Suad Ibrahim Ahmed: “I am fighting”
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By Magdi El Gizouli
December 31? 2013 6 Death robbed me of another ‘teacher’ this Sunday.
Suad Ibrahim Ahmed, a veteran Sudanese communist, passed away in a
Khartoum hospital in the early hours of 29 December at the age of 78.
Born into a family of prestige and wealth, Suad chose the perilous
path of the counter-effendi the moment she awoke to political
consciousness as one of a few female students in Khartoum University
in the late 1950s. Her father, Ibrahim Ahmed, was a distinguished
politician of the Umma Party of a liberal mould and minister of
finance in Abdalla Khalil’s cabinet. The daughter was raised in the
shell of Khartoum’s grand and great, one she broke out of with the
tool of mind.
Talal Afifi, the man behind the Sudan Film Factory, introduced me to
Suad. We visited her in her Khartoum (2) house, a history book by
itself, for a video interview as part of a project to document the
experiences of those distinguished Sudanese communists who lived
through the 1971 purges and came out alive. Talal chose the title “We
survived” for the series but it never saw completion, partially
because of the stubborn resistance of many to speak about events they
felt were still very much contemporary. It was in Suad’s house that
the last meeting between the commanding officer of the 1971 communist
coup Hashim al-Atta and the party chief Abd al-Khalig Mahjoub too
place. Both men did not survive. Hashim was executed by firing squad
in al-Shajara military base south of Khartoum and Abd al-Khalig died
on the gallows of Cooper Prison in Khartoum North. Suad did survive,
one of four women elected to the thirty three members Central
Committee in the Communist Party’s historic 1967 general convention,
next to Mahasin Abd al-Aal, Naima Babiker al-Rayah and Fatima Ahmed
Ibrahim. I asked her how she landed in the Communist bosom considering
her background and education. She answered in the sharp tones of a
militant: ‘The Origin of the Family’ referring to Engels’ book ‘The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. For many a
feminist in Sudan, Suad was the woman to look up to, assertive,
defiant and incorrigibly political. Alas, many of her admirers in
recent years overlooked her politics in favour of her symbol.
In her study, Suad had a desktop PC that she commanded with fingers
severely disfigured by rheumatoid arthritis, one of several diseases
she had to suffer in her later years. She was persistently in pain but
brushed off sympathetic questions about her health with the answer: “I
am fighting,” and a fighter she was. She was fired from government
service in the statistics bureau in the early 1960s for opposing the
flooding of Halfa and the eviction of its residents to make way for
the construction of the Higher Dam in Egypt. The government of Ibrahim
Abboud probably regretted the move, since it prompted Suad to become a
full time journalist for the ‘The Voice of Women’, the surgically
subversive publication of the Sudanese Women Union at the time. A
Nubian herself, Suad continued to champion the cause of her people in
the face of dams and displacement till her last breath, a legacy that
won her the name “Mother of the Nubians”.
Unlike many fellow Sudanese communists, Suad had the indispensable
skill of making and managing money judiciously, capacities that she
possibly acquired from her father, and also her husband, the late
Hamid al-Ansari, one of a handful Sudanese businessmen who associated
with the Communist Party and probably funded it in its heydays. Hamid
is remembered for his brave refusal to testify against Abd al-Khalig
Mahjoub in the military tribunals set up by the revenge-thirsty
Nimeiry following the defeat of the 1971 coup as bullets burst through
the bodies of the accused officers within hearing distance. Suad spent
money on the causes she believed in, a lot of it. She set up a centre
to teach threatened Nubian languages in Cairo in the 1990s and
continued to support initiatives and individuals in Sudan whenever
need arose. Suad the Nubian will be missed by many; others will miss
the feminist; some the communist. I will miss that invincible spirit,
the emaciated white haired-woman seated in her study, her twisted
swollen aching fingers defiantly tipping messages of solidarity letter
by letter, each typo requiring excruciatingly painful repetition.
The author is a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He publishes
regular opinion articles and analyses at his blog Still Sudan. He can
be reached at [email protected]
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