The Mandela Doppelganger

Founded in 1945, the Cairo American College began as the Cairo School for American Children. Over the years, it has educated its share of international luminaries, including Queen Rania of Jordan, former American CIA Director John Brennan and Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of the former Shah of Iran. Despite the name, it is not a college as we think of it, but an elite private school, so when my daughter entered her third-grade classroom in 2005, her classmates included the grandson of then-President Hosni Mubarak, the daughter of the Israeli Ambassador to Egypt, and others whose family names regularly appeared in the newspaper.

I used to walk my daughter to school almost daily and whenever I could, I would linger for the first period of the day- technology. The class was learning IT skills, frequently keyboarding through a game called Typer Shark.

If you’ve never seen it, imagine a bright blue underwater screen. Cartoon sharks glide from right to left across the monitor, each one carrying a word or string of letters on its side. The faster you type the letters correctly, the faster the shark swims away. Miss a letter, and the shark keeps swimming closer. It’s half arcade game, half typing tutor. The room would fill with the gentle clatter of keys and the occasional triumphant “Yes!” when a particularly long word was conquered.

Those mornings were a window into a world I did not fully understand. The children were eight years old, but they carried assumptions that felt decades older.

One boy in particular rarely bothered to chase the sharks. He would sit back, hands folded, occasionally tapping at the keyboard without urgency.

“Why aren’t you playing?” I asked him once.

He shrugged. “I don’t need to know typing,” he said casually. “We have people to do that.”

I paused. “People?” I asked. 

Several boys nearby nodded in agreement and added, “Yeah. Typing is something that we won’t need to know.” Other children stared at their screens, their faces tightening almost imperceptibly before they resumed firing at digital sharks. Even at eight, some of them understood that something about that statement didn’t sit quite right.

I knew these children were privileged in ways I could not imagine. The boy who mentioned his people was a scion of a prominent family that owned many of the car dealerships in Cairo, as well as a chain of optical stores, and a private hospital  for good measure. But knowing something intellectually is different from seeing how it is embodied in the everyday confidence of a child who assumes the world will arrange itself around him.

Even with children who appeared more down to earth, a chasm between our worlds might reveal itself in unexpected ways. My daughter was invited to a birthday party for one of the girls in the class, and parents were invited to stay. The birthday girl’s family dealt in art and antiquities, providing the shipping for golden pharaonic treasures when they toured the world. The girl’s home was as anticipated, built around a hand-laid mosaic-tiled courtyard with a fountain in the center. At one point during the party, the birthday girl rode her pony—actually her favorite pony—through an arched doorway into that courtyard so it could drink from the fountain. The scene felt like something out of a 19th-century novel about minor royalty, complete with servants scurrying to collect the inevitable deposits on the tiles.

My daughter absorbed all of this with wide eyes. She understood that, by the standards of her classmates, we were “poor.” We lived comfortably, but there were no ponies in our courtyard—no courtyard, in fact, and we did not have a retinue of servants, or the means to afford even one. Yet she also understood something more nuanced: by the standards of her Egyptian relatives, we were extraordinarily privileged. Her school had reliable electricity and far fewer than 60 kids in a classroom. Privilege, she was learning, is relative. It depends entirely on where you stand.

Her classmates would talk about trips to Europe as if discussing a routine trip to the grocery store. One girl complained bitterly that on their last trip to Paris she had to fly coach with the nanny while her parents flew business class. The injustice of it all.

I didn’t fully grasp the effect this kind of upbringing might have on children until the biography project.

Each student had to read a biography of a famous person and create a presentation with visuals. Some chose American heroes like Helen Keller. Others ventured further back into history and landed on Leonardo da Vinci. The posters were colorful, carefully lettered, sometimes suspiciously polished in a way that suggested adult “assistance.”

My daughter, showing her bona fides as the child of an aid worker, chose Nelson Mandela.

She was captivated by the photographs of his cell on Robben Island—the narrow bed, the small window, the starkness of it. She studied images of apartheid in action: segregated benches, protest marches, police lines. Her poster featured a large portrait of Mandela in the center, surrounded like the numbers on a clock by scenes from his life—imprisonment, struggle, release, the Truth and Reconciliation period that marked his presidency.

I took the afternoon off work so I could sit unobtrusively in the back of the classroom. There is a particular kind of pride a parent feels when watching a child present something they have built from scratch. 

The presentations rolled on. Children spoke confidently about inventions, bravery, genius. Then it was her turn.

She began with Mandela’s early life, moved into the system of apartheid, explaining it carefully—laws that separated people by race, that limited where they could live or work, and who they could love. She walked her classmates around the “clock face” of photographs, her small finger pointing to each image in sequence. She ended with his release from prison, his election as president, and his choice to pursue reconciliation over revenge.

The teacher smiled. “Any questions?”

A hand shot up from the front row. Mohamed T.

“Wow!” he said brightly. “He looks just like my servant, David!”

Another boy nodded. “I was thinking the same thing!”

There was a ripple of laughter—not cruel, not even particularly loud. Just casual. Observational.

And with that, the presentation was over.

The teacher, perhaps unsure how to respond, moved on. The poster was handed back to me for safekeeping.

My daughter walked toward me, her eyes searching my face. Even in her eight-year-old mind, she sensed that something had tilted. She didn’t yet have the language for systemic inequality or internalized hierarchy. But she knew the moment had not landed the way she intended.

I can’t say I was unhappy when her time at the school came to an end and we repatriated to the United States. She kept in touch with several classmates, but not with the boy who had the Mandela doppelgänger servant.

Later, I learned more about his family. His father was a Libyan billionaire businessman with vast holdings across industries, a man whose wealth placed him in the rarefied stratosphere of global power. He had been a supporter of Ghadaffi and then saw the writing on the wall and turned on him to support a warlord with a cadre of strongmen and then threw his weight behind the campaign of a renegade general opposed to Libya’s U.N.-recognized government. 

It clicked then. These were part of the 1% of the world— from families whose resources and privileges are unfathomable to most of us.

And yet. They were still eight-year-olds chasing cartoon sharks across a computer screen. They were still children who wanted to win a game, impress a teacher, and laugh with friends.

But privilege shapes perspective. It can narrow empathy if left unexamined. It can create blind spots so large they swallow history itself. But it does not erase humanity.

What I carried away from that classroom in Cairo was clarity. Wealth can buy comfort, access, insulation—even a pony in a mosaic courtyard. It cannot, on its own, teach humility. It cannot guarantee understanding. Those things must be modeled, named, practiced.

And sometimes, they are learned not from the front row—but from a poster about a man who spent 27 years in a prison cell and emerged determined to build a world large enough for everyone.