Khartoum at Night

Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan

Marie Grace Brown

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In the first half of the twentieth century, a pioneering generation of young women exited their homes and entered public space, marking a new era for women's civic participation in northern Sudan. A provocative new public presence, women's civic engagement was at its core a bodily experience. Amid the socio-political upheavals of imperial rule, female students, medical workers, and activists used a careful choreography of body movements and fashion to adapt to imperial mores, claim opportunities for political agency, and shape a new standard of modern, mobile womanhood.

Khartoum at Night is the first English-language history of these women's lives, examining how their experiences of the British Empire from 1900–1956 were expressed on and through their bodies. Central to this story is the tobe: a popular, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman's head and body. Marie Grace Brown shows how northern Sudanese women manipulated the tucks, folds, and social messages of the tobe to deftly negotiate the competing pulls of modernization and cultural authenticity that defined much of the imperial experience. Her analysis weaves together the threads of women's education and activism, medical midwifery, urban life, consumption, and new behaviors of dress and beauty to reconstruct the worlds of politics and pleasure in which early-twentieth-century Sudanese women lived.

CHAPTER 1

THE POST OFFICE PEN

The Imperial Mission

In 1907 in a tiny classroom in the small town of Rufa‘a, seventeen young girls were reading and writing nonsense words. They belonged to the initial class of the Rufa‘a Girls’ School, a bold experiment to determine if formal education in reading, writing, and arithmetic was appropriate for Sudanese girls. Because the students had no previous knowledge of the written alphabet, their headmaster, Sheikh Babikr Bedri, devised a primer that introduced groups of similar letters and combined them into “words” so that his pupils could practice pronouncing each sound. When the girls had learned just eleven letters, Ernest Dickinson, the governor of the province, paid the school a visit. The young students carefully and proudly recited what they had learned. Luckily for Bedri and his experiment, Dickinson himself knew little of the Arabic alphabet. He wrote in amazement to the Director of Education that after just a few weeks of schooling, the Rufa‘a girls already knew how to read and write!¹

Several forces combined to make this moment possible, not the least of which was the ambition of Sheikh Babikr Bedri, a merchant and veteran of the Mahdi’s army. It was opportune that his vision for girls’ education matched the imperial mindset of civilizing reform.² Invisible behind the high walls of the harem and the folds of their tobes, Sudanese women were thought to be particularly oppressed. Bringing women and girls out of the shadows and educating them in the basics of literacy, arithmetic, and modern domestic habits formed a central pillar of Britain’s administration of Sudan. The imperialists were joined in their project by a nascent group of progressive reformers like Bedri, who argued that women’s segregation from social and political spheres was detrimental to the strength of modern nations. Although their tactics often diverged, both imperialists and reformers agreed that women and their bodies, hidden or seen, educated or illiterate, healthy or ill-formed, stood as a measure of society’s modernity and civility as a whole. Crucially, it was the British imperialists and not the Sudanese who set the standards of visibility, education, and bodily integrity. And, as with Dickinson’s unfamiliarity with the basic Arabic lesson, misunderstandings and mistranslations abounded. Nevertheless, the seventeen young girls in Rufa‘a were undeniable evidence that imperial interest in redirecting and redeeming the lives of Sudanese women had begun.

GORDON’S SUDAN

For much of the nineteenth century, Sudan was one of the most distant provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It was administered via the Khedive of Egypt, itself a part of the Ottoman lands. The vast territory was a difficult province to rule; harsh geography and incredible ethnic and linguistic diversity prompted control through force, rather than diplomacy. Government corruption was endemic. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as Egypt and much of the rest of Ottoman Empire were undergoing an intense period of modernization and social and economic restructuring, Sudan stagnated under heavy taxation and lost livelihoods due to the abolition of the slave trade. An opportunity for change came in 1879, when, after driving his country to bankruptcy, Khedive Ismail of Egypt was deposed in favor of his son, Muhammad Tawfiq. It was as clear to the Sudanese as the Egyptians that young Tawfiq would be no more than a puppet for foreign interests, namely Great Britain and France. With the Egyptian Government weakened and distracted, the time seemed ripe in Sudan for revolt.

In 1881, a noted religious ascetic named Muhammad Ahmed ibn Abdallah proclaimed himself to be “al-Mahdi,” the anticipated rightly-guided leader within Islam who was to bring divine justice at the end of days. His message of religious renewal and a return to Islam’s true origins was especially appealing to those who suffered economic hardships under Ottoman rule. Religious adherents, boatsmen, slave traders, and soldiers of fortune all united under the Mahdi’s promise of an economic and political revival that would be made possible through military conquest and a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Ottoman officials recognized the threat of the Mahdi’s philosophy and quickly sent a small force to capture him. They were easily defeated, as were subsequent expeditions dispatched over the next year. The victories of spears and clubs over the firearms and better training of British-led Egyptian troops lent credence to the claim that ibn Abdallah was in fact the expected Mahdi and that a religious revolution was near.

