Messages from Tahrir: a photo-history of the Egyptian revolution

Slide 1 (Photo credit: Karima Khalil)

When I walked into the some 800,000 strong crowd that was in Tahrir Square on the morning of Saturday January 29th, one of the first things I saw was a man standing quietly, holding a sign with a simple message in Arabic: “I used to be afraid, I became Egyptian.” I looked around me and saw hundreds of signs bravely held by people of all ages and backgrounds, made from whatever they could find: paper, cardboard, wood, fabric, balloons, and even shoes. This man’s simple yet profound message neatly sums up the decades of repression Egyptians endured under Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic rule and the newly-found pride we felt at expressing our outrage at last.

Over the next fourteen days I saw messages written on people’s foreheads, others spelled out on the ground with rocks, cups, candles and even date pits. Largely homemade, these handwritten messages expressed yearnings that we Egyptians had been prevented from voicing for decades: messages in Arabic addressing Mubarak and his hated regime directly, but also in English, aimed at the world: “Here we are and this is what we want”.