AFRICANEWS

Sudan

Women break free from cultural expectations

Women/Culture

Women in the Nuba Mountains of Central Sudan have organised and started programmes that will enable them to grow out of the strict roles that they have been assigned by their culture.

In the dusty village market of Gidel, deep in the Nuba Mountains, nineteen-year-old Koutto Idris stakes out her position on top of a massive boulder. Armed not with a gun, but with a Panasonic video camera, she starts filming the crowd in the market's dusty bazaar. The sun is blazing hot, but that doesn't deter her; she focuses her zoom lens onto a woman talking to a potential customer. Completely absorbed in her camera, Idris takes no notice of the exclamations and occasional rebukes from some villagers and continues with her filming. "I do not care what they say," she says with a determined face. "I just ignore their comments because it could generate doubt and I may lose confidence."

If it were in a different market place in Africa, the filming would be seen as just another leisure activity. But the energetic Idris is actually sharpening her skills as a camerawoman. She is among twenty other Nuba students involved in a two-month journalism course at Gidel. The course is one of several programmes organised by a Nuba-based NGO, the Nuba Women's Association (NWA), to empower Nuba women.

Founded in 1993, NWA has been undertaking various activities that are culturally meant for men. The association has made it clear that it wants to eliminate some of the cultural prejudices that for generations have subjugated women in this war-torn area of central Sudan. In Arabic, the lingua franca of the area, the NWA acronym means a nucleus. Thus, NWA sees itself as the nucleus from which a new, strong, and liberated Nuba woman will emerge. So far, the group has trained more than a hundred women tailors, eighty-four nurses, seven community workers, two journalists, and five senior women officers in the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). To achieve that, the NWA has chaired many workshops and seminars to empower women and to gain more gender balance.

The organisation has also called for compulsory education for women, cultural freedom for women, abolition of forced and under-age marriages, and sharing of duties with men. "The Nuba men depends entirely on us, especially in Heiban County where women look after children, cook, cultivate, and in some instances, build houses. At the present, this is acceptable due to men's enrolment in the liberation struggle," says Amna Asheia, the head of NWA in Nuba's Heiban County. Because of men's complete dependence on women, NWA started a weaving project to feed its tailoring project. Also, they started a grinding mill project to reduce the women's workload, as most women grind their grains using the traditional grinding stones. "But we still have a long way to go," says Asheia.

Until the group's advent in the area, many Nuba people used to view some of NWA's programmes as occupations meant for men. However, NWA officials didn't think so and set about debasing such notions that were strongest among the women. "Our challenge was, and is, not men, but fellow women who are yet to break away from oppressive cultural bondage," says Idris.

The situation was compounded by the war, which saw many Nuba women suffer untold atrocities at the hands of government troops and their militia allies. "A raped woman would never admit being raped to a man. So we had to create an avenue for such women to voice their suffering," says Asheia. Due to cultural barriers that hinder women from expressing their problems freely, many traumatised women returning from abduction by government troops or 'peace camps' couldn't bring themselves to speak about what happened to them.

The reason is that their interlocutors are men, who in Nuba society are supposed to be beyond reproach. Idris says that the fear of telling their experiences have left many women devastated, forcing many to withdraw socially while others have opted to remain in the camps rather than come home and suffer the stigma of rape. The so-called peace camps are special camps set up by the government to 'protect' Nuba civilians from the SPLA, but international human rights groups have equated them to concentration camps.

For some NWA officials such as Asheia, it has been a long journey. She and others got involved in liberation issues in the late 1980s when they joined a clandestine organisation, Komolo, the forerunner of the SPLA in the Nuba Mountains. In Komolo, women hosted SPLA messengers who were busy forming units among the Nuba. But once the SPLA became established in the area, it meant Khartoum would bring the civil war to the Nuba and the women had to change tactics. "We started seeing the Nuba men injured, killed or absent from their homes due to the liberation war, as our brothers, husbands and sons hence concluded that the struggle is also our struggle," says Asheia. The group subsequently started assisting widows of fallen fighters and also nursing the injured.

It was from such service that Idris and other women emerged. Idris is a product of the NWA struggle in the field of communication and is not ashamed of being rebuked. According to Asheia, NWA's vision is to form a self-reliant and a socially conscious Nuba woman who is full of confidence and self-esteem. "They (women) have a forum in the National Liberation Council (SPLA's top organ). They also express their opinion at all levels, starting from their primary association at the village to the regional levels. There are audiences giving heed to what they say," she says. The Islamic generals who rule Sudan might have thought the war will incapacitate the Nuba, but as Asheia says, the war has made the Nuba woman become a very conscious being who hopes one day to tell her side of the story.

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