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...rural north. suggest that while midwifery training had contradictory outcomes and failed to undermine the logic that underpinned the practice of pharaonic (female) Circumcision, some aspects of it became woven into the fabric of Sudanese daily life in unexpected ways. Parties to the colonizing venture looked, inescapably, in two directions at once: to the immediate situation in which they were mutually engaged, and to the respective cultural contexts of health from whence they came and in which they remained grounded.
Key words: Colonialism, gender, midwifery training, female circumcision
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How the Arab women [in Sudan] ever produced any children is difficult for a European to imagine. The universal and barbaric practice of genital mutilation ... would make intercourse painful. There could be no birth without preliminary slashing and subsequent cobbling together by, in the majority of cases, untrained locals using septic tools ... The constant teaching and preaching of the Midwives' Training School, did nothing to alter public opinion ... The apparent determination of Arab women, enduring this primitive treatment, to continue to inflict it on the next generation is shocking. (Kenrick 1987:110)
What is health? What is a normal, healthy female body? These are rhetorical questions, perhaps, readily disposed of by banal replies. But for the anthropologist, self-evident statements are seldom transparent; they are instead clues to Social Analysis, Volume 47, Issue 2, Summer 2003 the presence of naturalized cultural assumptions that demand to be explored.
What constitutes 'soundness of body and mind' (to use an Oxford English Dictionary definition) resists unitary description across cultural, political, and historical divides. Health is an illusive ideal we strive toward in keeping entropy at bay; it is the largely unanalyzed ground of illness and, in the passage above, of aberrance. In other words, health is what illness, aberrance, and infirmity are not. Its parameters depend--reciprocally--on those of its counter-conditions, and these are culturally informed. When others with whom one interacts follow a different regime of health, the contrast can reveal the taken-for-grantedness of one's assumptions and perhaps, in an ironic movement, denaturalize them.
But not always. In colonial situations in which a dominant group seeks to replace an indigenous regime with its own, the subordinates' contemplative agency is constrained. So, too, is that of the colonizers, whose vision prevails as truth and their subjects' as its foil: 'superstition', 'backwardness', ' barbarity'.
Despite this, for reasons of humanity, expediency, and cost, colonizers often used native practices and terms as vehicles for implanting novel ideas; they also translated local expressions as literally mirroring their own. This is what happened in the case of midwifery training in early-twentieth-century Sudan. For British and Arab Sudanese women, engaging with each others' body images and ideals in the power-laden colonial context left ample space for ironic miscommunication. If neither group recognized it at the time, the Sophoclean upshot of their encounter surely tells the tale.
Battling 'Superstition'
Beginning in the 1920s, British officials in colonial Sudan sought to abolish the pharaonic form of female circumcision, or infibulation, among self-identified 'Arabs' in the northern two-thirds of the country, where the practice was (and is) entrenched, and to prevent its spread to adjacent non-Arab groups where it was not. Efforts to end infibulation--but not all forms of female circumcision--continued in fits and starts into the latter days of Anglo-Egyptian rule, yet were concentrated between 1920 and 1946. The project's path was not smooth: there were significant clashes among expatriate personnel over the pace of change and how best to ensure it; political and commercial exigencies often intervened; medical and political objectives seldom converged; few Sudanese complied. Change did occur, for in some regions the severity of cutting was reduced, but far from being abolished, the practice was as prevalent at the end of the period as it had been at the start. Since independence in 1956, there have been intermittent attempts to revive the campaign, the latest (as of this writing) proclaimed in March 2003.
British motives for trying to reduce the severity of female genital cutting were predictably touted as humanitarian and civilizing, but what, in the colonial context, did that mean? As research progressed, it became clear that the overriding concern was to make the population more productive and tie it firmly to the 'world market' over which Britain was rapidly losing control. The fertile lands of the Gezira, above the junction of the White and Blue Niles, were being converted into a massive cotton plantation backed by Parliament and British entrepreneurs. Britain sought a reliable source of long-staple cotton required for the fine textiles that its Lancashire mills, faced with growing competition, had lately begun to produce. If successful, the scheme would significantly reduce reliance on mercurial suppliers such as Egypt and the United States. Not least it would enable Sudan's administration to pay for itself, as imperial possessions were expected to do. There was, however, an abiding shortage of native labor to cultivate the project (Daly 1986; Sikainga 1996), a situation aggravated by the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 (Bell 1998: 296).