The rapid and unexpected military victories of the Mahdi drew the attention of the British, who had just settled into their offices in Cairo after putting down an Egyptian nationalist uprising in 1881. And though some strategists argued that the Mahdi posed just as much threat to regional stability as the Egyptian nationalists, Great Britain had neither the military resources nor the diplomatic support to deploy a full set of troops to quell what should have been no more than minor tribal skirmishes. Instead, the government in London proffered a small evacuation force under the command of British hero Major-General Charles George Gordon. “Chinese” Gordon had risen to military prominence in the 1860s, when he led Chinese forces in defeating the Taiping Rebellion and distinguished himself as a man who could work his way out of difficult situations. He was also no stranger to Sudan. From 1874 to 1880, in the joint service of the British army and the Egyptian Khedive, Gordon traveled throughout Sudan suppressing local revolts and attempting to halt the lucrative slave trade that shipped captured Africans up the White Nile to Khartoum and then on to Egypt. Although he had resigned from his Sudan post due to exhaustion, in 1884 Gordon answered his government’s call to return to the volatile region and avert a potential military crisis.

When Gordon arrived in Sudan in February 1884, he carried two conflicting sets of orders. One, to evacuate the Anglo-Egyptian troops and civilians remaining in Khartoum; and the other, to restore good government—meaning one that would acquiesce to Ottoman control and thus, indirectly, to British interests. By mistake or for reasons known only to him, while on his way to Khartoum Gordon published the set of orders announcing the evacuation. From these documents, it seemed clear to the Mahdi and his supporters that Egypt was ready to abdicate its authority in Sudan. Gordon had lost all diplomatic leverage. Once in Khartoum, the seasoned general surprised onlookers yet again when he refused to abandon the city and dug in for a long siege. Over the next year, Gordon’s increasingly desperate entreaties to Cairo and London to send reinforcements and supplies were ignored, refused, and then finally, reluctantly met. When the relief column reached Khartoum on January 28, 1885, they were too late. Just two days earlier, Gordon had been killed and the city had fallen.

The capture of Khartoum and the death of Gordon secured Mahdist control of central riverain Sudan. The Mahdi himself unexpectedly died six months later, leaving an infant son, Sayyid Abd al-Rahman, who would carry his father’s religious and political clout into the twentieth century. The Mahdi’s immediate successor, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, worked tirelessly to strengthen the new state and insulate it from Ottoman, Egyptian, or British control. He relocated Sudan’s capital from Khartoum to Omdurman and called on all true believers to join him in the Mahdi’s chosen city. Khartoum’s grandest houses were dismantled and bricks, doors, balconies, windows, and ironworks were shipped eight miles west across the White Nile to Omdurman. There, the new government constructed storehouses, a hospital, a treasury, a soap factory, a prison, and an impressive tomb for their fallen leader.³ With independence secured, the new state turned to the task of implementing the messianic vision of the Mahdi, but was weakened by political rivalries, a severe famine, and economic downturns. Lacking the charisma of the Mahdi, for the next fifteen years Abdallahi ruled through a combination of religious invectives and fear.

More than building materials flooded into Omdurman. Tens of thousands heeded Abdallahi’s call to come to the new capital, abandoning their tribal homelands for life in the city for the first time. Omdurman’s population exploded to at least a quarter of a million people, three-quarters of whom were women.⁴ Wives followed their soldiering husbands to the city, widows sought compensation or new husbands, and still other women labored as camp followers, providing domestic comforts to married and unmarried men. Large numbers of female slaves were also imported to provide sexual services or be traded as political bargaining chips. The sheer number of women upset economic and power relations. Masters who had once profited from the earnings of their female slaves in market stalls and merissa (beer) shops now faced a rapidly dwindling market share. Many forced their slaves to seek their own means of shelter and income. And though slave women were expected to remit a portion of their earnings to their masters, a good number took advantage of the economic crisis to distance themselves from their masters’ control.⁵

The challenge of governing this diverse, newly urban population was one of the lasting legacies of the Mahdist period. The Mahdi’s conquest of Sudan had been a cultural as well as military campaign. As the herald of the end of days, the Mahdi’s religious directive was to guide his followers, known as the Ansar, away from the sinful tendencies that had corrupted the population. He issued emergency laws prohibiting long-standing practices such as the sale and use of wine and tobacco and loud, excessive mourning for the dead. A further set of laws addressed women’s public appearance and behavior. Women were to cover their heads and bodies, and anyone who went about bareheaded was subject to being beaten. Women were also forbidden from entering the marketplace or looking after their cattle herds alongside men. Similarly, a man who was found speaking to a woman who was not his relative was punished with two months of fasting and one hundred lashes.⁶ The heavily female, overgrown city of Omdurman presented its own problems. A special corner of the marketplace, prohibited to men, was reserved for women traders and women-specific products. War widows also had to be provided for. In his lifetime, the Mahdi had prohibited excessive bride-prices and instructed the Ansar to marry the Islamic legal limit of four wives. Abdallahi continued to enforce these directives, so much so that one observer noted that Omdurman was “continuously occupied in marriage ceremonies.”⁷ Historian P. M. Holt explains that the severity of these social rules “should not be dismissed as mere blind conservatism.”⁸ Years of violence had uprooted the existing social order. Strict guidelines governing behavior and the relationships between men and women were necessary to maintain control over the disparate populations that formed the Mahdist state.

