Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere Read Free Page A

Tahrir on 25 January. 1
    During the following days, activists frantically refreshed the Facebook page advertising the 25 January demo, as news spread it was gaining thousands of followers per second. Many had also joined the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ page, dedicated to a youth beaten to death by police in Alexandria for posting evidence of police corruption on YouTube.
    The veteran activists knew the stakes. They knew the Central Security would crack down hard on any attempts at demonstration. They had no idea whether the tens of thousands of names on Facebook would translate into anything more than the usual forlorn and harassed protests. That they did was thanks, in the first place, to a new generation of young people—many of whom had previously been active only in student politics, and who simply decided they’d had enough.
    Sarah Abdelrahman (@sarrahsworld), a twenty-two-year-old drama student at the American University of Cairo, had never been on a demonstration and had never been politically active beyond the student union. On the 25th itself, knowing that the advertised start-points on Facebook would be mere ‘camouflage’ to fool the police, she hooked up with a friend more experienced in political organization and headed for the slum settlement of Naheya, just outside downtown Cairo.
    We had to walk in twos at first—this was my first protest and I didn’t know why, but they said it’s because of the Emergency Law: more than two is illegal. Then someone gave me a paper with lawyers’ numbers ‘in case you get detained’—and I am going: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’
    Her eyes whiten as she relives it. She speaks perfect American English, dresses like any student in London or New York, and has that confident tone of voice you hear in the Starbucks of the world:
    We were roaming around; people started hiding in alleys, walking in twos and you could look at another two people, the other side of the street and know they don’t belong here. And I’m thinking, ‘I know why you are here’—there’s a moment of eye contact. Someone started chanting and then all of a sudden people came from the alleys and we were about 200 people, in this tiny street. And people came onto the balconies to see what was happening.
    Among the crowd she spotted Abd El Rahman Hennawy (@Hennawy89). The twenty-five-year-old is hard to miss: he sports a large beard, a red Bedouin scarf and a t-shirt bearing the word ‘socialism’. He seemed surprised to see her: ‘Before then, whenever Hennawy called us out to protest, in the university, I’d be like, sorry, man, I can’t. He saw me and said, what are you doing here? This is my stuff, it’s what I do!’ Hennawy was part of the core of protesters who knew what was going to happen. On the night before, 24 January, he had attended a packed meeting in a private flat. Then, like all the activists there, he’d organized a cell of six people to sleep on the floor of his own apartment and to wait there for information.
    They’d been working like this since Mahalla in 2008: misdirecting the police by planning spoof marches openly on their cellphones and then failing to turn up, or launching flash demos out of the radical coffee shops in the alleyways around Tahrir. Recently they’d switched from demonstrating in the centre to demonstrating in the slums and suburbs. ‘On 25 January,’ Hennawy recalls,
    we put three things together for the first time: the surprise demonstration, plus going to the slums instead of downtown, plus the chants. We chanted about economics, not politics. If you are shouting ‘Down with Mubarak!’ in the slums, nobody cares. They care about food and shelter. So we chanted: ‘How expensive is bread; how expensive is sugar; why do we have to sell our furniture?’ And people joined in. We had no idea it was going to be a revolution, though. I thought