79 JFK AND BEYOND

When War Affects Decisions

WHEN ROGAIA MUSTAFA ABUSHARAF left northern Sudan in the early 1980s for graduate school, her country was not yet in the grips of another bloody civil war that would eventually leave 2 million dead and 4 million, mostly from the south, uprooted from their homes.

Today, she is far away from the violence. Living in the United States, she splits her time between Brown University, where she teaches, and the Kennedy School, where she is a visiting fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights.

But Sudan is always on this anthropologist’s mind. Especially its women.

It’s why she’s at Harvard continuing a project on Sudanese migration that she started three years ago. Now she’s trying to figure out how migration has affected the cultural practices of “displaced” women — those who are uprooted but don’t leave the country.

In many ways, Abusharaf is cutting a new path in her field. Although migration has been studied extensively, a focus on Sudanese women as a separate entity has received little attention. This doesn’t make sense, she says: it’s women and their children who fill the northern camps and shantytowns that “temporarily” shelter southern migrants.

“The majority of who gets affected by war are women and children,” she says from her bare office at the Carr Center, symbolic of her own nomadic existence.

They arrive in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city, after fleeing their homes in the south having lost virtually everything: their possessions, relatives, and culture. Husbands, brothers, and sons are off fighting or have crossed into other countries alone. A good number have been killed. For many women now in charge of their destiny for the first time, this dramatic switch from follower to leader is a mixed bag. On the one hand, there’s a new sense of independence. As she talks to women in the camps, it’s obvious they want to make something of their new lives, she says. They don’t want to depend entirely on limited humanitarian aid. But it isn’t easy, especially in the isolated shantytowns, which are less regulated than the camps and located outside the city. Food is in short supply. Social services and electricity are nonexistent. Even water is sparse in the desert space.

“You see lots of children looking for anything in garbage cans,” Abusharaf says. Houses are built with adobe-like material known as zibala, composed mostly of animal dung, or straw. Little work is available, especially for women. Out of desperation, some turn to prostitution — something they would never have considered before. Protection is minimal, exposing women to rape, harassment, and looting. There have been allegations of slavery and human trafficking.

There’s also the problem of identity.

“Northern Sudan is mostly Arab speaking, Muslim, and urban. The south, where the women come from, where the war is taking place, is more rural. They are mostly followers of indigenous religions,” she says. “The rhetoric is that you can’t be ‘displaced’ in your own country, but that’s not true.”

Belonging becomes an issue, she says. “In the south they had a rich cultural life. But in the camps and shantytowns, they become alienated and traumatized. Who, they wonder, are they becoming?”

In response, some women try to assimilate, taking on northern cultural practices. They switch religions and intermarry, adopting their northerner husband’s beliefs. Native language is used less often. Even harmful practices like female circumcision — more common in the north than the south — are adopted in an effort to fit in.
“War affects decisions,” Abusharaf says.

In May, she plans to go back to the camps to talk with more women. “There’s still lots of fieldwork to be done,” she says. Eventually she’ll pull her findings together as a policy report, then a book. (Her newest book, Wanderings, came out last year. One on female circumcision is due this year.)

“I’m trying to figure out how to get international attention to let people know there are entire communities struggling,” she says. “Struggling just to eat.” — LH