All events · Empires Unmade

Nubian Displacement for the Aswan High Dam

1963–1964 · Middle East & North Africa

Displacement

Displaced

50,000

Some 50,000 Egyptian Nubians were moved in 1963–64 from the forty-odd villages of Egyptian Nubia to a purpose-built resettlement zone near Kom Ombo, about 40–50 km north of Aswan. The figure is given by the anthropologist Hussein Fahim, who worked on the Nubian Ethnological Survey, and by a contemporaneous Institute of Current World Affairs report written in March 1964 as the move was under way; both derive from Egyptian government resettlement registers. Sudan resettled the population of Wadi Halfa district — commonly given as a further 50,000 people — at New Halfa on the Atbara, so the combined regional total is usually stated as roughly 100,000. Nubian organizations give higher figures that include later migration to Egyptian cities.

Share of the population affected

100%

of the resident Nubian population of the 44 Egyptian villages of the Nile valley above Aswan flooded by Lake Nasser, 1963

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What happened

Construction of the Aswan High Dam from 1960 created Lake Nasser, which submerged the whole of Egyptian Nubia and the Sudanese town and district of Wadi Halfa. About 50,000 Egyptian Nubians were moved in 1963–64 to a crescent of state-built villages near Kom Ombo, north of Aswan, on land and in housing very different from the riverside settlements they had occupied for centuries; Sudan moved the Wadi Halfa population south-east to the New Halfa irrigation scheme on the Atbara. The relocations were carried out with compensation and with the resettlement villages built in advance, but the sites were remote from the river, the housing and agricultural allotments were smaller and differently organized than what people had left, and anthropological studies of the new settlements documented sustained health, livelihood and social difficulties. UNESCO's parallel international campaign moved the temples of Abu Simbel and Philae. Egyptian Nubians have campaigned since for the right to return to the shores of Lake Nasser.

Parties

The Egyptian state relocated the Nubian population of the Nile valley above Aswan to government-built villages near Kom Ombo before Lake Nasser flooded their land; Sudan separately moved the population of Wadi Halfa district to New Halfa

Disputed

Nubian associations and the Egyptian state disagree over whether compensation was adequate and whether commitments to allow Nubians to return to the lakeshore have been honoured; estimates of the number moved vary between the ~50,000 in government resettlement records and larger community figures that include subsequent migration.

The denominator

Egyptian resettlement records count roughly 48,000-50,000 residents moved from Old Nubia to the government-built villages near Kom Ombo in 1963-64. Because so many Nubian men worked in Cairo and Alexandria, the wider Nubian community with claims to those villages was considerably larger, often put near 100,000. Sudan separately moved about 50,000 Nubians from Wadi Halfa to Khashm el-Girba.

Where the baseline comes from

TIMEP - Nubians, the Egyptian State, and the Right of Returnpress
Aswan Damopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no significant death toll. The resettlement was administratively organized rather than violent; the documented harms were economic and medical. Fahim's community-health research recorded raised morbidity in the new settlements — including schistosomiasis and other conditions associated with the irrigated environment at Kom Ombo — but no excess mortality has been quantified.