British officials viewed Sudanese in racial terms and ranked their capacity for work on an evolutionary scale. They considered southerners or 'blacks', whom northerners had enslaved, to be strong, energetic, but innately undisciplined workers, needing close supervision and control. Northerners or 'Arabs' were regarded as habitually (not naturally) indolent, possessed of a 'slave-owning mentality', and averse to heavy manual toil (Hargery 1981; Sikainga 1996). Arabs were thus deemed rehabilitatable--through education, economic pressure, and the encouragement of 'orthodox' Islam over its volatile, charismatic forms. (1)
Officials were also convinced that Sudan had been severely depopulated in the late nineteenth century owing to famine, disease, and internal warfare. They claimed a decline from over eight and a half million people in 1881 to fewer than two million when Britain took control in 1898 (MacMichael 1954: 73). Though the figures were likely distorted to justify intervention, there had still been considerable misery, upheaval, and loss. (2) Yet a diminished peasantry meant there was now ample arable land. To control and resettle the populace, administrators subsidized farming and refused to liberate farmers' existing slaves. Indeed, well into the 1930s they abetted slaveholding, in the belief that without it, Sudan's shattered agrarian economy would not revive (Daly 1986, 1991; Sikainga 1996; Spaulding 1988). 'Free' labor for colonial projects was therefore scarce and expensive. Presumably, only when the limits of cultivation were reached would a reliable source of land-poor, cheap Arab workers arise.
By 1920 the population had not grown sufficiently to fill the demand for workers on colonial projects. Gezira dams, canals, and settlements were being built with costly foreign labor, and cotton production was slated to start in 1925.
Yet it was deemed imprudent to coerce Arab men with corvee or the like, lest they rise up in a new jihad. Armed with metropolitan understandings of motherhood, officials turned to Arab women for both explanation and solution. During the 1920s, northern women's domestic practices, childrearing techniques, inadequate hygiene, preferred position for giving birth, and, above all, customary infibulation were blamed for sustained low birthrates, high infant mortality, and all manner of moral deficiency. This, despite advice from British physicians that conquest and colonial rule had altered disease patterns in Sudan, and the consequent spread of malaria and syphilis accounted for the discouraging state of procreative affairs: the landscape of the Gezira had been altered, and troops were moved quickly from place to place (Atkey in Bell 2000: 157). Arab mothers nonetheless bore the onus of the north's apparent 'failure to progress'.
A memo from the British director of intelligence circulated to all senior staff and medical personnel in 1924 states the case:
Setting aside the ordinary motives of humanity, the Government is deeply interested in the increase of population and I believe it to be within the bounds of accuracy to say that no very great propaganda with the male population of the country can be expected until the female portion of it, which controls the children for all their early and impressionable years, is raised to a higher standard of mental and moral development, which seems impossible as long as the custom, of Pharaic circumcision holds. (3)
The medical director agreed, warning that worse than the physical harm from infibulation is its "mental effect on the child ... as the shock is so severe as to be liable to cause serious mental disorder, thus further handicapping a sex that is ... behind the development of the men of the country." (4) Arab Sudanese women were deemed an unhealthy influence on the next generation. Their bodies and bodily practices "would have to be 'civilized', so that their offspring might proliferate and learn to work and consume in useful, intelligible ways.
Reforming Women:
Such concerns were key factors in the regime's attentions to public education and health. Professionals in these fields were tasked not merely with swelling the workforce, but also with schooling native sensibilities, working subtle transformations at the level of bodies and minds. Because northerners subscribed to a doctrine of gendered spheres more stringent than in Britain, contact with Muslim women was difficult for officials and civil servants, most of whom were men. Yet the transformation to modernity required women's compliance to produce healthy and disciplined workers, shape the sensibilities of Arab youth, and 'improve' the human and natural environments for intensive cotton cultivation by bettering sanitation and controlling the spread of disease.
How could they be reached? Sponsoring general education for girls seemed a likely approach, yet here the regime was reluctant and slow, convinced that objections from Muslim fathers...
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