“My family had been trying to change things in Egypt for decades,” she says. As they walked through the university, Seif clung to her mother. “She wasn’t happy: ‘Sanaa, I told you this isn’t a good day.’” “I called my mum, who collected me,” Seif says. At the gates, she was detained by police. The teen was given short shrift: “I don’t have time for this, there are campus protests, your mother is busy.” So Seif headed to the campus to track her down. But I had a party that night which I didn’t want to miss.” Short on money for the evening ahead, Seif called her mother, asking for cash. “I’d heard there were protests happening that day,” Seif remembers. History marks 25 January 2011 as the start of Egypt’s revolution. But I was shielded from the details – a spoiled brat.” I knew there was inequality, and that my father had issues with the authorities. “Nobody spoke about anything serious in front of me. “But I was the youngest child,” Seif says. Raised in the north of the capital, she came from a well-known political family: her father, Ahmed Seif, was a respected human rights lawyer, while her British-born mother, Laila Soueif, was an academic and activist at the University of Cairo. Seif was barely 17 in January 2011, when the Egyptian revolution started. Maybe I’m naive not to have realised it earlier, but Cairo was never going to be safe again.” “I had to accept that could be my future,” says Seif. Opposite were the cells where those facing a death sentence were detained. “I had time to think – this was my third stretch inside.” During exercise breaks, there was a tree in the courtyard under which she would sit and consider her options. “It took a lot of contemplation,” she says, sitting at the kitchen table of her temporary London home and reflecting on her most recent time in prison. It meant leaving the country where her brother, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, is jailed and on hunger strike. For the 28-year-old pro-democracy activist, going into exile didn’t only involve saying goodbye to home, friends and family. T he decision to leave Cairo wasn’t one Sanaa Seif made lightly, despite the long stretches in prison, vicious beatings and threats of worse to come from Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s repressive regime.

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