A new report from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs examines the situation of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in eastern Chad, and responses of the MINURCAT and other UN agencies. It also discusses the implications for the exit of MINURCAT, with termination scheduled for 31 December 2010, and for early recovery initiatives, as well as the prospects of protection measures provided by the government of Chad.

As with any other country, it is difficult to gauge the exact extent of SGBV committed against civilians in Chad. However, SGBV is high on the agenda and a cross-cutting issue for various sectors in MINURCAT and humanitarian agencies. SGBV appears to have been used as a part of a deliberate conflict tactic, with women being attacked once they leave camps to fetch firewood, water etc. On the other hand, many of the reported cases of SGBV are committed inside the camps by family members and neighbours. A central focus of the fight against SGBV has been to sensitize the targeted population, refugees and IDPs to harmful customary practices and human rights violations as preventive measures, as well as to encourage victims to report SGBV and other violations. This work has been especially important for the various gender and women’s committees in the refugee camps. Other main activities have been area security and facilitating returns for the displaced population, provided by MINURCAT and its partners to ensure the protection of civilians.

A major achievement has been to establish the national community policing, Détachement Intégré de Sécurité (DIS). The DIS is responsible for maintaining the rule of law in refugee and IDP camps and key towns within a 10 km radius. Members of the DIS have been trained in gender issues, and all its units have a gender focal point. Throughout our field visit, however, we were told that the important work of the DIS was being hampered by a dysfunctional judicial system, as well as a substantive lack of material and personnel capacity. Furthermore, SGBV victims who report their cases to DIS are vulnerable to reprisals and stigmatization from their communities, so it was proposed that victims should be offered protection in a safe house next to the DIS compound within 24 to 72 hours of filing a report.

Notwithstanding the important advances, the Chadian government, weary of repeated promises of construction of airport aprons and hard-wall commissariats for the DIS, early this year asked the mission to leave. President Déby announced that the mission had been a failure, unable to fulfil its promises, and that the Government of Chad was ready to take over responsibility for the security of refugees, IDPs and humanitarian workers. UNSC Resolution 1926 of 26 May 2010 outlines how Chad will assume responsibility for the protection of civilians. Indeed, the commitment that Chad is showing through the detailed plan is unprecedented. The Government of Chad has committed to:

(i) ensure the security and protection of civilians in danger, particularly refugees and internally displaced persons;
(ii) facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and the free movement of humanitarian personnel by improving security in eastern Chad;
(iii) ensure the security and freedom of movement of MINURCAT staff and United Nations and associated personnel.

This is a laudable step on the part of the Chadian government. There have been far too many instances where host governments feel no obligation to present their plans for the protection of civilians to the international community. However, the extent of the tasks given to the DIS is worrisome: ‘… to provide security inside and around refugee camps and IDP sites, security escorts and area security, in coordination with the Gendarmerie and the Nomad Guard.’ Firstly, this expands the area of DIS operations from refugee camps to include IDP sites in general. Secondly, it gives the DIS responsibility for area security as well, in coordination with the Gendarmerie and the Garde Nationale et Nomade du Tchad (GNNT) – who are sorely lacking in capacity and are ill-informed as to how to execute a protection mandate. While the plan is praiseworthy, what is less clear is whether it is realistic. Lacking are arrangements for how the other protection measures, such as strengthening of the judicial apparatus, human rights monitoring and intercommunity dialogue efforts – currently undertaken by MINURCAT should be transferred to the Government of Chad, UN agencies and NGOs. There is a high risk that eastern Chad, which was on its way to early recovery, may again become a humanitarian crisis. The key benchmark – the return of a critical mass of IDPs – had been within striking distance. It now seems an elusive goal.

But in the new Government of National Unity, of 35 cabinet ministers, there are just two women. Amira al Fadil is Minister of Welfare and Social Security, and Halima Hassaballa al Naim, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs. That’s disappointing to say the least.

Of the 42 ministers of state, there are six women, including Grace Datero (Foreign Affairs), Teresa Sirisio (Communications and Information Technology), Amna Dirar (Labour), Fadwa Deng (Environment, Forests and Urban Development), Sana Hamad al Awad (Information) and Su’ad Abdel Raziq (General Education). That’s a slightly better but still well below par. And of no woman has yet made it to the top of the key ‘sovereign’ ministries or into the presidency.

The book centres on the biographic narratives of Hajja and Umm Khalthoum, who belong respectively to the class of market women and of female teachers. Market women were considered to be disrespectful because of their economic activities in the public sphere, while female teachers had a high status because of their education, despite the fact that they also entered the public domain in order to perform their job. The book attempts to show, rather than tell, how, in daily life, women actively constructed identities while negotiating the Islamist discourse on the proper Muslim woman.

So why would anyone who wants to understand the current violence in Darfur be interested in the book? It is particularly in the absences and silences that become apparent when comparing the period before and after the onset of the war, that has allowed me to hold an alternative perspective on the dynamics of the current war in Darfur.

A lot has been written already about the fluidity and permeability of the boundaries between these ethnic groups. However, by taking ethnic identity as a starting point of analysis, one will always end up with considering ethnicity of central importance. To understand the current scale and extent of the violence well one should take a different perspective. The obvious absence of young adolescent men from communities in both Jebel Marra in the 1980s and from Kebkabiya in the 1990s, led me to analyse the conflict in relation to masculinity and generation.

In the period of my research, women and their daughters were the main cultivators in most farming communities in Darfur, while married men would move out of the village to trade or otherwise earn money to provide their families with those items that cost money, including taxes and school fees. Single young men often did not have clear tasks or responsibilities and thus from the perspective of society they were redundant. In particular during times of shortage they would be ‘just another mouth to feed’. Among the Fur, for example, young boys from the age of 8 till about 18 would wander from one Qur’an school to the next, and engage in odd jobs along the way for survival.

Single nomadic young men, on the other had, were most important for herding camels. In times of drought only young men would tend to the smaller herds temporarily leaving behind women, children and elderly in small settlements near sedentary peoples. These parallel processes of settling by female nomads coupled with male out-migration among sedentary farmers has created over the last decades communities that consist of predominantly female-headed households, of both sedentary and nomadic backgrounds. Sometimes, as was the case in Kebkabiya, they live in the same town or even in the same quarter. More recently, also the formerly temporary settlements of nomads have become permanent, and are hosting an increasing number of young men, which is in fact a sign that the nomadic lifestyle is becoming extinct.

