Heading for trouble

Press, 31 August 1984, Page 15

Heading for trouble

From

GILL LUSK

in Khartoum

A score of Sudanese hairdressers have been flogged — for the simple crime of being hairdressers. Only when the men were arrested, lashed, and then imprisoned for a month, did the stunned residents of the capital, Khartoum, realise that hairdressing had become illegal. The "coiffeur,” as he is known in Sudanese Arabic, was an essential part of Sudanese urban social life and, indeed, one of the few pleasures available to women outside the home. His star function was to complete the preparation of the bride for her wedding party. Instead of leaving from home, the modern town bride would be driven straight to the celebrations from the highly perfumed salon. Crowds of equally highly-per-fumed , female relatives, also displaying the hairdresser’s skills, would gather excitedly outside the shop, ululating at the tops of their voices.

The noisily coy crowd would then escort the shy young bride to the wedding party, where her en-

trance on the stage — often at midnight — would be eagerly awaited for up to six hours by an audience numbering hundreds, and even thousands. Her arrival was the climax of the three-day party. This, it seems, is no longer to be. Nor is the hairdresser to be allowed to cater for the needs of regular middle-class customers and the rapidly growing group of young working women.

This removal of one of the simple and harmless pleasures of life is seen in Khartoum — a city where pleasures are few and life is hard at the best of times — as yet another depressing addition to the campaign of official puritanism which began with the banning of alcohol early last September. This campaign is carried out in the name of Islam, but the objection voiced by most Muslims, the majority of the population, is quite

simply: “This is not Islam.” Indeed, the imposition of a state of emergency at the end of April made it clear that the harsh measures bad a political rather than a religious basis. Waves of arrests “on suspicion,” including “suspected intended adultery,” began and are still continuing, as are the amputations of band and foot for relatively small thefts and the flogging, fining, and imprisonment of those who break the drink laws — and, sometimes, break no law at all.

Such was the case of the unfortunate hairdressers. Though it has now been announced that they may reopen their salons, this can be done only on condition that female hair is attended to only by females. There are virtually no women trained in “modern” hairdressing in the entire country. Copyright—London Observer Service.