Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim (The Guardian)
Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim was a towering determine in Sudanese politics and a pioneering advocate for ladies’s rights. Born in Khartoum, her actual start 12 months varies in sources, starting from 1928 to 1933. She was a part of an informed and politically acutely aware household; her grandfather was a headmaster and imam, and her father, a trainer, was dismissed for refusing to show in English below colonial rule.
Ibrahim’s activism started throughout her faculty years at Omdurman Ladies’ Secondary Faculty the place she launched a newspaper known as Elra’edda (The Pioneer Ladies), which centered on ladies’s rights and anti-colonialism. She additionally wrote below a pen identify in public newspapers. Whereas at school she organized Sudan’s first ladies’s strike in protest of her faculty’s determination to take away science classes, changing them with “household science.”
In 1947, Ibrahim based the Mental Girls’s Affiliation, and in 1952, she co-founded the Sudanese Girls’s Union (SWU). Ibrahim served on its government committee and have become its president in 1956. Underneath her management, the SWU established branches in cities and villages throughout the nation. She advocated for equal wages, technical coaching for ladies, and literacy packages, confronting each colonial authorities and conservative parts inside Sudanese society who resisted ladies’s participation in public.
In 1955, she turned the chief editor of Sawat al-Maraa (Womanpol’s Voice Journal), the SWU’s influential publication that performed a vital position within the overthrow of the Ibrahim Abboud regime.
Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim married El-Shafie Ahmed el-Sheikh, a outstanding communist commerce union chief and political activist. That they had one son, Ahmed. Their household life, nevertheless, was typically overshadowed by the turbulent political panorama of Sudan. El-Shafie Ahmed el-Sheikh was executed in July 1971 by the regime of Jaafar Nimeiri following a failed navy coup, leaving Fatima a widow with a younger baby to boost. This private tragedy deepened her resolve, and she or he vowed by no means to remarry, dedicating herself to her son and her ongoing battle for justice.
In 1965, Ibrahim made historical past by changing into the primary Sudanese girl elected to parliament. As a member of that physique, she championed equal employment, equal pay, and entry to greater schooling for ladies. Her political journey was typically fraught with challenges, together with arrests and imprisonment throughout numerous dictatorial regimes, notably below Nimeiri and later Omar al-Bashir.
Regardless of the political persecution, Ibrahim continued her work. In 1990, she went into exile after the al-Bashir navy coup, serving because the President of the banned Sudanese Girls’s Union from overseas. In 1991, she was elected President of the Girls’s Worldwide Democratic Federation (WIDF), changing into the primary African Muslim girl to carry this prestigious worldwide place. Her advocacy on the worldwide stage earned her the United Nations Award for Excellent Achievements within the Area of Human Rights in 1993, and the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2006.
Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim returned to Sudan in 2005 after a reconciliation between the federal government and the opposition, briefly serving once more as a deputy in parliament representing the Sudanese Communist Get together. She handed away in London on August 12, 2017, on the age of 84.