A Sudanese university enlists women to wage peace in a country marred by war
A bus crowded with talkative, exuberant young women winds its way along a dirt road, spraying plumes of fine dust over the mud-brick walls and patched-together tents of a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city. When the bus stops inside a fenced compound that houses a clinic, pharmacy, and multipurpose classroom, the women, who are all university students, gather in the shade of a lone tree, where they hastily don costumes and rehearse their lines, a few of them drawing fake beards on their chins.
Parched and sprawling, this camp, whose name, Dar El Salaam, means “place of peace” in Arabic, houses some 20,000 refugees, primarily from Sudan’s long-running civil war. Most fled villages in the remote deserts and lush swamps of the south years ago, crossing huge expanses of barren wilderness only to find themselves trapped here in this grim purgatory, with slim prospects of finding jobs or acceptance among Arab northerners.
Sitting behind battered metal desks, some of the women from the camp wait in a crowded classroom for their visitors. The refugee women are dressed in colorful, flowing traditional cloaks, called thopes, with babies and squirming toddlers in tow.
With her hair tied up in pigtails and her voice pitched high to imitate a child’s, Shaza Abdul Halim Awad Omer, a medical student, skips to the front of the classroom and sits down on the floor, pretending to play. Her “mother,” another student, breezes in and happily informs her that a man from a rich family has just asked to marry her. “Oh, will he buy me nice toys?” Ms. Omer asks sweetly, prompting laughter from the audience.
The tone of the skit is comic, but the subject matter is no joke. As Ms. Omer later explains, her aim is to convince the women gathered here that the practice of forcing girls to marry young, though sometimes viewed as an economic necessity in poor families, deprives girls of education and puts their health at risk.
“I was 13 years old,” she says, describing her character in the skit. “I wanted to play, but they forced me to get married. So then I got pregnant, but my pelvis was too small for me to give birth, so I died and the baby died also.”
The performers are all students at the Ahfad University for Women, Sudan’s only all-female institution of higher learning. They have come from their campus, in Omdurman, to take part in the university’s annual Rural Extension Program, which is required of all fourth-year students. It involves their traveling in groups to impoverished communities across Sudan in order to share their knowledge with local people and, more importantly, experience firsthand the hardships of rural life.
In a country marred by deeply rooted, interlocking wars and tightly controlled by an authoritarian, Islamic-fundamentalist government, the university, with its unique mission of educating women to respond to the needs of society, as well as confront societal boundaries, has paradoxically flourished.
Ahfad was established as an elementary school in 1907 by a broad-minded soldier-turned-merchant named Sheikh Babiker Badri, who wanted to educate his 13 daughters at a time when most considered the idea deeply shameful. The institution has pioneered women’s education in Sudan for a century, weathering successive military coups and resisting vigorous state clampdowns on higher education.
Now, as war rages in Western Darfur, and a fragile peace hangs in the balance in southern Sudan, the university’s mission to train Sudanese women from all walks of life as leaders, peacemakers, and women’s-rights advocates has taken on a new urgency.
Taking the Lead
“It has been the role of Ahfad since its inception to make changes in society,” says Amna Badri, vice president for academic affairs. “Whatever we do, at the beginning we find that it does not find wide acceptance in society. Which is an indication that you have a vision: You are seeing things that other people are not seeing yet.”
When the university introduced women’s studies as a subject in the 1980s, for example, conservative Muslims were scandalized to discover that it had little to do with cooking or child rearing.
In the following decade, local clerics thundered against the university when its clinic began offering contraceptives, until the clinic supervisor won them over with the argument that the Koran sanctions family planning by encouraging mothers to suckle their infants for two years to space pregnancies.
And while the government waged its “holy war” against the darker-skinned Christian and animist tribes of the south, Ahfad lecturers traveled to those underdeveloped regions in search of promising young women who would be able to use a university education to bring benefits back to their communities.
These days, when mistrust between the north and south threatens to undo the peace process, the university’s commitment to educating southern women and equipping them to help rebuild their region has set an example for the rest of society to follow, says Alfred Taban, a prominent newspaper editor from southern Sudan, who lives in Khartoum.
“They have resisted the government, and they have begun to bring more and more southerners” into the university, he says. “This is one important way that unity can actually be brought about.”