In other words, young males of both groups were engaged in a process of change, in which the old ways were becoming extinct, or simply ‘old-fashioned’, and in which the elderly did not constitute a role model anymore. As the way of life of their fathers came under threat, so were the self-identities and capacities of young men which were based on that life-style. With the loss of their livelihood, their pasts, they have become men without a ‘future’. At least they have little socio-cultural capital to acquire a ‘modern’ lifestyle, while at the same time in many locations tribal leaders and elderly men in general have lost their authority. Without casting young men collectively as victims, many of them seemed to suffer from what I call a ‘masculinity-in-crisis’.

For example, during my research in Kebkabiya in the early 1990s, conflicts over scarce resources concerned predominantly the Fur and the Zaghawa. In the Darfur war these groups have become allies, while in Kebkabiya District they have been engaged in clashes with each other since colonial times. During my research there were several reconciliation conferences held inside the town of Kebkabiya. After one such conference the leader of a Zaghawa sub-group was ambushed when returning home. It turned out he was killed, not by the ‘enemy’ Fur, but by youngsters of his own constituency as they felt their rights were thwarted and their needs neglected by the agreement he had signed.

So, ethnicity is indeed important. However, the deteriorating conditions of deprivation and despair among a growing number of disenfranchised young men on both sides of the conflict, may account for the scale and extent of the war. Weapons apparently form an easy and immediate satisfaction in the quest for respect, self-identity, and a sense of control.

At the same time, to cast the war in Darfur as just ethnic or racial is also problematic since the labels of ‘Janjawid’ and ‘African Blacks’ were not used in Kebkabiya before the war. Currently, the term Janjawid has acquired the meaning of an Arab militia, who are considered as the perpetrators of violence. However, the Fur would use the term Solong or Arab for Arab camel nomads, while Baggara was used for Arab cattle nomads. The term ‘Janjawid’ was not used. Alternatively, in localities where the term was used prior to the recent conflict, it referred more generally to ‘rabble’ or ‘outlaws’, in particular in cases of banditry and camel theft — committed predominantly by young men.

In addition, there are quite some indications that the Janjawid militia that engaged in violent attacks in the context of the war, were ethnically not as homogeneous as the label seemed to suggest. Some of the groups even included young men from sedentary farming populations. In the course of the conflict the illusionary ethnic homogeneity of the Janjawid has become part of a regional political-ideological discourse of ethnic and religious superiority of those who claim themselves to be ‘Arabs’.

Although the Sudanese Arab government from Central Sudan has been affiliated with the Arab nomads in the current war in Darfur, the meaning of ‘Arab’ to denote each of these groups carries different connotations of class and culture. The notion of ‘Arab’ that is used for the nomadic peoples in Darfur is used in the sense of Bedouin and indicated backwardness and marginality to most Central Sudanese. Alternatively, the educated ruling Arab elite residing in the Nile Valley constructed themselves as ‘Awlad Arab’ and ‘Awlad al-balad’, or children (sons) of Arabs and inheritors of the land. A label they used in founding political Arab nationalism, which allowed them to claim the Sudanese nation-state as theirs. It is precisely the issue of the construction of an exclusive national identity, which is at the core of the war between the Central Sudan and one of its marginal areas.

The strategy of turning Arab nomads into a militia as happened in Darfur was not novel. In the civil war with Southern Sudan consecutive regimes armed Arab nomads from Kordofan and Darfur and turned them into so-called murahilin. Apart from these fighting techniques and the application of a ‘scorched-earth’ policy, the racial rhetoric used to justify the violence in each location are also similar. The shift of casting the war in terms of ‘Black African farmers’ attacked by ‘Arab nomads’ took place in the same period that the peace agreement with the South was formulated. This not only meant that opposition groups learned that armed resistance pays off. It also marked a shift in the significance of the Darfur conflict, in the sense that a regional problem from that moment on gained significance in the government’s project of constructing a Sudanese national identity. It is the perspectives of men as represented in the book, that substantiate this notion of a discursive shift.

Although ‘One foot in heaven’ centres on women, men are not absent in the book, on the contrary: they are present as fathers, brothers, sons and (prospective) husbands as well as government officials, tribal leaders, project officers. In the first chapter of the book, speeches delivered by male members of a popular committee are analyzed. Even though these speeches articulated the viewpoint of the government that the Darfur population were lesser because ‘improper’ Muslims, they were still considered ‘fellow’ Muslims. They could be redeemed and their souls saved, if they would just mend their religious ways under guidance of the government. Only since the onset of war, has the Darfur population been cast as black African farmers whereby ‘black’ does not refer to skin colour per se. It refers to inferiority and, in combination with ‘African’, suggests the status of a slave, which means automatically that of a non-Muslim. Although the term black (azrag, blue) is in itself not novel to the area, where also ruling Fur and Masalit were cast as zuruq before the onset of the current conflict, it has now a connotation added, namely that of inferior non-Muslims and thus enemies of the Sudanese state.

In the final chapter offers an explanation of why the Sudanese government would need a ‘black other’ against whom to wage a war. This chapter centres on the new generation of young professional men working in the government service. The author argues that the public gaze directed at female behavior took away – purposely or not — the attention from the problematic construction of masculinity among this new generation of young educated men. This masculinity-in-crisis in the centre of the nation-state was related to an economic, social and political crisis, which brought these young middle class men in a precarious position. These young men were themselves not able to perform the life-style, which they were propagating on behalf of the government. A life-style, moreover, which formed the core of the identity of the educated elite class. It is this connection between crises in masculinity at different locations and among different classes of young men, both in the marginal areas and in the center of power, which constituted an important reason for the continuation of the animosity between the central government and so-called ‘tribal areas’. Masculinity, in relation to other identifications, has to be taken seriously in processes of power and dominance, if we want to come up with better solutions for violent conflicts, such as the war in Darfur.

