Ahmed (not his real name) was shorn twice by soldiers, in 2019 and 2022. Here in Khartoum, October 2, 2022. : “Rastas do not die. They rolled me over, left for dead, but I’m still here. Long hair, dreadlocks. It is rebellion daily. But, above all, it is personal freedom. No one can decide for you whether or not to cut them. No one can stop the change that is underway, and the coming generation is even more rebellious. » ELIOTT BRACHET
In the processions that have been challenging the military power since General Bourhane’s coup a year ago, the police have targeted many long-haired demonstrators.
By Eliott Brachet lemonde (Khartoum, correspondence)
“My hair is my freedom. That’s what they want to shear, shave from the surface,” says Abdallah (the first names have been changed), stacking bricks on a barricade. As every week for almost a year, this engineering student took to the streets of Khartoum on Thursday, September 29, to protest against the coup led by General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane. Besides his swimming pool goggles, his FFP2 mask to protect himself from tear gas and the Sudanese flag tied at the waist, the 22-year-old protester wears a wide red cap. His headgear hides a tignasse of black hair, with holes in places, giving a glimpse of his skull. “I don’t look like anything anymore,” he says in a rictus where shame and derision mingle.
Plainclothes police beat him before cutting off strands of hair with scissors
A week earlier, on his way out of university, he was about to board a bus when a hand violently pulled him back. Plainclothes police beat him before cutting strands of his hair with a pair of scissors. On that day, dozens of young Sudanese suffered the same fate, humiliated in public.
In the wake of the military putsch of 25 October 2021, campaigns of this kind have multiplied in the capital and other major cities of the country. Posted at checkpoints or scattered in the tumult of bus stations, police, soldiers, intelligence agents or militiamen in the power’s pay regularly take passengers off a bus to cut off rebel manes. All with the help of mowers, knives, razor blades and sometimes even pieces of glass.
Resistance committee activists are particularly targeted, but many other young urban dwellers are paying the price. “Our entire generation is targeted. They say, “Are you an artist? A breaker? An anarchist? You’re pretty with your girl’s cut. Have you strayed from the path of our religion?” “ lists Adam*, who was razed in early August.
In the processions that challenge the military power, many demonstrators wear long hair. “When you live under an authoritarian regime, all means of resistance are good. Growing hair, for us, is a way of refusing their conception of the world,” says Wad el-Sheikh (an assumed name), a masked protester wearing thin dreadlocks.
“Extinguishing the revolutionary flame”
“The Burhan regime, which turns a blind eye to security unrest, political tensions and deteriorating living conditions, has found in the capillary extravagances of Sudanese youth a serious threat to the country’s security,” journalist Abdulhamid Awad quipped in the online newspaper Al-Rakuba. “They are trying by all means to extinguish the revolutionary flame that is burning the streets,” adds Mujahid*, who was mowed down at the beginning of September.
On the flags waved in the crowd, faces sporting afro cuts or dreadlocks often return. Bibo, Russi, Marwan, Hussam… These names are on everyone’s lips. “Martyrs of the revolution,” they were all “Rastas” and have become symbols among protesters killed by law enforcement since October 25, 2021—at least 117, according to a committee of doctors. The Rastafarian movement is not a religion in Sudan. It is at the same time a fashion, a lifestyle and the marker of a Pan-Africanist inspired ideology. “We have re-appropriated the figure of the rasta. It is made compatible with Islam through the values of tolerance and peace. The rasta does not die. If his body collapses, his ideas endure,” Wad el-Sheikh continues. An employee of a medical company, he says he does not drink or smoke, wanting to break “the stereotype that systematically equates Rastas with idle bango [local marijuana] smokers.”
These shearings in public places began to appear on the sidelines of the demonstrations that wavered the power of Omar Al-Bashir, from December 2018. The phenomenon had faded during the political transition that began at the end of 2019 and the sharing of power between civilians and the military, but it has regained momentum since the latter again appropriated power in 2021.
