Interview with Shahenda Maklad

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

This interview was conducted in connection with the project ‘Poverty dynamics, access to resources and social change in rural MENA [Middle East and North Africa]: a gendered approach’. The project is carried out under the auspices of the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo, with support from the Ford Foundation and Oxfam Novib. The authors would, of course, wish to thank Shahenda Maklad for her time and patience.

Notes

1 feddan = 1.038 acres or 0.4 hectares.

Maklad referred to this man as the feudalist. He also became the ‘Umda (mayor/local authority) of Kamshish.

Salah Hussein first joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1940s, and went to Palestine. When he came back, he decided to leave this group.

The feudalist in the village required the school pupils to wear hats in front of him as a form of humiliation and a mark of inferiority. The feudalist had his own mosque where he performed his prayers alone on the carpet, whereas the rest of the village performed the prayers behind him.

Shahenda and Salah were cousins. Her father was his maternal uncle.

While agrarian reform was only concerned with expropriating land above a certain ceiling, sequestration was considered a punishment against certain persons who were deemed enemies of the Revolution, and it usually involved confiscating all property, and not just land.

The first agrarian reform law issued in 1952 stipulated the expropriation of land beyond a ceiling of 200 feddans, but with fathers of more than two children allowed to own 300 feddans. The law also included tenancy guarantees whereby tenants had secure open-ended contracts and paid a rent fixed at seven times the land tax. A new tenancy law was passed in 1992 with a five-year transitional period that lapsed on the first of October 1997. Almost one million families were adversely affected by this measure.

‘Change’ is the slogan of Mohamed el- Baradei , former Chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency and now a campaigner for constitutional reform and a main opponent of the Mubarak regime.