ABSTRACT
Amena Yussuf Omara (my grandmother, my mother’s mother-in-law) was Sudanese, of ancient genealogy. She was the only daughter of Yussuf Omara, a rich slave-trader who was a sirr al tujjar, or President of the Chamber of Commerce. Yussuf Omara was a descendant of an ancient Funj clan; his estates bear the Funj royal seal, a hallmark of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century sultans’ land charts. Yussuf Omara was too rich to sell grain during famine and disaster: he piled grain in front of his house for the needy to come and help themselves. This was an old tradition, which came down from the time of the Pharaohs, by which the rich heads of tribes and Sufist tariqas would provide for their followers during times of recession, natural disaster and famine. This act of his is still the theme of folksongs on paternal generosity. The praises of his daughter (Amena Yussuf Omara) are also sung, as the epitome of nobility, dignity and charity; she inherited her father’s estates, wealth and slaves. (She kept her slaves until she died: although slavery was officially abolished in the Sudan in 1933, they continued to live with her, as they had nowhere to go.)
Her husband, Mahmoud Hussein Safwat, was Egyptian of Ottoman origin; his family had come to the Sudan with the 1821 invasion by Egypt, on behalf of the Khedive in Constantinople. The Egyptian/Ottoman administration was interrupted by a brief period of Sudanese independence under the Mahdist revolt against the Turko-Egyptian rule which overtook the four-centuries-old Funj sultanate. Amena Yussuf Omara’s husband later returned and worked with the Anglo-Egyptian administration as Senior Registrar at the High Court of Justice. The civil service in the Sudan has old connections with slavery: government officials, like the military, were the slaves, ex-slaves or foster children of the ruler, the head of the tribe (sheikh) of the Tariga. In her heart of hearts, Amena was not proud of her husband’s profession. Although he came from a relatively developed society and was educated, he was a government servant. Exactly how her marriage came about was not known; what was clear was that she felt superior to him from the very start. In Amena’s eyes, her husband remained her inferior.