Ahmed* was mowed twice. The first time in January 2019, at the beginning of the revolution against Bashir’s regime: intelligence agents dug him a furrow in the middle of his long dreadlocks, before imprisoning him for two months in one of the dungeons in northern Khartoum nicknamed “al-talajat” (“freezers”), where detainees were sprayed with water in cold rooms.
“It’s long and difficult in Sudan to be accepted by your family and community when you wear long hair. There, in a second, they snatched a part of my identity from me. It destroyed me from the inside. As if they had raped me,” he says, his voice trembling. Grieved by the wind of freedom at the fall of the dictator, Ahmed had decided to let his hair grow again.
For three-quarters of an hour, a blade goes back and forth on his skull, in a mixture of shaving foam and blood
Three years later, on March 8, 2022, as the young man turned back at the end of a demonstration, he was hit by a vehicle loaded with soldiers. His skull hits the ground and opens 8 centimeters. “I was pissing my blood. The men hoisted me into the back of the pickup and continued to beat me. I lost consciousness,” he says. He wakes up at the police station, between life and death.
For fear of ending up with a corpse on his arms, his torturers finally decide to release him. But before dragging his wobbly body to the car, he kneels in the middle of the police station yard, his hands tied behind his back. For three quarters of an hour, a blade goes back and forth on his skull, in a mixture of shaving foam and blood. Then the soldiers dispose of his body in a vacant lot. Ahmed is narrowly saved by locals who discover him in the middle of the garbage cans.
“Soldiers act with impunity,”
“Beyond physical violence, it’s symbolic violence,” said Azza Abdul Aziz, an anthropologist in Khartoum. “The control of bodies and appearance was a tool in the service of the ‘civilizational project’ imagined by the Al-Inqaz regime [the ‘salvation’ regime, the name claimed by the former dictator Omar al-Bashir], which wanted to Islamize Sudanese society. He pursued this idea of flattening the diversity of the population, of standardizing it,” she adds, recalling that in the 1970s, before the introduction of Sharia law, Afro-cuts were widespread in Sudanese cities.
These gradually disappeared, at the same time as the military-Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir imposed the “laws of public order”, a legal arsenal with blurred contours that criminalized outfits deemed “indecent” and has led many women to be whipped and humiliated since the 1990s. In November 2019, the transitional government installed after the fall of the dictator tore down this repressive arsenal. Officially, they are still suspended, but, for several months, the police have been multiplying operations called “fight against negative phenomena”. “Hair shaving is one of them. These are arbitrary practices, with no legal basis. Soldiers act with impunity. If your head doesn’t come back to them, they do what they want. We are in a situation of non-state,” denounces lawyer Abdelsalam Saboon.
The leaders of the multiple units of the security apparatus deny having ordered these public shaving campaigns and denounce “individual blunders”. Should we see in this the return to grace of the Islamist regime, many of whose supporters have been rehabilitated, released from prison, or returned from exile since the coup of General Al-Bourhane? Some have returned to their posts in administrations, others are once again active on the political scene. This step backwards is not, however, publicly assumed by the head of the junta, who describes his seizure of power as a “rectification of the course of the revolution”.
“To admit publicly that they are returning to the old order would ignite the street. Now the junta is raising the spectre of a society that is sinking into depravity and immorality. They make a part of the Sudanese population feel attacked by this movement of subversion that intervenes in the public space. This is a classic counter-revolutionary strategy,” concludes Azza Abdul Aziz. These humiliation campaigns do not seem to intimidate the young people involved in the uprising. “They don’t understand that something has broken between our generation and theirs. Shave my head today and tomorrow I will be in the street again,” promises Abdallah, the student with the red cap.
Despite the intense repression, most protesters describe the ongoing revolution as an irreversible liberation. Dreadlocks, afro cuts, detached or short hair for women are emanations among others. “What is more dangerous for society, my long hair or those soldiers who gas and charge their people with their armored vehicles?” exclaims Abdallah, pointing to the head of the procession that disappears in a cloud of tear gas.
Eliott Brachet lemonde (Khartoum, correspondence)
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