Stories from the streets of Khartoum

By Mai Azzam

Mai Azzam is a junior anthropologist graduated from the University of Khartoum. Mai holds two master degrees in Anthropology. The first one is from the University of Khartoum 2010 and the latest is an M.Phil. in anthropology of development from the University of Bergen. Her research interests are on youth, Islam, and political anthropology. She worked with youth movements in Khartoum, Sudan, to explore more about youth role in public life in Khartoum. Mai worked in Khartoum as a junior researcher at CEDEJ (Centre d'Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et sociales) for three years. She also worked in different capacities with local NGOs in Khartoum and developed her activist personality.

Introduction

This is a series of life stories of young motivated people in Khartoum. It is a direct reflection from ethnographic material collected in 2015. I spent six month for data collection among two charity associations in Khartoum namely Sadagaat and Shari’ Al Hawadith. Each association has started via informal methods and grows to fill a gap left by government privatization policies and investments on war and defense rather than social services.

Through this material I aim to show an ‘experience-near’ (Wikan 1991) ethnography, in which the voices of my interlocutors are dominant.

“I wanted to do something” is a statement almost all my interlocutors gave when I asked why they join the charity associations. One question that continuously puzzled my writing process was how I could conceptualize the many narratives I got from my interlocutors. In particular, those who told me very rich life stories, as these stories encompassed/embodied so many elements that seemed difficult to capture correctly with a few anthological terms. Such an attempt, it seemed to me, would lead to a devaluation of the rich stories I was told. Thus, I will try to present their narratives pretty much as I got them, in order to understand some of the reasons why my interlocutors decided to join the charity associations.

In her article Wikan (1991) criticized the existing strait jackets of anthropological jargons that dominated the discipline. As Wikan told us, “I suggest, …, that we have to follow people, as they move, bridging scenes and encounters. I stress the aspect of bridging because much social analysis proceeds by compartmentalizing life into distinct domains (for example, a « public » and a « private »), not seeing that a life-line is cut in the process, and with it compelling concerns” (Wikan, 1991:295). To achieve this Wikan calls for a deep, experience-near presentation of fieldwork data.

However, whatever their personal and individual reasons, what brings my interlocutors in this chapter together is the mutual aim for social change, by offering help and staying active, not passive. The “do-something” type of motivation they all point at, aims at changing the lives of those who are being served, and it comes from a feeling of responsibility towards the community. “Feelings” are actually an important pushing factor for my interlocutors to work in charity; either they have wounded feelings caused by a certain indecent that changed their way of seeing themselves, or feelings of a need to bring about or for improving an ethically based community. These feelings transfer from passive into active ones, once they join the charity associations. By passive I mean the feelings that one keeps inside and therefore remains inside the person. Once these feelings are active, this means they are strong enough to allow those people to “do something”. Thus, to present my interlocutors as they encounter change, it is important to shed light on few anthropological concepts I find relevant to the stories presented.

The act of “doing something” is best seen in the framework of what Bayat (2010) calls “quiet encroachments”. Bayat (2010) argues that people who are in way or another excluded from urban social services systems engage themselves in quiet encroaching. The concept refers to people’s informal methods in bringing social services and accordingly changes their realities. My interlocutors too are involved in encroachment of the social and political system in Sudan.

Bayat (2010) argued that quiet encroachment is grounded in people’s needs. In a system that cannot provide the services they need, people start to “encroach” the systems in order to get what they need. I would like to add, that quiet encroachment also starts from feelings, and this is one thing that my interlocutors mentioned over and over again.

I use the word “feelings” in the same sense as the concept of “emotions”. In Sudanese Arabic the expression “I feel” points to a state of emotional complexities that one encounters. “I feel” does not only explain a sensed status of being or a bodily experience, it is a combination of body and mind status. For example, if one says, “I was hurt” in Sudanese Arabic, “hurt” may refer to bodily pain, or it could mean that “my feelings were hurt”, thus referring to a mind/heart experience.

Here I relate to Leavitt’s (1996) reminder that feelings in the Western meaning of the word contain a dichotomization that might not always exist in other places in the world.

Emotions in anthropology have often been studied as part of dichotomies, mind versus body, positivist versus interpretivist, culture versus nature, and universal versus relative (Lutz & White, 1986). I understand emotions here as a complex process that is generated by social elements. Emotions in this sense vary between individuals and between social circumstances. Many of my interlocutors talked about the deep emotions they got after certain incidents in their lives, and thus these emotions motivated them to “encroach” and do something. Then emotions are not merely metaphysical stands that we cannot grasp, emotions are rather powerful in changing people’s lives.

Consequently, in the stories I will tell emotions/feelings appear to be an effect of interaction with a fellow human beings suffering; anger with injustice and a basic compassion with those who suffer. As Leavitt (1996) argues, feelings are “subjectively” shaped and attached to meaning, “human-beings” initiate this process in particular “social contexts” (Leavitt, 1996: 531).

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