However, Willemse is not just applying the methodology of listening to, analyzing, and representing women’s biographic narratives, in the course of this book she also devises a methodology to do so by drawing on (and going beyond) some of the most complex feminist theorists of the last twenty years. Moreover, she does not only tell her readers about this methodology but shows step by step how listening, reading and writing against the grain is put into practice. Thus Willemse does at least three things at the same time. First, she develops the theoretical underpinnings of this methodology, situating it in theoretical scholarship of different kinds (such as discourse analysis, feminist theory, and critical Islam studies). Second, she explains how she used and refined it in dialectical tension with the biographic narratives of women it was intended to elucidate. Third, she shows what it has yielded in terms of these narratives as they were coproduced, in a very specific set of contexts, by the narrators and the anthropologist and her research assistants. To my mind, this is an incredible feat.
Moreover, given the emphasis on knowledge production, Willemse adopts an unorthodox representation of her research. “The focus on the process of knowledge production rather than only on its outcomes, on dynamics, contexts and subtexts rather than facts does not allow for an orthodox representation,” she writes (32). Thus her study is not chronologically organized or based on hypotheses to be proven or disproved but is written up as “a process of evolving and ‘becoming’” and of “theoretical discovery” (32). This process, which Willemse calls “listening, reading, and writing against the grain,” involves a series of readings and re-readings — analyses and re-analyses, write-ups and further write-ups, conclusions and new conclusions — of the biographic narratives in question. The result is a book that is on the one hand a true tour de force and a deeply impressive achievement and, on the other hand, also a fiendishly complex and even unwieldy study.

Willemse adopts a form of discourse analysis by presenting three different levels of analysis of every narrative or segment of narrative in the book. First she represents the narrative as she first recorded it. Then she presents an analysis of the immediate context (spatial, temporal and otherwise) of the narrative so that the readers can understand it. Third, she analyzes it from her own analytical perspectives and understandings, relating it to her own theoretical and methodological interests in how the narrators situated themselves and others vis-à-vis the dominant moral discourse of Sudan’s Islamist government. This third level, her analysis and description of how her own understanding of the narrators and narratives evolved over time, is a crucial part of the methodology. Moreover, Willemse does not represent this evolving process by applying it to the one set of texts (the texts with which she begins) but to an ever-expanding set of new narratives. This makes her scholarly narrative so intensely dynamic that it becomes a real challenge to the reader.

There is only one still point, one subject-matter that is not mobile or dynamic in the book, namely the dominant moral discourse on gender by the Sudan’s Islamist government. While this is a balm for the mind, it also appears to fly in the face of what Willemse’s methodology is all about. Willemse does not deconstruct the Sudanese government’s dominant moral discourse about gender and thus appears to take it for granted as a category. This is disturbing. Were there no variations, tensions, or changes in the Government’s Islamist discourse on gender as it was produced by a range of actors in the period 1990-1995? How did the Government’s Islamist discourse about gender relate to the religious and other moral discourses on gender before the Islamist turn in the early 1990s? It is hard to imagine how this study could contain another changing variable, but the monolithic and static nature of the dominant moral discourse as presented here is an unexpected and puzzling dimension of the analysis. Though Willemse’s methodology strives to undermine the anthropologist’s authority that willy-nilly shapes all research situations, she is quite authoritative when she claims the centrality of the government’s Islamist discourse to the ‘narratives of self’ of all the working women of her study. She contends that “[t]he subject positions offered by the dominant Islamist discourse were for all of these women the point of reference or the point of departure” (450). We will return to this below.

What, to the mind of this reviewer, can readers learn from this theoretically and methodologically sophisticated book? First of all, in the process of developing her tools of analysis, Willemse introduces and gives concise and lucid definitions and explanations of an enormous range of theoretical concepts, including (biographic) narrative, identity (performed, constructed, prioritized, narrated, contextualized, mapped, and traced),agency and relational agency, experience, difference, discourse, deconstruction, intersubjectivity, intertextuality, intersectionality, subject and object positions, border zone, context, masculinity (in crisis), femininity, resistance, and so forth. Thus she elucidates and further develops concepts developed by Lila Abu-Lughod , Ruth Behar, Judith Butler, R.W. Connell, Teresa De Lauretis, Norman Fairclough, Judith Fetterly, Maaike Meijer, Sarah Mills, Chandra Mohanty, Judith Okely and Helen Callaway, Joke Schrijvers, Dorothy Smith, Judith Zur, and many others. Willemse has a real gift for recognizing the nuggets of gold in the analyses of other scholars and to use these productively in her own analysis. This reviewer found this dimension of Willemse’s work enormously instructive and helpful.

Second, this book contains a number of poignant learning moments that even by themselves would have made this study worthwhile. One such moment is when Willemse comes to realize that it was not just she who had chosen to interview Hajja, one of the two most significant authors of biographic narratives in the book, but that Hajja also had chosen her and had her own objectives as she positioned herself vis-à-vis other people as well as the dominant moral discourse on gender! Another such moment is when Willemse, after almost four years, returns to Kebkabiya with the hope of discussing her analysis with Hajja and of having the latter approve or authorize her anthropological understanding of Hajja’s biographic narrative. She writes:

“What I began to realize was that authorization of a narrative some years after it was constructed was beside the point: a narrative some years after it was constructed was beside the point: a narrative does not exist in itself, but only in the context in which it carried meaning. It had been ‘our narrative,’ time- and place-bound. The narrative contained multiple layers and was open to multiple interpretations. The narrative could not be retrieved from the past of our interaction some four years before.” (247)

A third such moment, finally, is when Willemse acknowledges towards the very end of the book that the centrality of the Islamist discourse in the biographic narratives of the women she interviewed in part resulted from her own intellectual background and interest in the scholarly field of Gender and Islam. These kinds of poignant learning moments punctuate and enrich this dynamic narrative of knowledge production.

Third and finally, the reader will also learn much about female teachers and market women in Kebkabiya as they made active claims on moral womanhood by strategically positioning themselves vis-à-vis the dominant moral discourse.

This 547 page-long book also has drawbacks, some of which have already been noted or hinted at. First, the structure of the book is so complex and has so many different layers , levels, and components that it becomes somewhat inaccessible to the reader. Thus the book does not only present a series of different narratives of the two most important authors of biographic narratives, Hajja and Umm Kalthoum, but also includes chapters on other market women, younger women, and elite men, brought into the analysis to allow the author to broaden her contextualization and understanding of working women’s narrated identities. The accessibility of the book or better, its user friendliness, is also reduced by the author’s many theoretical asides. An example is the 11-page long discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the terms ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘Islamism’ (pp. 74-85). There is no doubt that the point the author wants to make — that the term ‘Islamism’ has the drawback of diverting attention away from what many religious fundamentalisms have in common, namely a particularly confining moral discourse on gender – is significant and relevant to her study. Nevertheless, such theoretical digressions divert from the flow and focus of the study as experienced by the reader.