In Darfur, Ahfad lecturers and graduates have been working to ensure that humanitarian aid gets to refugees, and fighting for the legal rights of women who have been raped during raids on villages and refugee camps.
“When you go to Darfur or to the southern region, you find that many of the development projects are being run by graduates of Ahfad,” says Shadia Abdel Rahim Mohammed, who is dean of the School of Rural Extension, Education, and Development at Ahfad.
Current students talk about following in their footsteps. One of them is Majda Omer Idriss. In 1989, the same year that Sudan’s Islamic-fundamentalist government grabbed power in a military coup, Ms. Omer Idriss left school at the age of 15 to become a wife. “I wanted to study,” she says in Arabic, telling her story with the help of a translator. “But the traditions of my village forced me to marry.”
That was also the year that conflict flared up in the hills surrounding her home in southwestern Darfur. War spread on the heels of a devastating famine that pitted local herding and farming tribes against one another in competition for scarce resources. After rival tribesmen attacked her village and burned it to the ground, Ms. Omer Idriss and her family fled across a vast desert to the eventual refuge of a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Khartoum.
For the next 17 years, politics, poverty, and gender all seemed to conspire against her. Divorced four years after she married, living as a refugee with three small children to fend for, she eked out a living selling tea from a market stall in one of Khartoum’s vast slums.
Outgoing and gregarious, a natural community organizer, Ms. Omer Idriss connected with local women’s-rights activists concerned about police harassment of market women like her. Eventually she landed a scholarship to study rural development at Ahfad.
After four months of study, her English is still halting, but her enthusiasm is palpable in her frequent smiles. She speaks of returning to Darfur after she graduates to promote the return of peace as well as equality for women.
For now at least, the prospects for peace in Darfur appear slim, as the government refuses to let United Nations’ peacekeepers secure the area.
But even as hopes fade in Darfur, there is cautious optimism in the south, where a 2005 treaty between the government in Khartoum and the southern Sudanese rebels ended more than 40 years of civil war.
The treaty has prompted the first waves of refugees to return to their devastated homes and forced the government to take reluctant steps toward democracy. National elections are to be held within the next couple of years. And then, in a crucial 2011 referendum, the southern Sudanese will vote whether to share power with Khartoum or to secede from the north. Ahfad lecturers and graduates are gearing up to support those processes.
“There is a huge need for voter education,” says Sonia Malik, a lecturer in women’s studies. “People don’t know anything about democracy. They don’t know their rights.”
Linking North and South
To an outsider, Ahfad seems steeped in local history, in sharp contrast to its modern ideals. The stern-faced portrait of Sheikh Badri adorns many an office wall and looms large in the library atrium, his steadfast gaze reflecting an era. Yet the university is also fiercely modern, particularly in its efforts to encompass the diversity and bridge the racial, religious and class divisions of society.
While many of Khartoum’s elite send their daughters to Ahfad — the adopted daughter of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, for example, is a graduate — 20 percent of places are reserved for students from marginalized areas like Darfur and the south, and the majority of students receive some financial aid.
On the campus, the diversity of Sudan is reflected in the faces and the dress of its nearly 5,000 students. Some women have the tall, dark, and slender look of the southern Dinka people, while a tiny minority of others wears veils that fully cover their faces, much more in the style of Saudi Arabia than Africa.
While full-length skirts and headscarves for women are considered de rigueur on most campuses around Khartoum, some students at Ahfad wear jeans and go bareheaded. And while other Sudanese universities bowed to a government decree in 1991 that Arabic be used in education, Ahfad simply ignored it. “We didn’t ask them about it, and they didn’t ask us,” shrugs Gasim Badri, the president of Ahfad. Lecturers repeat in English much of what they say in class for their southern students who do not understand Arabic.
In the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden lived in Khartoum and government repression was at its peak, the religious police used to stand outside the gates of Ahfad and wait to pounce on improperly dressed students. In one incident, police arrested 15 students traveling home on a university bus and hauled them to the station, where they were each given 15 lashes for wearing trousers.
Situated in the ancient city of Omdurman, which sits opposite Khartoum at the broad nexus where the Blue Nile and the White Nile converge, Ahfad’s modern and rather drab brick campus contrasts starkly with the crumbling souks and towering minarets of mosques that surround it. A little farther from campus is the glistening silver dome of the Mahdist temple, built to commemorate the instigator of an illustrious but short-lived rebellion against British and Egyptian occupiers. Sheikh Badri was a soldier in the Mahdi’s army.
