For the boy who grew up taking family picnics between the paws of Egypt’s Great Sphinx, it is fitting that his ascension to head the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) comes just weeks before the opening of a new $300mn museum in Giza.
Getting 55 votes out of a possible 57, Egyptologist Khaled al-Anani was elected UNESCO’s next director-general at the organisation’s headquarters on Place de Fontenoy Square in Paris on 6 October. He is the first Arab to hold the position, and only the second African. Few subscribe more fully to UNESCO’s motto, that “heritage is our shared story”.
The man who once guided tourists through Egypt’s pyramids is now the guardian of humanity’s collective memory, from the Amazon’s vanishing tongues to the digital vaults of endangered archives. Born in the shadows of Giza’s pyramids, hearing the traffic over the call of the muezzins and distant hum of archaeological digs, al-Anani was cradled in a world between myth and modernity.
The new UNESCO head’s father was a civil servant and engineer who embodied the dedication of Egypt’s middle class. A job on the side paid for young Khaled to get the French schooling he coveted. His father took him to the ancient sites in different parts of Egypt as a boy. Wide-eyed, Khaled recalls tracing hieroglyphs with a stick in the dust, symbols that whispered of gods and eternity.
His mother, a French teacher, wove language into this tapestry of wonder, and at home, Arabic flowed seamlessly into French. It was here that al-Anani learned that stories usually transcend borders. He attended a French-speaking secondary school in Cairo, earning his Baccalaureate in 1988 with a scientific bent that pleased his father, who hoped his son would help design Egypt’s industrial future.
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