To this already heavily burdened structure the author has added a final postscript to deal with a quite different period and subject-matter, the war in Dar Fur since 2003. Even though her analysis of this in terms of a crisis in Sudanese citizenship is innovative and compelling, it further detracts from the cohesiveness of the study.

All in all, this is an extraordinarily interesting, unique, and accomplished book. This reviewer hopes that Willemse will in the future publish a separate manual on her methodology of ‘listening, reading, and writing against the grain,’ as this is also relevant beyond the field of Sudanese Studies. As a contribution to the latter and to the growing and highly uneven knowledge production about Dar Fur, this book too is in many ways transformative and highly recommended reading.

– Hajja Ishak to Karin Willemse, Kebkabiya, Darfur, c. 1991 (page 199).

“Tea is the mother of crime” (p. 210). So claimed the Sudanese government in 1991, when, as part of its Islamist “Civilization Project” (mashru’ hadari), it declared a ban on women selling tea in market squares. As an anthropologist pursuing doctoral research, Karin Willemse was present in Kebkabiya, a small town in northern Darfur, just before and after the ban was imposed. She heard from other market women about how authorities came to seize the tea women’s utensils, threatening them with fines, beatings, or jailtime, and accusing them of using their trade to engage in improper conduct with men. Willemse was also there when members of “popular committees” (lajnat shu’ubiyya) arrived to declare the government’s Islamist credo, delivering public speeches that urged locals to shun foreign customs and people, to dress properly (in the case of women, by more thoroughly covering their bodies), and to behave as good Muslim families, ideally with women obeying husbands while functioning as mothers installed in the home.

One Foot in Heaven represents Willemse’s effort to assess the social and discursive impact of this moral campaigning, which occurred in the early 1990s as the regime of General Omer Beshir was trying to hammer out its Islamist agenda. Willemse concentrates on Kebkabiya women who were striving to maintain and proclaim their Muslim propriety while nevertheless working outside the home. Totaling more than five hundred pages, One Foot in Heaven is a dense but brilliant book that makes valuable contributions to the study of modern Sudanese history and culture. The author remains steadily aware, throughout the book, of her own place as a female foreign visitor in Kebkabiya. Perhaps as a result, she manages to write a scholarly work that is imbued with a spirit of friendship and empathy.

The book’s title contains a reference to two hadiths (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that Kebkabiya women frequently cited. The first hadith, which emphasizes women’s enduring value for Muslim society, recounts that “Heaven is under the feet of the mothers.” The second, which appears to assign women to proper locations, is “There are three places for a woman: in her father’s house, in her husband’s house, or in her grave.” Willemse suggests that together these two hadiths as recited in Kebkabiya in 1991 illustrated “the ambiguity in dominant moral discourses [about] the ‘good Muslim woman’” (p. 34).

The married Kebkabiya women who befriended Willemse spoke often about how their roles as daughters and wives had affected the course of their lives. In the not-too-distant past, fathers, husbands, and brothers had certainly decided their futures. Yet by the time Willemse arrived in the early 1990s, the influence of men appeared diminished in households. Many fathers, husbands, or brothers were either dead or absent. Frequently, absence was the result of migration (to work in places like El Fasher or Khartoum, or further afield in Saudi Arabia or Iraq), but sometimes it was the result of divorce. If uncles, male cousins, and other members of the extended patrilineage were around, they, too, were exerting a shadowy influence. Willemse connects this last trend to the dwindling influence of extended families and to the growing importance of “neolocal nuclear families”, a process that, among the educated elite in particular, accompanied the rise in migration through job transfers (p. 345). Extended family structures persisted, but did not claim the same force that they once did – perhaps because birthrates per woman, as well as (polygamous) marriages per man, were also diminishing.

Willemse suggests that the Numayri period (1969-85), as experienced in Kebkabiya, witnessed some far-reaching social changes. During the 1970s and ‘80s, “recurrent droughts forced men to migrate” (p. 386), prompting women of humble or reduced means to seek work in what had been, in effect, a man’s world – the world of the market square. Lacking sufficient funds to cover day-to-day expenses, women in Kebkabiya began selling okra, tomatoes, millet, and other food items in order to earn money to feed and clothe their children, and to pay for the incidental expenses (such as pencils, books, and uniforms) that would enable their daughters and sons to be schooled. Meanwhile, a lucky fraction of the girls who attended schools were themselves able to secure jobs as government teachers. President Numayri’s support for mass education facilitated this last trend. That is, as many more government primary (and to a lesser extent intermediate) schools began to open in small towns like Kebkabiya, families were able to educate their children without having to send them to school far away.

Willemse learned such details by recording biographical narratives. Two women, in particular, offered narrations of their life stories, and these stand at the heart of the book. The two women were Hajja, a widow, mother, and trained midwife who sold onions in the market to get by; and Umm Khalthoum, a mother on the brink of divorce who taught in the government school while depending, to an important degree, on the child care and logistical support provided by her relatives, including her own older children. Hajja and Umm Khalthoum represent two different groups of professional women — market sellers and schoolteachers – who were separated by education and social status but who were both, in their own way, struggling to affirm their social legitimacy as good Muslims and working women.

Hajja remained functionally illiterate whereas Umm Khalthoum was a schoolteacher, and yet in striking ways their lives in Kebkabiya ran parallel. Both women, in their youth, enjoyed opportunities that were exceptional for females of their day. Hajja, who was born around 1920, was fortuitously chosen — and then forced by her father — to attend the midwifery training school that the British authorities established in Omdurman during the Anglo-Egyptian period. In 1936, when she was still training in Omdurman, Hajja became one of three midwives chosen to preside over the birth of Sadiq al-Mahdi (the political and religious leader who is a great-grandson of the Mahdi). Hajja consistently described this occasion as one of the greatest achievements of her life. She was also proud of the fact that with her own earnings from midwifery, she eventually paid for her pilgrimage to Mecca (as her honorific nickname, al-Hajja, attested). Born more than a generation later, around 1950, Umm Khalthoum had the rare privilege of attending a government intermediate girls school – which was, at that time, a boarding school far from her home. This was in the early 1960s, before Numayri expanded the number, and arguably reduced the quality, of government schools. The school as she described it to Willemse was lush and luxuriant: the girls enjoyed clean patterned bedsheets, delicious food and varied diets, and devoted, doting teachers, all provided at government expense. However, both Hajja and Umm Khalthoum saw their youths – and in some sense their career aspirations — abruptly end when their fathers married them off. Both women came from prosperous families that enjoyed connections to Darfur elites, and yet both, as they progressed through adulthood, saw the family wealth wither and dissipate. In both cases, part of their loss of affluence may have derived from their fathers’ and husbands’ tendency toward multiple marriages, which increased heirs and shrank inheritances. But broader trends in regional and national wealth also came into play. The economic opportunities that greeted their fathers in a decolonizing Sudan were not nearly as bright as the ones that their husbands encountered.

