Postcard from Cairo: Is Egypt's robabikya trade destined for the scrap heap?

Every day for the past 15 years, brothers Ibrahim and Ahmed Hassan have driven around Cairo's affluent Heliopolis neighbourhood in their autorickshaw, from time to time issuing a call familiar to most Egyptians: Bikya!

The word is a shortened form of "robabikya", an old Italian term imported to Egypt in the 19th century and which means anything old and unwanted.

From worn appliances to broken furniture – and anything else householders might no longer have use for – such items are Ibrahim and Ahmed's bread and butter.

But whereas two years ago the brothers might return home with broken fridges or air conditioners in the back of their small blue vehicle, bought from their owners for next to nothing, today they receive mostly cardboard boxes.

With Egypt experiencing surging inflation, people have become more reluctant to let go of their possessions, even if they are mostly broken, Ibrahim tells The National.

“I used to make 10,000 pounds [$323] at the end of every week. Today I am lucky if I can make 700 pounds. It’s not sustainable, to be sure, and many of my friends and family have left it altogether and returned to Upper Egypt where we’re from,” he says.

An ongoing economic crisis has pushed inflation to a six-year high, while the Egyptian pound has depreciated by more than 50 per cent since last year.

Ibrahim, 35, and Ahmed, 28, say they have been getting by with parcels of food and small sums of money sent by their family in Sohag, where they farm. The brothers live in Al Marg, a large informal settlement west of Cairo.

The brothers face the painful fact that the trade they inherited from their father, who moved to Cairo from the southern province of Sohag in the 1990s, is dying.

Homeowners used to be a lot more easy going before the economic crisis, Ibrahim says, and he had built a rapport with several of them.

Now, they haggle aggressively over the prices of their unwanted scrap, often showing the brothers listings from online marketplaces to drive prices up. Many of them also conduct de facto auctions between robabikya collectors, selling the item to the highest bidder.

“All we hear about from the homes we visit now is how high prices are. They tell us that’s the reason they can’t sell stuff to us any more. And I understand where they’re coming from. People don’t really have money to buy new appliances and furniture so they want to make the most out of what they do have. Even if it is technically scrap,” Ahmed says.

Even their presence and calls of "bikya!" are much less welcome than they used to be. Whereas two years ago people would wave from their balconies even if they did not have anything to sell, today they often tell their doormen no to let the brothers in and to ask them to keep the street quiet.

“One guy who is a police officer stands on his balcony with a birdshot rifle and shoots at us as we pass. He chased us down the street in his car one time. Told us not to come back and make the street dirty,” Ibrahim says.

The sales to robabikya collectors always had an element of charity to them, with homeowners knowing that the value of their items was probably higher than what they were being paid. But because the job is most often done by Egypt’s poorest, they accepted the exchange.

Thousands of unskilled labourers in Egypt, faced with limited career prospects, turned to collecting and reselling robabikya. The trade is a perfect example of Egypt’s informal sector, which accounts for more than 60 per cent of the country’s GDP.

“Many people like me from Upper Egypt or from the Delta do this job. We didn’t have the means to be actual salesmen, so we started selling other people’s old stuff. If it’s a machine, we either sell it for parts or repair it and sell it as used. If it’s furniture, we take it apart and sell the fabrics and the wood,” Ibrahim says.

The brothers are now considering a move to Libya, where many of their family and friends have had better fortune.

“About 35 friends and family members of mine have left Egypt in the past few years because there’s no work to do here. They are always telling me I should go to Libya where they are and I would make good money," Ibrahim says.

"I was always scared of the stories I heard of random shootings and unsafe conditions. But I don’t think we can keep this going for much longer so it’s getting harder to say no.”

When their trade dropped in Heliopolis, the brothers decided to try their luck in one of the new satellite cities being built east of Cairo, near the New Administrative Capital where many affluent Egyptians have relocated.

“Within two hours of getting there, we were detained by the police who told us to leave because our kind of work was not welcome there,” Ibrahim says. “There’s no place for people like us it seems.”

The morning calls of "bikya!" are a familiar sound in many of Egypt's largest cities. Despite being a somewhat romanticised occupation depicted extensively in many films and novels, robabikya collectors are also viewed with suspicion by more conservative Egyptians who often assume they are criminals.

Others feel that the job is simply no longer relevant with the advent of internet marketplaces.

“It was charming of course, the whole robabikya thing. But the way in which it is done is incongruent with the internet and where the country is headed now," says Afaf Hasssanein, 58, a Heliopolis resident.

"People aren’t interested in someone screaming at them in the early morning to collect old fridges. They can now quietly log on to a marketplace and sell it for a good price,” Mr Hassanein says, noting that “that Egypt is gone now".

"I was born in the 1960s and by the 1980s, the country was entirely unrecognisable to me. Many jobs disappear this way.”