By Okoi Obono-Obla
Gamal Abdel Nasser(5 January 1918-28 September 1970) was an Egyptian Army Colonel who was among the Free Officers that toppled the last Egyptian monarch, King Farouk, in the July 1952 Revolution to establish a new political order in Egypt. General Mohamed Naguib was not the monarch, but the senior officer who became the first President after Farouk’s ouster before Nasser took over in 1954.
Yes, Nasser was a core Pan-Africanist, although his ideology was torn between Arabism and Pan-Africanism and was somewhat contradictory. In his own words in The Philosophy of the Revolution, he placed Egypt at the centre of three circles: Arab, African and Islamic. While his primary vehicle was Pan-Arabism — through which he sought Egyptian leadership of the Arab world and even briefly united Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic in 1958 — he was also a dedicated supporter of African liberation. It was under him that Egypt’s Arab identity was greatly played up; before the 1940s Egyptian nationalism had been largely territorial and Pharaonic. He steered the country into formally proclaiming that identity, with the country retaining the name United Arab Republic until 1971 when it became the Arab Republic of Egypt. That proclamation is historically complex, because while modern Egypt is culturally and linguistically Arabized and a founding member of the Arab League, its people are not wholly Arab in the peninsular sense but descendants of ancient Egyptians mixed with Arab, Berber, Nubian and other influences.
He amply demonstrated his Pan-African vision when he rescued the children of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. After Lumumba’s government was overthrown in September 1960 in an international conspiracy involving the United States and pro-Western forces in alignment with Belgian interests, his family was left vulnerable at the mercy of local collaborators. Nasser mobilized Egyptian diplomats in the Congo to smuggle three of Lumumba’s young children out under pseudonym covers in October 1960. They were flown to Cairo and housed in a villa in Zamalek district under state protection, where the Egyptian state paid for their upkeep and education, and later granted them citizenship. He later sent an aircraft to lift Lumumba’s wife, Pauline Opango, and the remaining children to Cairo as well after Lumumba was assassinated on January 17, 1961.
Nasser fought several wars against Israel, most notably the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the disastrous Six-Day War of 1967 in which the Egyptian Army suffered a dramatic defeat after initial mobilization. He did not die immediately after that war. He died of a heart attack in Cairo on September 28, 1970, at age 52, shortly after mediating an Arab League summit to end the Black September conflict in Jordan.
In Conclusion: Nasser remains a symbol of dignity, pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism and social justice — a leader whose contradiction was his strength. He made Egypt more Arab than its ancient Pharaonic roots, yet used that Arab Egypt as a sanctuary for African liberation, epitomized by his rescue of Lumumba’s children.