Notwithstanding the hadith connecting heaven to mothers, Hajja and Umm Khalthoum had little to say about their own mothers as forces in their lives. Willemse speculates that their mothers were unable to serve as role models for the kind of women that Hajja and Umm Khalthoum were trying to be – educated (in their different ways), well-behaved professional women in an age of government-sponsored Islamization. Willemse’s narrative suggest that other Kebkabiya women may have been lacking in role models, too: notably, female schoolteachers who were remaining single, with few marital prospects on the horizon. Representing this trend was Sa’adiya, a teacher in town and one of Willemse’s research assistants, who having “escaped early marriage now dread having to make a step ‘back’.” Willemse explains, “These female employees are the first generation of women who have what I have called a ‘prolonged adolescence’. …Single female teachers want single educated men who are broadminded enough to let them have the life they attained by hard work and a bit of luck” (p. 440). Such men in Kebkabiya and elsewhere were not so easy to find. Therefore, lacking pressure or orders from fathers and male kin, some women were postponing marriage indefinitely.

It was certainly hard to be a “good” Muslim woman in 1991, when the Sudanese government was pressing its “civilizing” agenda. Sudanese womanhood was arguably in crisis. But other identity crises were lurking in this story as well. Looming in the background was a crisis of masculinity, which Willemse explains as follows: In the circles of the educated, the pay and perquisites of government service were diminishing for young men, who were finding themselves unable “to live up to the ideal-type notion of Muslim masculinity that the Islamist government…had created” (p. 492). Government employment in 1991 was not as lucrative as it had been thirty years earlier. Many successful men had left Sudan entirely, migrating to oil-rich Arab states or further afield, occasioning a sense of inadequacy, doubt, and frustration among educated men left behind. Meanwhile, by 1991, women in places like Kebkabiya had entered the marketplace. Having succeeded through hard work and increasingly, ambition, these women showed no signs of retreating, despite government discourses that enjoined women to stay at home. At the same time, women were becoming stronger about choosing – or not choosing – husbands. Male authority was not what it had been.

These changes in social and family life made the government’s Islamization or “civilization” campaign, as it played out in Kebkabiya in the early 1990s, look like a nostalgic and tradionalist attempt to recapture an era that had already lapsed. “Do you think it’s shameful to make tea?” Willemse asked her friend Hajja. Hajja’s answer revealed the influence of the government’s moral discourse while challenging its aims: “Yes, in the past it was, but now everyone can sit in the market. Only the rich families would not go. Nowadays all people work: women work and men work in the offices, in the market, all the people are working together, mixed” (p. 199).

What the government’s moral discourses did show, Willemse convincingly argues, is a sense of deep identity crisis rooted in the malaise of the Sudanese nation-state. The “civilizing” project in Darfur, she contends, reflected the anxieties of Sudanese riverain elites who sensed the loss of their cultural hegemony. Numayri’s educational policies during the 1970s (which led to the proliferation of regional schools), together with worsening economic conditions, led to a process of decentralization that amounted to pariochialization and perhaps, too de-Sudanization, in a peripheral region like Darfur. (Darfur’s “Sudanization” had in any case been quite recent. Recall that British colonial authorities incorporated the region into Sudanese territory not during the colonial conquest of 1898, but only in 1917, when they overthrew its sultan, Ali Dinar.) Willemse argues that government officials – who after the 1989 coup were at once Islamists and Sudanese nationalists – regarded Darfurians as “insufficiently detribalized”, that is, inadequately assimilated to riverain ways, and possessing a degree of autonomy that challenged Sudanese cultural and political coherence. Officials expressed these sentiments by presenting Darfurians as derelict Muslims, with the men lazy and the women (like the tea sellers) promiscuous. In this way, the Beshir regime’s moralizing discourses barely covered the Islamist-nationalist riverain elite’s contempt for Darfur provincials.

One Foot in Heaven does not aim to explain the war that broke out in Darfur in 2003. Still, in retrospect, it is possible to detect in the book two features of the Darfurian social landscape, circa 1991, that foreshadowed this conflict. First, the Sudanese government was promoting a “civilizing project” (mashru’ hadari) that was not far removed from a civilizing mission. The discursive parallels with colonial rhetoric are striking here, insofar as the government emphasized the alienation of Darfurians — their veritable “other-ness” as bad Muslims — as a pretext for dominating them and changing their ways. The government’s words and deeds underlined the very features that have made Sudan’s nation-statehood so fragile: the uneven distribution of power and resources, in a vast and culturally diverse territory. Second, a crisis of masculinity was producing a generation of frustrated men who had too much time on their hands. “In these deteriorating conditions of deprivation and despair among nomadic and sedentary young men ‘without a future’,” Willemse suggests, “weapons form an easy and immediate satisfaction in the quest for respect, self-identity, and a sense of control. Due to the high presence of disenfranchised men on both sides of the conflict, it has taken on an especially troubling gender dimension”. With its rapes, mutilations, and slaughter, Willemse concludes, the post-2003 war in Darfur had distinct “gendercidal” dimensions (pp. 486-87).

Conflict was already stirring near Kebkabiya when Willemse reached the town in 1990. She had not wanted to stay there, she explains in her opening pages; she had hoped to work in a village instead. But Sudanese officials forbade her from venturing beyond the protective bounds of the town, citing security threats from roaming Chadian guerrillas and highway robbers. As is so often the case for serious researchers who face constraints in sources and circumstances, Willemse decided to improvise. Thus she set out to answer a small question that troubled her: why did the Kebkabiya tea women disappear from the market during a short period when she was absent from town? The result of her investigation is this outstanding book, which illuminates one piece of Darfurian and Sudanese culture and history – and shows its tremendous complexities — while raising much bigger global issues about constructions of gender and family in the midst of social flux.

