(about one hundred years old) with a strong tradition of education and religious observance and it was led by an influential family of which Ibrahim was a member. His father had been a prominent leader in the trade union the farmers had formed during the colonial days. Others in the family had achieved high levels of education and were prominent in regional and national politics; his brother had been the minister of agriculture for several years. The village founder was Ibrahim’s grandfather, Abdal Galil Hassan, who had gathered kin and supporters at a new well site to build their homes, following a dispute in the nearby village where they had been living near the end of the nineteenth century. The new village had flourished under his and his sons’ leadership, attracting educated religious scholars to teach the children of the region at a mahad, or school for the study of the Qur’an and religion, literacy, and mathematics. Families housed children of distant kin who came as students. Although it was boys who studied there in its early years, Abdal Galil and his family were early supporters of education for girls, donating money to the famed “father of girls’ education,” Babikr Bedri. Bedri founded the school in Omdurman (across the Nile from Khartoum) that has become the foremost women’s university in the country, Ahfad University. When the government began providing teachers to teach a government curriculum, the inhabitants of Abdal Galil raised money to build a school for girls shortly after they built one for boys.
Abdal Galil offered an ideal situation for research. The village had electricity (as only about half of the villages of the irrigated area did), clean well water in a tall water tank that fed the local taps in homes of the better-off families of farmers, and a fairly good dirt road. There was a clinic that was much superior to the one-person “dressing stations” found in many places. Abdal Galil’s clinic was a “health center” that boasted a trained medical assistant, a lab technician, clerical staff, cleaning staff, and even a health visitor, whose duty was to supervise the midwives of the surrounding villages.
My research assistant and I were invited to stay at the home of Ibrahim’s widowed, elderly mother, which afforded a respectable niche and easy entree for two women on their own among strangers. Hajja Fatma welcomed us with gracious hospitality. The title hajja recognized that she had gone on the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. My assistant, a researcher from the Ministry of Social Affairs named Awatif Al-Imam, was unmarried, and although she was educated, employed, and the daughter of liberal parents who did not disapprove of her pursuit of a career that necessitated rural research, this respectable and reasonably comfortable living arrangement was valued. We were both used to Sudanese urban middle-class lifestyles (with electricity, telephones, refrigeration, plumbing, and cold-water showers), so the latrine without a door (requiring a discreet cough as one approached in case someone else was already there) and the sometimes muddy and poorly lit paths of the village took some getting used to. Hajja Fatima offered us beds on a screened porch, fine for the warm nights. She had a refrigerator, so we could drink cold water after a hot morning of visiting and interviewing, and we did not need to cook for ourselves.
The house was well located, just a short distance from the mosque at the center of the settlement. The lofty minaret—from which the call to prayer was chanted at the five prayer times of the day—was visible from a great distance and served to orient me to our house. After hearing about the village midwife from the clinic staff, I met her in our neighborhood.
Besaina was an extremely capable and confident woman, and I liked her immediately. A widow with five children, she was a farmer who held claim on a ten-acre tenancy in the irrigation scheme. She had made the difficult decision some ten years before to spend an entire year living away from her family to undergo the government’s midwifery training in a distant town. Literacy was the prerequisite for the training (Besaina had had a few years of elementary school), which consisted of courses and ample direct experience under the supervision of a health visitor with advanced nurse-midwifery training. The class of thirty-six students went to many villages to attend births, and each student had to do twenty deliveries by herself before she could be certified.
So that prospective midwives would apply themselves to their studies and not forget what they had learned, the government’s midwifery training schools did not allow students to go home for the entire twelve-month period. Their children could be brought for visits only on Fridays, and those who attended schools at some distance from their homes seldom saw their families.
Despite the hardship, Besaina was very pleased to have had the training, as she could earn additional income and her role had earned her respect in Abdal Galil and the neighboring villages. She earned a reputation for never having any problem deliveries because she referred difficult births to the nearby hospital early and she had done several successful breech deliveries. When I first met her in the 1970s, however, Besaina’s government salary was the equivalent of only thirty dollars a month, a very small sum even by local standards. The midwives had been passed over when government raises were set that year; she explained that the government believes that the additional payments and gifts midwives receive from clients provide adequate income. But those sources are not much. At that time she reported such payments to be very small—about five dollars for a circumcision and eight to fifteen dollars for a birth. She was also expected—and was willing—to perform services for free if a family could not afford to pay. Families usually also gave the midwife gifts on both occasions, usually soap, perhaps perfume or incense, and some of the meat if an animal was sacrificed for a celebration.
Once certified as a government midwife, Besaina had been issued some basic equipment she kept in a metal box she carried with her when she went to see clients. Midwives were entitled to ask for supplies at the health clinics, but she told me they usually did not have what she needed, so she bought her supplies in the market in town: razors, disinfectant, antibiotic powder, a plastic mat, and xylocaine to inject for local anesthesia. One day she described her shopping list to me, and the total came to about seven dollars for antibiotic powder, a plastic sheet, and local anesthetic. “Vacation is here,” she laughed, “and it’s time for circumcisions.”
Indeed, within a few days I was invited to join her at a circumcision. “But isn’t it forbidden by the government?” I asked, wondering if that mattered to her.
“Yes, but it’s what the people want. The health visitor [her supervisor] never told me not to do circumcisions. If she had, I wouldn’t have done it. But she didn’t.” Evidently, the relationship with the health visitor was positive; she had supplied Besaina with gauze and surgical thread, useful for both circumcisions and births, and was available to do deliveries and follow-ups when Besaina needed to be away for a few days. Abdal Galil village fit the pattern I had encountered elsewhere—there was no government enforcement of the ban on female circumcision.
Besaina had done only about six circumcisions in the village that year. The West Africans (the Hausa, discussed again below) in the laborers’ quarter of the village do not circumcise (masheen sakit, zey intu, roughly, “they go untouched, like you foreigners”) and seldom summoned her for childbirth except for very difficult cases. Besaina was responsible for several villages, but one of the larger ones had sent off a young woman for training that year, so there would soon be more help.
The day of the circumcision, Besaina sent for me early in the morning, around seven o’clock, and I joined her at the home of one of the farming families, near the edge of the village adjacent to the dirt road that ran along the canal on the north side of the village.
“Sit right next to me so you can see everything,” she instructed me. I scooted my small stool, a bumber made of ropes woven on a wood frame, across the packed dirt floor to be closer to where she sat, next to a bed of similar construction placed near the window. The light was good. She prepared her instruments on a small table to one side, placing a new razor, hypodermic needle, a curved suture needle, suturing thread, and a small scissors in a large blue and white enameled metal bowl. A kettle of water was heating on a low charcoal stove outside so she could sterilize these instruments with boiling water when the time came.
Meanwhile the other arrangements
