Retracing the Nile: How a 4,000-Mile River Built Civilizations and Now Divides Nations

The video opens with the Nile described as a single strip of green cutting through an endless brown desert, a ribbon of life in one of the driest regions on earth. Over 100 million people depend on this waterway, and the narrator notes that it has supported this way of life for thousands of years.

Johnny Harris explains that he is retracing the river because it is changing, and frames the trip as a way to see how modern nations are now powerful enough to control it.

Harris says the river is changing because modern nations are now powerful enough to control it, and that the old rhythms that sustained it for thousands of years are breaking.

He describes the journey as one from headwater to delta, meeting people along the banks to hear their stories and see how they are adapting. He reminds viewers that every life depends on water, and asks who has it, who controls it, and what happens when it no longer behaves as it always has.

At the headwater lake in the Ethiopian mountains, where the Blue Nile begins, islands hold Christian monasteries that adopted the faith long before Europe, as early as the 300s. Harris finds the island's elder priest reading his Bible under a tree.

The priest tells Harris that he is 95 years old and has spent his entire life at this sacred source. Later, the community invites Harris to dinner and coffee made from beans harvested on the island, and the evening turns into a dance that leaves him feeling freer than ever.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam spans nearly two kilometers across the Blue Nile and is a source of pride for Ethiopians. Egypt tried to stop its construction, and the two countries negotiated for years without reaching an agreement. Egypt has repeatedly described the dam as an existential threat.

Ethiopia built the dam anyway. It created a massive reservoir whose water runs through turbines to generate electricity, something most Ethiopians had lived without. Last year, millions of Ethiopians were connected to electricity for the first time, many of them thanks to the dam. Harris notes that this is the first time Ethiopia has used the river as a national resource, though countries downstream remain unhappy about it.

In Sudan, three important things happen. First, the Blue Nile joins the White Nile in Khartoum, the country's capital. Second, the river moves from falling through lush highlands into flowing lazily through a flat, sandy desert, a landscape Harris says is unlike anything he had understood. The area gets an average of about two and a half centimeters of rain per year, and some years it does not rain at all.

Third, the river passes monuments built more than 2,000 years ago by the Nubians, a civilization most people have never heard of. Harris says their story is key to understanding the modern Nile.

At the border between Sudan and Egypt, Harris visits a structure dating to around 1200 to 1300 BC, more than 3,000 years old. An Egyptian king built it to show the neighboring Nubians that Egypt was more powerful, placing it on the border between the two civilizations as a display of strength. Harris finds it hard to imagine that people were building such ambitious projects so long ago.

Harris explains that for most of human history, people moved in small groups and followed food rather than staying in one place. In a few places, including the Nile valley, humans began gathering in large numbers and cooperating. Each year, rains in the East African Highlands sent huge amounts of water rushing down the river, creating a flood that swelled the river through the desert.

The flood carried volcanic rock picked up from the Ethiopian mountains. Harris describes this sediment as rich in phosphorus, potassium, iron, magnesium and calcium, which acted as free fertilizer delivered every year. In the desert, where the sun was constant, farmers only needed to drop a seed into the soil for crops to grow. While most farmers elsewhere depended on rainfall that sometimes failed, Egyptians had a yearly flood, which they worshipped as the god Hapi.

Harris adds that surplus food freed some people to do other work, such as building monuments, and that the Nile supported not one major civilization but two, with Nubia upstream built on the same flood.

Upstream, Nubia was full of gold and skilled archers and had its own alphabet, which we still cannot fully read to this day. This is one reason less is known about Nubia than about ancient Egypt. Both civilizations were built on the same miracle, a flood that arrived mostly on time, year after year, to nourish their soil.

The British had controlled the Nile for 75 years during the height of their empire. In the 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the British-backed king and expelled the British entirely. He chose the river as the project to announce that Egypt belonged to Egyptians. The massive dam would end the annual flood and its delivery of fertilizer from upstream, but in return it would store years of water, electrify the country, and allow development and growth.

Harris says that for the first time in history, the Nile and its flood were placed under human, Egyptian command.

When the dam was built, the reservoir drowned the region where an Egyptian temple stood, so the temple was moved stone by stone to a new location on the banks of the new lake. Harris's boat driver notes that while the temple survived the drowning, much else was lost.

Because of the dam, more than 100,000 Nubian descendants had to leave as the water rose over their homes, temples, palm groves, schools and fields. The government moved them into much denser neighborhoods near the city, cutting them off from a way of life 5,000 years old, built on the river and its nourishing flood.

On the river, Abu Yusuf shows Harris how to ride the current until the boat sets down on a rock midstream. There he talks about the homeland the dam took and about the slow, steady pressure to stop being Nubian and become Egyptian. He tells Harris that despite his people losing their land and way of life, the one thing he still holds onto is the river itself.

Harris reflects that modernizing forces create winners and losers, and that much is gained while precious and often irreplaceable things are lost.

Along a green bank, a family's trees drop mangoes so freely that the crew fills their pockets and shirts with fruit, eating it as they go. One local says the Egyptian mango is very nostalgic for him. The crew later receives more mango nectar as they leave, and a mango farmer who had been shaking the fruit from the tree offers to cook for them, joining the boat.

Midu, a cook who joined the boat, says he is from Nubia. His father and grandfather taught him the story of Lake Nasser, and they lived there before the dam. When the president planned the High Dam, the government offered the community some land in the city, but the residents refused, saying they needed to live behind the river because they needed a small plot for growing plants and vegetables. Each Nubian family had one or two hectares of land.

Asked whether people still dream of going back to the village, Midu replies that it is over, because of the dam. Harris notes that Nubians lost not just their villages but a kind of farming that gave them food, their calendar, their livelihood, their songs and their whole way of being for thousands of years.

Because the dam stopped bringing natural fertilizer down from the Ethiopian mountains, farming along the river is now an industrial affair that relies on chemical fertilizer. Water is pumped from the lake through man-made canals to feed farms deep in the desert. Harris describes walls topped with barbed wire protecting these farms, security checkpoints, and armed guards in front of pumping stations.

Harris says that in most countries such measures guard a border, but here they guard the water. Egypt, with more than 100 million people, sees control of water as a matter of national existential security. The military uses engineering to control the river and carefully allocate every last drop. Harris links this to Egypt's objections to Ethiopia's new dam, since a country that controls the river upstream threatens not just the water supply but the entire existence of the country downstream.

Harris meets Douai, a fisherman who lives on a boat and is joined each day by the same white bird he calls his friend. He invites the crew to breakfast with fish he has just caught and serves tea made with water straight from the Nile.

Harris learns that Douai is not a Nubian and did not lose his home and lifestyle to the dam, which may explain his different perspective on all of this.

Near the end of the river's course, Harris describes Cairo, the largest city in Africa, with more than 20 million people along the banks. The pyramids were built from the wealth of the flood 5,000 years ago, while modern towers and bridges are lit partly by electricity from the dam that ended that flood. Harris concludes that ancient Egypt was built by working with the river, and modern Egypt was built by seizing control of it.

For millions of people, the river is still everything: they sing about it, bathe in it, fish it, drink it and farm along it. The people with the deepest memory of what it used to be still feel the pain of this trade-off. In Harris's words, for 5,000 years this place lived by the flood, and now it has to figure out how to live without it. Further upstream, the fight over who controls the water is only just beginning.