The political dynamics of the rise and fall of the “civilization project” and the “return to the roots” are not, however, Willemse’s main focus: she is interested far more in the lives of her subjects, and how they are narrated. This provides a challenging perspective on the events of the time, which political scientists and analysts tend to frame in terms of high-level policy decisions.

Many readers will be drawn to this book because of the calamities that unfolded in Darfur a decade after Willemse’s research. The impending conflict does not loom in her account, however, until a short postscript. This picks up some of the themes of the bulk of the book, namely how the spread of education combined with economic austerity created a crisis of gender identities for young men. The sheer numbers of educated men, and the inability of the dominant “Sudanized” class to absorb and sustain them economically, created a crisis of identity at the center. To affirm elite Sudanese identity, policy shifted to defining gender and race boundaries, a process that led to the systemic exclusion of Darfur.

It is an interesting argument. Let me suggest that it would be enriched by another, as yet unwritten ethnography, that of Kebkabiya’s “missing men.”

Reading Willemse’s account, I was reminded of my time in the vicinity of Kebkabiya in the 1980s—and the striking fact that in some villages, there were almost no men. Among the farming communities around Kebkabiya, as many as half the men in the age brackets 15-35 had migrated, to find education or work. Many had gone as far as Gedaref in eastern Sudan. In those days, with poor communications, these men had in effect vanished, and their families lived in the hope of receiving some cash remitted through a relative, or their ultimate return after some years of profitable work. Married women were unsure if they should still consider themselves married; unmarried women dreamed of finding a rich(er) returnee. The socio-economic crisis in Darfur of the time was gendered. Willemse focuses on the women who stayed, and one of the recurring themes is that while women stay, men come and go. An ethnographic gap that remains is the men themselves, as they migrated to Dar Sabah in search of education and employment. It is these men who later led the rebellion. I would contend that we cannot obtain a rounder picture of the government’s policies on gender, race and exclusion, without a deeper understanding of the socio-economic realities of Darfur’s migrants, and how those were reflected in their political consciousness.

This blog will be running reviews of Willemse’s book, hoping also to generate a wide discussion on the issues it raises, over the coming weeks.

I don’t know if this is because women are more civic minded, more committed to democracy and civil politics, or have a longer-term view of political developments and so are less easily swayed by day-to-day events. Perhaps the women’s list, which will deliver 25% of the members in every elected legislature, has encouraged more women to vote.

But the consequence is that, whoever stands for election in Sudan in the future, will have to bear in mind that she or he will be elected principally by the votes of women. I wonder what effect this will have on future election campaigns, on the composition of party leadership, and on Sudanese political life in general.

In this posting I will examine the debate around the question of how to define a ‘low-intensity conflict’ and what this means for Darfur. It’s an important policy question because it helps determine what should be the right strategy for UNAMID, especially given the recent request by the UN Security Council that UNAMID define its strategy and benchmarks for success.

When Joint Special Representative Rodolphe Adada made his presentation to the UN Security Council on 27 April his use of the term ‘low-intensity conflict’ sparked controversy.

He said that the situation had changed from the period of intense hostilities in 2003-04, when tens of thousands of people had been killed, to a low-intensity conflict. According to UNAMID data, from 1 January 2008 until 31 March 2009, there had been some 2,000 fatalities from violence, approximately one third of them civilian. 573 combatants had died. A further 569 people had died in intertribal fighting and UNAMID had lost 14 of its members.

The controversy focused on the figures. It is now widely accepted that Adada’s numbers are broadly correct. The question is how to interpret them, and what else is going on.

There is no numerical threshold for a ‘low intensity conflict.’ The Uppsala conflict database classifies Darfur in 2007 and 2008 as a ‘minor’ conflict.

According to its definition of ‘intensity level’, this variable ‘is coded in two categories: Minor: At least 25 but less than 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year, i.e. civilian and military deaths associated with the conflict. War: at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year.’

If the level of fatalities is nearer to 1,500 per year then perhaps Uppsala should upgrade Darfur from ‘minor’ status. On the other hand, if a substantial number of these deaths are due to criminality and these reflect some kind of ‘normal’ baseline for criminal homicide, then Darfur’s conflict-related ‘excess’ homicide rate may be lower than 1,000 per year (see the debate on this in response to UNAMID’s June figures.) Whatever is the correct decision, the bigger point here is that Darfur is close to this borderline.

There is no numerical threshold for defining a ‘low-intensity conflict.’ The U.S. Army Field Manual, ‘Military Operations in Low-Intensity Conflict,’ (FM 100-20, 1990), defines ‘low-intensity conflict’ in relation to threats to U.S. interests and in particular identifies them as protracted struggles in the Third World which are somewhere between outright war and normal peaceful competition between states. In the introduction to the Manual, the army authors write:

‘The term low intensity conflict reflects an American perspective. Indeed, the term is a misnomer. To peoples more directly affected, the threat is immediate and vital. To us, it is subtle, indirect, and long-term; but potentially it is just as serious. The actions which take place in low intensity conflict are distinguishable from those in conventional war, more by differences in kind, than by degree of intensity.’

In the last few years, political scientists have begun extremely productive quantitative investigations into levels and functions of violence in civil conflict. The seminal work in the field is Stathis Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006). What Kalyvas demonstrates is that levels of violence can vary hugely from time to time and place to place during a civil conflict, depending on the calculations of risk and benefit among the different actors. The front line may be a relatively quiet place to be. This accords with the experience of internal conflicts in Africa, which may have long periods of stasis or stalemate characterized by an appearance of normality.

Ethnographic accounts of civil wars confirm and elaborate this. An excellent example is Burundi, as described by Peter Uvin, in Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi (2009). He recounts how a war which, for long periods, involved relatively few killings, involved profound and lasting social disruptions. The history of Burundi also suggests that unresolved political and ethnic dispute contains the potential for explosive violence, which may overtake the country in very short order. Hakan Seckinelgin and colleagues also detail this, focusing on the status of women and girls, their strategies for survival during long periods of insecurity, and the implications for HIV/AIDS.