A Family Tradition
On these streets and in their bustling marketplaces, mention of the founder’s name still draws approving smiles and reverent intonations from white-robed men, some of whom have draped cotton scarves embroidered with the colors of their Sufi sects over their shoulders. “He was a visionary,” one says, nodding.
The word Ahfad, fittingly, means “grandchildren.” When Sheikh Badri died in 1964, his son Yousef took over and gradually expanded Ahfad to the university level. Sheikh Badri’s grandson, Gasim, has been the university’s president since 1995.
The university, which is financed largely by tuition and private donations, now has six schools: family sciences; health sciences; pharmacy; rural extension, education, and development; management studies; and psychology and preschool education. It offers graduate programs in nutrition and gender studies. Many of its academic programs are regarded as the best in the country, and a number of the lecturers are Ahfad graduates. There are also Ahfad elementary and secondary schools for both girls and boys, but the university admits only women.
“Some of our girls enter Ahfad at prekindergarten and leave at Ph.D. level,” says the president’s sister, Nafisa, who is an assistant professor in the School of Health Sciences.
Some Badris bristle at the notion that Ahfad remains a family-run institution. “It’s not a family institution; it was the first institution to be founded by the Sudanese people,” insists Babiker Badri, an assistant professor in the School of Rural Extension, Education, and Development and another grandchild of Sheikh Babiker Badri.
Throughout much of each day, students traipse in and out of President Gasim Badri’s cavernous brick-walled office, seeking help with course requirements or money problems. Tall and slightly stooped, wearing jeans and sandals, he deals affably with throngs of students, joking and pinching cheeks. “There is an open-door policy here,” he says good-naturedly. “Otherwise people would disturb others and then come and disturb me also. So instead of letting them disturb others, I let them come see me.”
Mr. Badri has been so popular with students that in one famous incident several years ago, students swarmed around police officers and drove them off the campus when they tried to arrest him, allegedly for failing to pay the zakat, a religious tithe that all businesses must pay under sharia, or Islamic law.
Incremental Changes
For all its professed liberalism, however, some critics say that in working within the confines of Sudan’s authorities instead of confronting them directly, Ahfad has had to water down its ideals. “To have such an institution as Ahfad is a positive thing, definitely, but they can do more,” says Alhaj Warrag, a prominent liberal journalist. “I call their approach a lenient form of modernization. It’s so mild, it cannot contribute to change effectively.”
Indeed, the kinds of changes being achieved at Ahfad are of a more incremental than earth-shattering sort. Spreading across her desk issues of the student magazine, Alnisf Alwaid, which means “the promising half,” the editorial supervisor, Hadia Mohamed Hasaball, shudders involuntarily as one cover photograph catches her eye. It shows the face of a wailing little girl being held down, her eyes covered by an adult hand, as she is about to be circumcised.
Female genital mutilation is still widely practiced in Sudan, but thanks in part to the awareness and advocacy work of institutions like Ahfad, experts say, the practice is waning. The challenge for Sudan, Ms. Mohamed Hasaball says, is to find a way to embrace modernity that still preserves traditional values of hospitality, respect, and tolerance.
For the past week, the students traveling to the Dar El Salaam refugee camp have been grappling with that challenge. They have met daily with local women — as well as a few skeptical men — to discuss sensitive topics like family planning, HIV and AIDS, and female genital mutilation, all of which are normally taboo.
In the process, they have been struck by the poverty and the despair of these women and dismayed by the alcoholic men and disheveled children who roam the camp.
Inside the classroom, one woman wearing a bright yellow thope watches the presentations, visibly engrossed by the ideas being presented, as her young daughter crawls around her feet. The previous day, a couple of students were prevented from demonstrating the proper use of condoms, after a man in the audience objected.
And after today’s presentation on female genital mutilation, some women in the audience maintain that abhorrent as the practice may be, they still intend to subject their daughters to it so that they will not be prevented from marrying.
“Conditions are very bad here,” says Amel Zohair, a student in the School of Family Sciences, as a curious group of ragged children gathers around her, one of them smiling and reaching for her hand. “It’s hard to come here, but it’s important. You feel like you are doing something very good.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 19, Page A36