“Politics By Other Means”: The Politics and Risks of Oral History in Egypt

• In Event: Recording at the Crossroads of Africa: Engaging with the Political and Cultural Challenges of Oral History

Abstract

Oral history is political. In some settings, the politics of collecting oral histories, particularly those about human rights, are potent and risky. They are “politics by other means” (Abel, 1995).
Rick Abel’s Politics by Other Means (1995) chronicles how law was used for political purposes in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Law was a tool for those seeking liberation since the apartheid government had used law politically to foreclose most other possible avenues for reform through laws creating the apartheid state and the state of emergency. Similar authoritarian politics are being used currently by the Egyptian government which has set up an elaborate system of laws that effectively ban public protests and criminalize human rights advocacy at many levels. As in South Africa, Egyptian human rights advocates have used and continue to use law as both a sword and a shield (p.11). This paper, based on a 100+ hour oral history of one of Egypt’s leading human rights organizations conducted by this writer right after the Arab Spring, will discuss how that organization’s use of law was “politics by other means” as well as how the act of interviewing is itself political.
This paper also explores the politics affecting interviewers. In “Paranoia and Perspective, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving Research in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Malekzadeh (2016) confronts the issue of how to conduct research in semi-authoritarian or authoritarian contexts offering four rules for researchers in such contexts: “don’t panic; make it boring; self-reflect; and panic, if just a little.” How does one apply such rules? The case of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni, who was tortured and killed in Egypt because of his research on Egyptian labor unions, emphasizes the danger of conducting oral history in authoritarian countries such as Egypt.

Author

• Carol Gray, University of Connecticut