It’s been 10 years since Egypt’s Arab Spring – an anniversary that has proved challenging to mark

This week, one of the bravest people I know gave me a compelling answer to that question, why become a journalist?

In 2013, Hossam Bahgat decided to transition from directing one of Egypt’s leading rights groups to becoming a reporter as the country morphed into one of the most oppressive media environments in the world.

He said he felt that as a journalist he could combat the growing war over narrative and on memory. 

Exactly 10 years ago, Egypt’s uprising erupted and captivated the world. It helped fuel a revolutionary wave that swept across the Middle East, the aftermath of which is still shaping the world today. And so, the obvious question across international newsrooms in the lead up to the decade anniversary, was how do you aptly, honestly and helpfully mark this milestone?

In Egypt, the military-backed authorities have worked hard to reframe the past 10 years in a two-dimensional narrative of the good of now, versus the evil and chaos of before.

It was telling that Egyptian state media largely marked the revolution’s anniversary with officials celebrating what 25 January was before 2011: police day.

For Egyptian independent reporters in such an oppressive environment, journalism is literally about fighting against the state war on narrative, truth and history, often at great personal cost. Egypt has locked up many journalists and banned hundreds of websites including independent news outlets such as Mada Masr. Bahgat, who writes for Mada, is currently under a travel ban and asset freeze.

But really for all journalists, even if you’re free to express yourself, there is still the threat that we ourselves unwittingly rewrite narratives, erase certain memories, slip into hindsight-led hot takes and forget the details of what really happened in the interest of a neatly packed story. We accidentally wage war on memory and narrative ourselves.

When it came to deciding how to mark the decade anniversary of the “Arab Spring”, The Independent chose to preserve memory, and hopefully an accurate narrative, as best we can.

And so, as part of a new series we profiled people – whose experiences meshed together – to tell a real story of the so-called Arab Spring and the past 10 years. Some of those we spoke to are prominent activists who launched the protests, some of them just regular teenagers whose lives were profoundly altered by events of the past decade.

There is of course no one truth of what happened, but hopefully by keeping a record of what people lived through we can get as close to truth as possible.

Yours,

Bel Trew

Middle East Correspondent