Fostering a sense of unity was critical for the Mahdist narrative of redemption. The Mahdi discouraged the use of foreign imports and forbade the Ansar from dressing like the “infidel Turks.” To demonstrate their allegiance and communal identity, men chose a new type of dress, consisting of a turban, knee-length cotton pants, and a variation of the local jallabiyya (robe) known as the jibba. The jibba had wide sleeves, pockets, and a neck scooped on both sides so that it could be worn back to front.⁹ Its most notable feature was the colorful patches sewn onto the garment, which were meant to represent a life of humbleness and poverty as espoused by the Mahdi. Notably, women’s tobes, though almost always an imported product, did not fall under the Mahdi’s edict against foreign goods. After a century of consistent use among the upper classes, the tobe had gained an air of local authenticity in spite of its foreign origins. More practically, as religious fervor increased under the Mahdi, the tobe aptly satisfied women’s need for chaste clothing. Together, strict legislation and changing forms of dress cemented a new identity characterized by a conservative, participatory version of Islam and resistance to foreign intervention. Faith and belonging were not simply spoken of, but acted upon. Thus, though relatively brief, the nearly two decades of Mahdist rule established a common set of values and behaviors that formed a cultural baseline for northern Sudanese nationalists generations later.

Back in England, the tragic death of General Charles Gordon brought a personal raison d’être to Britain’s continued involvement in Sudan that was unparalleled in other parts of the empire. Popular opinion held that Sudan was to be reclaimed and redeemed for Gordon, not because of its geographic positioning or economic resources, but for its as yet unrealized potential of which only their fallen hero seemed fully aware. But it would be fourteen more years before Great Britain reentered Sudan, this time as part of the larger European “Scramble for Africa.” In the spring of 1896, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany were jockeying for control of the Upper Nile basin in central Africa. When Italian forces were defeated by the Abyssinian king, Sir Herbert Kitchener moved his troop of Anglo-Egyptian forces south from Egypt into northern Sudan. The intent was to offer indirect support to the Italians while also asserting British authority in the region. An astute tactician, Kitchener constructed a system of railroads that allowed him to rapidly move and resupply his soldiers across the inhospitable desert. This time, the Mahdist forces were no match for the Anglo-Egyptian troops. The Ansar were weakened by starvation and infighting among their commanders. Towns and outposts systematically fell. Over the course of two years, what had begun as a feint or series of maneuvers transformed into a concentrated campaign to win back Sudan.

The battle that claimed Sudan for England began on the morning of September 2, 1898, and was over by that afternoon. On the plains outside of Omdurman, eleven thousand Mahdist soldiers were killed; the number of wounded cannot be estimated. In painful contrast, the Anglo-Egyptian forces lost only 48 men, with another 352 wounded. On September 4, a flag-raising ceremony hoisted the Union Jack and, a carefully measured instant later, the Egyptian flag above the ruined governor’s palace in Khartoum. The ceremony ended with a eulogy to General Gordon as a Roman Catholic priest entreated God to “look down . . . with eyes of pity and compassion on this land so loved by that heroic soul.”¹⁰ Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan had begun.

We have no direct evidence of how Sudanese women responded to the Anglo-Egyptian conquest, but they almost certainly felt fear and profound loss. The violence was not confined to the battlefield. Three days of looting followed the loss at Omdurman. Sheikh Babikr Bedri, who would go on to open the girls’ school at Rufa‘a, reported that Anglo-Egyptian soldiers “entered our homes and took and ate everything within reach of their eyes and hands.”¹¹ The town’s residents broke into the grain stores. Remaining able-bodied Mahdist soldiers were impressed into labor gangs. Most infamously, Kitchener’s troops destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb and threw his body into the Nile. Taking advantage of the chaos, slaves fled their owners or in some cases killed them. Bedri wrote, “On the day after the fall of Omdurman we saw corpses lying in al-Hijra street, and no one knew who they were or who had killed them.”¹² Women of Khartoum and Omdurman were witness and victim to violence and looting. And in the aftermath of the conquest it is likely that they were far more concerned with protecting and providing for their families than with the persons and politics of the new foreign government.

Just five days after the ceremony at the governor’s palace, news reached Omdurman that shots had been exchanged between English and French troops at Fashoda, a small town in southern Sudan. The town itself was of little importance, but France’s control of the territory would thwart British plans for north-south dominance in Africa, from “Cape Town to Cairo.” Kitchener, newly installed as Governor-General of Sudan, quickly sailed south to secure British interests in Sudan and, more generally, Africa. Kitchener was a man of action, better suited for the battlefield than administration. Thus, his governing role was short-lived. But as for the hundreds of B...