Via The Arabist…

When Che Guevara visited Egypt in 1965, President Gamal Abdel Nasser took him to Kamshish, a little village in the heart of the Nile delta. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre visited it in 1967; in 2005, the international peasant movement, Via Campesina, made a call.
Geographically, Kamshish lies between Kafr al-Meselha, where President Hosni Mubarak was born, and Mit Abu al-Kum, the birthplace of Anwar al-Sadat; nearby is Denshawai, the scene of a revolt against British occupation in 1906.
But Kamshish is more important in the struggle of Egyptian farmers for access to land, as it illustrates both the political gains they have made and their current difficulties. Before the 1952 revolution most of the rural population lived in poverty, with terrible working conditions. Beside relatively free but small-scale peasant farming there was an overwhelmingly feudal agricultural sector that imposed bonded-labour sharecropping. Farming families lived in small villages on izba, or latifundia-style estates, servicing the landlord’s crops under the supervision of a bailiff. In lieu of wages they got access to land, an insecure tenure providing barely enough to feed the family.
Kamshish was ruled by the Fiqqi family, owners of some 600 hectares in the late 1940s; two-thirds of Fiqqi land lay within the village boundaries. The Fiqqis were influential in the agricultural cooperative created in 1936. They controlled access to credit, seed and fertiliser, and with this power — and influence on the village council — could force the exchange of land, requisition labour for their crops, or improve their access to irrigation.
It was accepted at least by the end of the second world war that there was a need for agrarian reform. On 9 September 1952, within two months of seizing power, the Free Officers led by Nasser passed legislation that limited the size of agricultural holdings.
At first the Fiqqis, like many of the other large land-holding families, succeeded in avoiding the effects of the law. Until 1961 they managed to satisfy the authorities through subterfuges that they held no more land than the law allowed, although each family member owned over double the legal limit. As early as 1952, however, a group of young students and villagers rallied to calls by Salah Hussein Maqlad, from a poorer, medium-sized, landholding family. With Salah Hussein they called on peasant farmers to take back the land they had been forced to sell to the Fiqqis at the ruinous prices provoked by the crisis of the 1930s.
In 1953, there were violent armed confrontations. Salah Hussein was sent to live in the provincial capital Shibin al-Kom. He was imprisoned for over a year (accused of membership of the Muslim Brotherhood) before being stripped of his rights until 1965. The state, despite its anti-feudal principles, was not prepared to tolerate the development of an independent peasant movement.
In July 1961, Nasser’s regime announced through “socialist decrees” the sequestration of the assets and land of 4,000 families, over 50,000 hectares. Although it took six months to review all the cases in Kamshish a committee was finally able to establish that the Fiqqi family had holdings well above the legal limit. The authorities confiscated its property and redistributed it to 200 small farmers. The Fiqqis were sent to live in Alexandria, while Kamshish had a reputation for peace and social justice, thanks to socialist reforms.

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