The textbook description of Burundi is that since 1991 it has been a low-intensity conflict with intermittent high-intensity episodes. According to Seckinelgin, ‘This view does not reflect the experiences of people who lived through this period.’ It is, he argues, ‘misleading’ because it does not capture the way in which the armed groups mobilized across the country, the large-scale and protracted displacement of the population, and the enduring militarization of society. Above all, this description does not reflect women’s experience of exacerbated gender disparities. Always a patriarchal society, the years of conflict led to women being further disadvantaged. A focus on sexual violence would also fail to capture the myriad ways in which women are compelled to navigate their weak and subordinate status, for example seeking protection through partnerships with members of armed groups.

It is perhaps no coincidence that these writers explicitly adopt a gender perspective. Combat may be the defining feature of conflict from a masculine perspective, but the adverse disruption of social relations may be women’s defining experience.

This analysis points us not only towards sexual violence but also women’s wider experience of armed conflict. Rape is certainly underreported in Darfur, as everywhere. I have not used the UNAMID figures for (reported) rapes because I am sure they are both too low and not representative. But the indications that exist are that the pattern of sexual violence is not dissimilar to the pattern of violent deaths: it is not a centrally orchestrated campaign but rather a mixture of rampant criminality and war-related actions. Rape is both common and horrible but is not, I suspect, the defining experience for most Darfurian women. Rather, in line with the ethnography of the Burundian war, the conflict is experienced chiefly as traumatic disruption and insecurity, in the broadest sense that includes lack of a dignified livelihood and social changes that generally increase uncertainties and undermine status. (On the other hand, some changes associated with camp life, such as women’s possession of ration cards and their capacity to resist arranged marriages at young ages, are less adverse.)

While the lethal violence in Darfur is ‘low-intensity’, that is not a complete description of the conflict, in three respects. First, the unresolved war has the potential for ‘spikes’ in violence. Second, the political repercussions of the unresolved conflict are very high, not only for Darfur but for Sudan and neighbouring countries. Third, the experience of traumatic disruption is anything but ‘low-intensity’—it is the defining life experience for millions of Darfurians. To be fair to Adada, he also made these points, though they were lost in the publicity over his label, ‘low-intensity conflict.’

This analysis has far-reaching implications for the kind of strategy that is needed to protect civilians, improve the humanitarian situation, and promote a political settlement. Last week, the UN Security Council requested UNAMID to produce a strategy with benchmarks for success. Evidently, the kind of data provided by Joint Mission Analysis Centre (JMAC) is one of the most important measures of success or failure, and the analysis of what these numbers mean (and don’t mean) should underpin any medium- and long-term strategy for the Mission.

The kind of peace support mission needed for a situation of high-intensity conflict, defined by mass killing and destruction, is very different from one of reduced lethal violence, but protracted traumatic disruption to ways of life with particular stresses and vulnerabilities for women. As Moudjib Djinadou of UNAMID’s JMAC points out in his most recent comment, it is the police contingent that makes the most consistent day-to-day contact with the Darfurian civilian population. The civilian police also play a very important role in managing the day-to-day threats to the people. Meanwhile, it is the Civil Affairs Department that takes the lead in engaging with the community leaders and local authorities to try to manage the local conflicts which comprise a large proportion of the burden of armed violence in Darfur. These are all considerations that should help determine UNAMID’s strategy. I will follow up on that shortly.

Stories of men being forcibly circumcised and even castrated peppered news accounts of the madness that overtook Kenya in the aftermath of the December 2007 elections. According to the Waki commission that investigated the Post Election Violence (PEV), by January 2008 the ethnic militia of the Kikuyu ethnic group, Mungiki, used blunt objects such as broken glass to forcibly circumcise at least eight men, some as young as eleven and five years old. While exact numbers are hard to come by, one can deduce that tens of men endured genital mutilation during the first three months of 2008. Forced circumcisions were not new in Kenya. There had been previous reports of high school boys being forcibly circumcised at school and the now infamous Mungiki sect had made their mark on the Kenyan psyche by forcibly circumcising Kikuyu women. But this seemed the first time that forced circumcision was being used as a political tool. It was being deployed as a weapon of inter-ethnic war.

How can we understand the forced circumcisions in the context of gendered and ethnic politics in Kenya? Better yet, what would a gendered exploration of Kenya’s PEV that placed these forced circumcisions at the center of analysis look like? This question does not pre-suppose that others have not offered a gendered analysis of those gory months in 2008. Indeed, many brilliant authors have written incisive reports focusing a keen eye on the varied forms of brutality that women especially endured.

Still, I find that much of gender analysis today still leans too heavily towards a discussion of women’s experiences. While a focus on women has yielded enormous insight into the ecology of gender, the way society’s power is distributed among the genders, we stand to gain even more if we also pay attention to men’s experiences. It is with this critique of the field that I offer what I hope is a different kind of gender analysis to Kenya’s PEV. Mine is a gender analysis centered on men’s experiences.

If we are to take seriously that gender is a social construct that assigns different power values to the masculine while usually devaluing the feminine then there are some very serious gender implications for what happened in Kenya on those fateful days in early 2008. I argue that a gendered analysis of Kenya’s PEV that centers on men’s experiences reveals why all Kenyans, even men, should care about, and struggle for gender equality. Indeed, the Kenyan experience shows how, in a moment of political tension, anyone, even men, can be feminized, and once that is achieved, brutalization and violation is an easily justified next step.

December school holidays bring with them a wave of circumcision ceremonies across many of Kenya’s ethnic communities. Young men mark the verge of adolescence with the cutting of their foreskin often in elaborate ceremonies. Often the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood begins with a sequestering where the initiates are taught ‘how to be men’ and climaxes with the ceremonial cutting. From the elaborate ceremonies in rural Kenya to the sterile surgical cuts in genteel urban Nairobi, circumcision is a Kenyan institution with those few communities that do not practice it excluded in certain ways. It is important to note that among the first wave of rioters during PEV in January were young Kalenjin men, who had just completed their initiation rites in circumcision camps in Eldoret that December. Infused with a newfound sense of male identity, these young men rampaged through the Rift Valley province attempting to cleanse it from ‘outsiders’ from other ethnic communities.

Circumcision in Kenya is more than a cultural act. The practice has a long political history. A quick glace at Kenyan political history from colonialism onwards shows that circumcision, both male and female, has been wielded as a political tool during moments of intense conflict. Circumcision, especially female circumcision, was deployed as a weapon of anti-colonial struggle. The country’s founding father, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, wrote about it in glowing terms, deriding those communities that did not make men of their boys. Meru women hid and circumcised each other when the practice was banned by the colonial British. President Moi’s insistence on banning female circumcision only served to drive it further underground and throughout the cutting of genital flesh has served as an act of resistance.

