A group of boys tell her how the neighbourhood has transformed to support the revolution, and a woman
asks her details for public demonstrations taking place the next day.
Mubarak appears to represent the revival of Sudan’s female leaders who were decimated under Bashir’s era.
Perhaps Sudan’s biggest feminist icon is socialist writer and thinker Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, born in 1932,
who became the country’s first female member of parliament in 1965 and died in London in 2017.
Sudan’s protesters paid homage to Ibrahim by putting her face on signs bearing the slogan “Our mother
Fatima”. Graffiti artists have tagged her image across Khartoum’s crumbling walls.
Ibrahim “was determined and strong, even in high school”, says Fatima Elgalil, a historian of women’s
rights in Sudan and a colleague of the former journalist.
Ibrahim challenged some of the repressive cultural and legal norms in Sudan, creating a viral magazine that
compared women’s rights in Sudan to other countries. But Ibrahim preferred to work in stages of change
and did not challenge all of the country’s oppressive norms at once, according to Elgalil.
“You must be flexible,” Elgalil explains of Ibrahim’s tactics.
But the generational gap of Sudanese feminists is evident as Elgalil speaks. Elgalil is 84 and her
granddaughter Zeinab is 17. As Zeinab listens to her grandmother talk, she agrees with the objectives, but
not the approach of working in gradual steps.
“When they grew up and fought in this regime, it was by being women who fit into society.” Zeinab says.
“But for us, living in this environment has been very repressive.”
Zeinab recounts stories of a friend getting married at 15 and another friend’s cousin being raped at 12 years
old. She says that instead of working in steps like Ibrahim, the Sudanese feminist icon, young women are
demanding a complete overhaul in women’s rights during protests. “The fact that we are angry and going to
fight is very weird for her generation because they took it step by step, but we say, ‘We want to fight’.”