In 1907 in a tiny classroom in the small town of Rufa’a, seventeen young girls were reading and writing nonsense words. They belonged to the initial classs of the Rufa’a Girls School, a bold experiment to determine if formal education in reading, writing and arithmetic was appropriate for Sudanese girls. Because the students had no previous knowledge of the written alphabet, their headmaster Sheikh Babikr Bedri [a merchant and veteran of the Mahdi’s army] designed a primer that introduced groups of similar letters and combined them into “words”. When the girls had learned just eleven letters (out of 28 in the Arabic alphabet), Ernest Dickinson, governor of the province, paid the school a visit. The young students carefully and proudly recited what they had learned. Dickinson himself knew little Arabic. He wrote in amazement that after just a few weeks of schooling, the Rufa’a girls already knew how to read and write.
-Khartoum at Night- Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan, Marie Grace Brown
I wanted to show my film at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman. I thought the women would like it even though the film is about men. Gasim Bedri, president of Ahfad, had arranged the screening in the library. Gasim is the grandson of Sheikh Babikr, and Ahfad University is the outcome of his experiment at Rufa’a Girls School.
Very few students were in attendance at screening time and I wanted a full house, so I walked out to the campus basketball court where a game was just ending. Come to a film screening, I said, You will like it. The women said, No, we are sweating and tired. We want to go to our dorm and study.
If Ernest Dickinson was easily fooled by the Rufa’a girls, I was even more easily fooled by the Ahfad women, because I knew even less about Arab co-education than did he. The women at Ahfad were studying psychology, business management, early childhood education and things like that. They did not care about men in the desert driving camels to market. I was amazed that they would pass on seeing a film about trails through the Sahara but they were more interested in finding their own ways through the modern world. After their basketball game.