Then Mungiki came. They wore dreadlocks, invoked Mau Mau, inhaled tobacco snuff, and agitated for a return to what they saw as the pristine original state of Kikuyu natural identity. Kikuyu women became the targets. They were not to wear trousers and those who did were stripped naked and beaten publicly. Stories began emerging of Mungiki forcibly circumcising Kikuyu women.

Strangely, few spoke up. Some women’s rights activists protested, but within the larger public sphere, in those early days, Mungiki was a Kikuyu problem and only a menace to Kikuyu women.

Then came those shocking days in early 2008 when Kenyans took to crude knives, seeking to make men of each other. Mungiki was at it again, only this time the Kikuyu militia were circumcising Luo men, accusing them, as Kenyatta had alluded long before, of being mere boys. Circumcision was supposed to render them men. These circumcisions, of course, were torturous acts of violence that often turned out to be castrations calculated to kill their hapless victims.

Why did these Kikuyu men deploy the rhetoric of circumcision? What social context rendered circumcision a resonant frame within which to articulate their actions as part of the ethnic warfare that was going on? It is here that gender analysis helps us understand that Mungiki were able to kill by circumcision by first feminizing their victims.

The construction of Luo men as feminine was a process that had begun long before in Kenya’s ethnic politics. This construction ranged from Kenyatta’s rhetoric in newly independent Kenya to the murmurs, whispered under Kikuyu breaths during the referendum on the Draft Constitution, that Kenya could not be led by mtu mzima. The Kiswahili term, meaning whole person or adult, was used euphemistically to refer to ODM’s leader Raila Odinga. The term was used as a double entendre in deriding Odinga, who, by virtue of being Luo, was uncircumcised hence anatomically ‘whole’ while at the same time pointing to the contradiction that he could not be adult because he was uncircumcised.

Interestingly, rather than challenge the discursive privilege accorded to circumcision as a measure of manhood, Odinga has continued to insist that he is himself circumcised. He has also become one of the staunchest advocates of circumcision as a method of preventing HIV/AIDS transmission in line with recent scientific findings.

Once the construction of Luo men as feminine was firmly entrenched, there was almost no defense needed for brutalizing them. Gender theory and analysis has shown that feminization comes before brutalization. For so long Kenyan society has failed to protect its feminine dimension. Mungiki had brutalized Kikuyu women with forced circumcision with impunity for years. Society as a whole had never spoken up. Not even those Kikuyu men who were not Mungiki had seriously challenged Mungiki on the issue. The police barely acted on reports of women being forcibly circumcised. Emboldened, it was only a matter of time before Mungiki wielded this weapon of terror on other targets.

The forced circumcisions were not just acts of violence; they must be understood as occurring within the context of Luo feminization. This feminization fit within the context of a biased history that tells Kenya’s story as that of brave Kikuyu warriors, the Mau Mau, who rescued the state from its colonial masters. From this biased Kikuyu perspective, Kenya’s history has been told as a story of Kikuyus as more hardworking than all the rest. Other ethnic groups are constructed as weaker, belonging less, having less of a stake in: as feminine. The forced circumcisions represented Kikuyu men declaring that they wield a masculine power over the feminized Luo men whose flesh they mutilated.

When Mungiki started by forcibly circumcising Kikuyu women, men, especially Luo men, hardly thought they had a stake in the issue. Gender is about the ecology of power. The economy of gender functions in ways that devalue the feminine even as it simultaneously empowers the masculine. That was at the heart of the forced circumcisions. The Kikuyu men were, at the moment of violence, rendering their Luo victims feminine. Unless we understand how this process works, how the feminine is automatically weaker and of less value, we remain a long way from achieving true gender equality. This is why, all Kenyans, even men, should care about issues of gender.

These issues of the gendered ecology of power in Kenya’s ethnic politics remain as urgent today as they were in 2008. Kenya’s ethnic politics continues to feminize some ethnic communities while simultaneously casting others as more masculine. In the absence of justice for the victims and perpetrators of the violence, the same ecology of gender power not only remains but is getting further entrenched. The continued silence around the forced circumcisions and castrations speaks to our collective acceptance that the practice is a relevant weapon of ethnic war which bodes ill for the 2012 elections.

* Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg is an assistant professor in the Politics department at the University of San Francisco. Her research and teaching interests center on issues of gender, women’s politics, ethnic politics, and human rights and she is currently writing a book on the impact of ethnic politics on the struggle for women’s rights legislation in Kenya. She is also the founder and executive director of Akili Dada, an international NGO empowering the next generation of Kenyan women leaders (www.akilidada.org)

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The question caused uproar. Nearly half of the civil society delegates were women and they applauded the question. But a male omda was the first to speak. He explained how village sheikhs are chosen by the men of the village, and every six to eight sheikhs elects and omda, and every six to eight omdas chooses a fursha or amir, who in turn affirms the position of the Sultan. All are men and he clearly could not conceive of an alternative arrangement. “We cherish and protect our women” he said.

President Mbeki then asked for a woman to respond. Half a dozen volunteered. Hawa Hassan Mansour was first in line. She contested the omda’s version. “There is a female sheikha who is also elected,” she said, “and by the way she gives birth to the male sheikh.” Hawa explained how the female sheikha has responsibilities and duties. She works on bringing conflict to an end, tending the wounded, and calming people. “We also have our equivalents of omda and amir,” she continued. “Anyway, what’s wrong with having a female omda?”

A second lady, Khaltoum Nimairi, took the floor. “Do we have experience in this field? Yes!” She gave examples of women who had taken part in consultative councils, which she said, “provided solid and convincing arguments.” One case was Taja, the sister of the last Fur Sultan Ali Dinar, who was in his council. The same was true in the Sultanate of Dar Gimir. Women serve in the assemblies of localities, states and the National Assembly. As we are the majority of the population today, Khaltoum said, we will elect our sisters. “If we want a female omda, why not? If we want a female sultan, we shall get one.”

President Mbeki closed the discussion by agreeing with Khaltoum, “why should not my mother, the woman who gave birth to me, also not be eligible to be an omda or a sultan?”