League of Nations Mandate of the Nile

Ligo de Nacioj Mandato de la Nilo (Esperanto)

Flag: Star Within Star

Map: Nile River Delta

Capital and Largest City: Old Mansoura

Official Language: Esperanto

Recognised Languages: Arabic, English, and French

Government: Unitary Demarchy

Head of State: Commissioner Rana Tadros

History

As the League of Nations reached terminal decline in the late 1940’s, the British Government elected to take on a number of its successful international projects and sponsor their continuation. The League Treaties Organisation (hereafter simply: the League) was created to manage the Slavery Commission, Health Organisation, and the Commission on the Status of Women, in the form of international binding treaties and agreements. From their offices in the Casa d’Italia building in Port Said, this new group struggled to continue their work under stringent British budgets and an increasingly hostile world.

As nuclear proliferation began at an alarming rate, the League’s administration came to the conclusion that preparations needed to be made to continue their projects following an apocalyptic event. Determining that Port Said was always going to be a target, they began moving materials to the village of Shirbin, on the Nile Delta, on the pretense of establishing an educational facility there. Mis-timing the end of all things by a number of years, the project was shut down by the British Armed Forces and the League was put on ice following an investigation into expenses, leaving the facility intact but derelict under British supervision.

When the End did come, there was no formal League plan left in place, and the administrators do not appear in later records again. What we do know however, is that the substantial international force garrisoned on the banks of the Suez Canal were largely abandoned by their home nations following the nuclear destruction of Port Said. During the crucial first month of activity, leadership of the region fell to Youssef Seddik, an Officer who had taken his remnant from the old Egyptian border west to the Canal. Initially he made to rendezvous with the remnant Egyptian government in Cairo, but radio communication was lost before they could arrive. As food supplies dwindled, the host made camp in Mansoura, around the old Red Palace building.

In the Quiet Years that followed, the group found what remained of the League’s cache in Shirbin, with its detailed instructions for post-nuclear survival, token canned supplies, and even small stockpiles of clean linen and seeds. Finding it curiously prescient, the group began to take on the symbol of the League as their own, and the remaining documents as inspiration for a new future in the wasteland.

After two generations in the dark, the League finds itself the major surviving organisation in the Delta, and has expanded its reach to cover even the radioactive remnants of Cairo, Port Said, and Alexandria. Establishing the Nile Mandate, they have attempted to reinterpret and reconstruct the old world from their capital-complex in Mansoura, expecting to be one of the few remaining sources of civilization in the world.

Summary

Clinging onto a vision of the old world perhaps too idealistic to have ever existed, the irradiated and struggling administration in Mansour uses stockpiles of cheap firearms to assert their control over the gradually recovering farmland of the Nile Delta and the ruins of the Suez Canal. Within the walled city itself, the residents argue and deliberate over ways to rebuild the world, and random selections of screened citizenry are elected to manage their visions over ten year blocks. They rule over a citizenry descended from refugees, soldiers, and indigenous Greeks and Egyptian Arabs, all jostling for property and the right to be part of a profitable government commission.

Aggressively secular and pragmatic, the state has been forced to harshly stamp out local national 'eccentricities', treading an uncomfortable line between necessary sacrifice and totalitarianism. Currently on the tail end of a full mandatory standardization of currency, language, and legal status, the new Commissioner Rana Tadros is eager to explore the wilderness and take control of the upper stretches of the Nile.

Whether the idealistic but flawed Mandate can survive contact with the greater world remains to be seen.