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all the zabbaleen ’s pigs to be slaughtered. There had been no recorded transmission of swine flu from pigs to humans. No other country in the world had ordered the mass eradication of domestic pigs. But that did not deter Hosni Mubarak.
    Across Egypt, an estimated 300,000 swine belonging to zabbaleen households were slaughtered; the government paid between $15 and $50 per pig in compensation, compared to the $80 to $300 they’d been selling for on the market. Soon, two things happened. With no pigs to eat the rotting food, the zabbaleen stopped collecting it, leaving it to pile up on the streets. Then malnutrition appeared among their children. For, says Guindi, though the multinational companies were getting $10 a tonne for waste, and the middlemen $2 out of that, the zabbaleen received nothing from the contract—only what they could make from the sale of recycled waste, and their pigs.
    Now something else happened, equally novel: the zabbaleen rioted. They hurled rocks, bottles and manure (there was plenty of that to hand) at the pig-slaughtering teams. In response, Mubarak deployed riot squads into the slums—followed, as always, by Central Security and its torturers.
    That is how a mixture of repression, greed, corruption and neoliberal economic doctrine managed to turn the zabbaleen into latent revolutionaries. All it needed was a spark, and that came on 25 January 2011.
    Cairo, 25 January 2011
    â€˜Something’s going to happen in Egypt,’ Hossam el-Hamalawy had told me when we talked in a Bloomsbury café two years before. ‘Mubarak will try to hand over to his son, Gamal, but Gamal might lose the next election.’
    Hamalawy spoke softly. He’d been detained and tortured by Mubarak’s secret police for selling socialist literature and was active around the uprising on 6 April 2008 in the Delta city of Mahalla. Then, like a tremor that should have warned of the earthquake to come, a city of 400,000 people rioted for three days in response to the suppression of a textile strike and the rocketing price of food.
    It was around the Mahalla strike, too, that the April 6 th Youth Movement was formed, by mostly young activists, liaising by Facebook, email and Flickr. They were drawn from Egypt’s fragmented opposition: secularist youth from the left, the liberal opposition parties, the human rights community.
    When I met Hamalawy in 2009, screwing up Gamal’s election campaign was the limit of his ambition. But in January 2011, once the revolution in Tunisia was under way, the horizon for Egypt’s opposition groups broadened rapidly. Hamalawy (who tweets as @3arabawy) was among those that initiated the call for a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January, again made through a Facebook page.
    Meanwhile, the downtrodden and the desperate had begun to react to Ben Ali’s overthrow in more direct ways. On 17 January, three days after the Tunisian president’s fall, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer in central Cairo shouted slogans about food price rises, then set himself on fire. A man in Alexandria did the same. A third man—a restaurant owner—immolated himself outside the Egyptian parliament after quarrelling with officials about the cost of bread. The next day, a twenty-five-year-old business graduate named Asmaa Mahfouz (@AsmaaMahfouz) posted a video blog on YouTube. ‘Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire’, she announced,
    to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and the degradation they’ve had to live with for thirty years, thinking that we could have a revolution like in Tunisia. Today one of them has died … People, have some shame! I, a girl, posted that I will go down to Tahrir Square, to stand alone, and I’ll hold a banner. All that came were three guys. Three guys, three armoured cars of riot police and tens of baltagiya … I’m making this video to give you a simple message: we’re going to