A boy runs down the hill. Behind him, a few metal cans and plastic bottles clatter on the asphalt. They are tied to a thread of worn raffia. The little boy, no more than eight years old, warns of the arrival of one of the midday shipments. Behind him, in a metal cart pulled by a donkey and guided by one of the zabaline (dumps) in Cairo, you can see mountains of cardboard and a large green garbage bag filled with organic waste: banana peels, stale loaves of bread and rotten vegetables.
In the Manshiyat Naser neighborhood – also known as Garbage City – the waste produced by the more than 20 million inhabitants of the Egyptian capital, one of the most populous metropolises on the African continent, is collected, stored and sorted every day. At the foot of Moqattam Hill, which stands southeast of Cairo, this neighborhood is home to about 60,000 residents. Popularly called “collectors” or “garbage collectors,” the zabaline They are Coptic Christians and perform a fundamental service: they collect garbage from the homes and streets of Cairo and recycle much of it, thus considerably reducing waste.
Layla and Nubia’s hands are cracked and stained black. On one side are knives, spoons and forks, neatly arranged and separated. On the other side, there is a mountain with all the plastic cutlery, some stained, some broken and some in good condition: this is what the two young women are looking for. Layla smiles. The thinness of his face breaks with the gloom of the bass where he spends more than 12 hours a day. “This is my job. My whole family is dedicated to sorting the waste that arrives from Cairo,” he says shyly. But suddenly he becomes proud: “This is what I love.”
A group of men pull hard on a long rope. With each lurch, a huge pile of garbage on a dirty pallet rises another meter. Using a pulley, they lift the waste to the top of a building. Even the roofs are not free from the stench of garbage. Nasser has lived in this neighborhood for more than twenty years and – he says – the conditions are not the best, but “they protect us,” he says, pointing to a sign that hangs from one side of the street to the other. The face of the Virgin Mary takes up its entire surface and seems to levitate.
A community rooted in Upper Egypt
The Coptic Christian community is estimated to represent between 10 and 15 percent of Egypt’s more than 100 million people. zabaline They are mostly Copts, settled at the foot of Moqattam almost a century ago. A few meters from the nerve center of the City of Waste, is the monastery of San Simón el Curtidor, also known as the Cave Church, because it is dug into the mountain: an impressive temple, with a capacity to accommodate between 15,000 and 20,000 people. faithful, making it one of the largest in Egypt and the Middle East.
Historically, the zabaline They were farmers from Upper Egypt. In the 1940s, a large number of them emigrated to the capital, fleeing poor harvests. At that time, the wahiyaa group of residents of Egypt’s Western Desert, asked the community to join them in Cairo’s garbage collection enterprise. To continue their tradition of raising pigs, goats, chickens and other domestic animals, the zabaline They established informal settlements on the outskirts of the capital, while also starting to devote themselves to garbage collection.
For a time, the zabaline waste collected and classified, and wahiya They served as intermediaries between themselves and the citizens of Cairo. This association and this new activity pushed many Egyptians from the Nile Valley to emigrate to the capital.
The economy of Garbage City, which relies on the collection and recycling of Cairo’s waste, has been repeatedly threatened by the Egyptian authorities. In 2003, the provincial government granted annual funds worth about US$50 million to three multinational waste collection companies – two of them Spanish, FCC and Urbaser, and the third, the Italian AMA. A contract was also awarded to the national Egyptian Garbage Collection Company (ECGC).
Although currently the zabaline They continue to manage the majority of the waste, outsourcing was and continues to be an indirect threat to the economic future of this community.
Double stigma
In 2009, in the midst of the swine flu crisis, the Egyptian government decided to cull about 350,000 pigs, mostly owned by the residents of Manshiyat Naser. The pigs are mainly raised by Egypt’s Christian minority and are considered unclean by the predominantly Muslim and conservative society.
At the time, the World Health Organization assured that the decision to eliminate pigs had no “scientific basis”, since the disease is not transmitted by animals and, furthermore, in this North African country, no cases of swine flu have been recorded.
The stigma of zabaline to live with these animals and with the garbage, and the discrimination due to their religion have made the neighborhood the target of attacks and gossip of all kinds. After the Egyptian revolution of 2011, a wave of attacks against Christians committed by radical Islamists increased the feeling of unease and hostility towards the then president Mohamed Morsi (2012-2013), leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 2022, the Egyptian capital was among the ten most polluted cities in the world, ahead of Tajikistan and behind India. The community of zabaline He suffers the effects of pollution in his flesh, as he coexists with plastic and organic waste, sometimes burned. It is common to see plumes of smoke rising above Manshiyat Naser. In addition, in this unsanitary environment, high rates of communicable diseases, such as tetanus or hepatitis, are recorded. This and the appearance of its inhabitants make other Egyptians turn to steel when they come across them.
