire generals and their families is being rubbed in the face of a vast youth population that has no means and no real chances of making a living. Good jobs are hard to come by; wages are generally low.

The only thing these young people do seem to have and hold on to as a symbol of hope is those music stars, whose footsteps they want to follow in. But sometimes the music itself seems to stir up further anger and frustration – these sentiments and energies are very tangibly simmering among some fans and artists.

In the last few years, before and then after Covid, I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable around some of these groups. But I came to realise that for the majority of young people, the music is unleashing energy that has been pent up inside them as a result of unmet material wants, and a sense of futility in imagining a tomorrow that is any different from their current situation. “Life is about today,” one fan in a group of young men told me, his friends nodding in agreement beside him. “I’m 22 and there is no future, so let me do what I want today.” That translates into roaming the streets, listening to music, sometimes breaking things. “I throw bottles [at buildings] because it feels good,” he says. “It’s like a release.”

At the start of the Egyptian academic year that began in October 2022, the government issued a blanket ban of mahraganat music as well as weapons and “tight” clothing on university campuses nationwide. The rules covered anything “inappropriate”: too tight, ripped, distressed or see-through, along with shorts, flip-flops and leggings. Traditional galabiyas (robes) were also banned. “Weapons” included fireworks and flares alongside knives and guns. A note against eating, smoking or drinking in lecture halls was also included in the statement, and although it was not directly stated, this was assumed to mean alcohol. The country’s most widely watched television hosts all took up the issue on their nightly segments, debating the necessity for this kind of control, but also asking aloud what had happened to our society: “The values of our society are broken” was the most frequent refrain.

As Egypt negotiated a new bailout package from the IMF last autumn, which involved a proper float of the currency, which has historically been pegged to the dollar, prices increased again. In the course of two days, the Egyptian pound lost 35% of its value. Headlines spoke of shortages of rice, chicken, eggs – not because they weren’t actually available, but because traders were hoarding supplies in order to release them later at higher prices. People began to murmur about “bread riots” and what the revolution of hunger might look like.

The 10th anniversary of the revolution in 2021 was marked by a political climate of censorship and human rights abuses. Although official figures are hard to come by, it was estimated by human rights groups that up to 60,000 political dissidents were being held in jail as of late 2022, many for belonging to the wrong political party.

I believe it is fair to say that Egypt is now at the most oppressive point in its modern history. Government and army officials have often been quoted saying that the longstanding “emergency rule” measures have been necessary to avoid the kind of chaos seen in Syria or the political mayhem experienced under the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule. Sisi has explicitly stated on television that he will never allow what occurred in 2011 to happen again. People I know are in prison simply for voicing opinions or personal experiences. One friend, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a blogger, computer programmer and activist, was arrested in 2019 for a Facebook post and has been in prison ever since on fabricated charges of spreading false news that undermined national security. Freedom of speech is a calculated risk you choose to take.

Yet despite this repressive atmosphere and the constant threat of censorship and silencing, a generation has broken through the fear barrier of personal and political expression. What happened in the 18 months between January 2011 and July 2013 – the street protests that led to the downfall of Mubarak and his clan, and the subsequent ones in 2013 that led to the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi – can never entirely be reversed.

This is an edited extract from Laughter in the Dark: Egypt to the Tune of Change, published by Columbia Global Reports

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