The pictures on his iPad evoke the now familiar images of unlocked popular anger on the streets of Cairo that led to the ousting of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak earlier this year.
“But that’s not what I wanted to show you,” said Ismail Serageldin, the Egyptian-born Harvard PhD graduate who is in South Africa to deliver the Ninth Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture this weekend.
The gently spoken 67-year-old former World Bank official, academic and now director of the Library of Alexandria in Cairo, was straining his Nelson Mandela Foundation host’s tight schedule of interviews by taking slow pleasure and evident pride in the images he showed the Mail & Guardian on Thursday.
An M&G question had made him reach for his iPad at the end of the interview. Both the origin and the fate of his library’s celebrated precursor as the ancient world’s first major seat of learning had prompted the question.
Established in the third century BC, it fell victim to a succession of imperialist adventures by foreign powers in Egypt, starting with Julius Caesar, who set fire to it. This led by stages to its total destruction in 415AD.
The history prompted a modern inquiry: Isn’t knowledge, as well as teaching and learning, dictated by the whims of the powerful? Is the democratisation of education really possible?
“Yes, it is,” he said emphatically — and produced his iPad. First came the images of the uprising in Cairo. “See how peaceful it really was,” he said, visibly savouring the memories 20 or so images evoked for him.
“But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Look at this.” There followed a sequence showing the modern-day Library of Alexandria, which he has headed for the past seven years. In the first few images the library’s delicate architectural beauty looked frail in the face of the street anger then at its height.
“See,” said Serageldin: “No walls to keep people out. Nothing.” Then he showed an image of a single-file ring of people around the building, hands joined, symbolically protecting it.
But it was only symbolic protection, he said. “The protesters didn’t want to attack the building. This is what they really wanted to destroy —” Here he lingered with relish over a photo of the fire-blackened shell of a stone building about six storeys high.
“That was a government office,” he said. “The only two official buildings that weren’t touched were the library and the museum.”
‘The Making of Social Justice’
His point resonated strongly with his answer to the question of what he will tell South Africans in his Mandela lecture on Saturday, titled “The Making of Social Justice: Pluralism, Cohesion and Social Participation”.
“You can’t have a modern democratic society — one with a social contract based on citizens’ rights — if people are feeling grievance and injustice,” he answered. The risks of failing are considerable, Serageldin said. “We’ve been witnessing breakdowns across the world, some violent, from Sudan to Yugoslavia. Yet in a country such as Switzerland — with its multiple languages, cultures and identities — no group wants to secede.
“The central question is: What’s needed to get and to keep social cohesion?” The answer lies in what is at the heart of social injustice, he said — “a sense of what’s fair. What people mean by this is expressed in the Shakespearean formulation — ‘justice tempered with mercy’.”
He conceded that it was reasonable to ask sceptically about the contribution to global justice of the World Bank, where he served for 27 years. “When my Harvard professor suggested I go there, I said: What? That terrible place!” But he went anyway, in 1972 — “unhappy with its economic models: I was more interested in human capital” — and found “it absolutely terrible, a bunch of reactionaries”.
Organisations such as the bank “can only do what their member states allow them to do”, he said. But even so, the bank had changed a lot in the nearly three decades he served there, “moving to lending for development, urban poverty and gender issues”.
“I was the first vice-president of the World Bank ever to be in charge of environmental and social development,” he said.
But these things are complex, he added, responding to the M&G‘s question about how World Bank-based ideas of optimal education spending still marginalise most South African schoolchildren.
“We need more time [to discuss this issue],” he said. But his Nelson Mandela Foundation hosts were, unfortunately, having none of it.