Anyone who visited Hussein Hegazi Street, last year during the Real Estate Tax Collectors’ strike, must have noticed Adham, the young tax collector from Beheira. Adham was on the shoulders of his colleagues most of the time, leading thousands of strikes in their chants, rhyming, singing holding the mike, raising the morale when it’s low, and setting the crowds with fiery enthusiasm.
But behind Adham was also an army of poets, lyricists, and composers. All are ordinary tax collectors and participants in the strike who had or discovered talents as soon as the struggle necessitated it. I had a very pleasant chat, during my trip to Minya, with one of the tax collectors who was part of this effort.
“I always loved poetry,” he said smiling, “both colloquial and classic. When the people [tax collectors] gathered in Hussein Hegazi, I started composing chants, write them on a piece of paper, and give it to the strike committee members or whoever holding the microphone. I’m not good with chanting. I can write only. I then started paying attention to which chants are getting picked up, and which ones were not popular. It was challenging, as there were people from all provinces in Egypt and had different accents. So we had to try to compose chants and slogans that would work well with everybody’s tongue.”
Later, I took from one of the strike leaders some of the handwritten papers that were distributed during the occupation.
Some other chants were previously compiled here.