Fawziyyah Hasan al-Yamani Uthman Arabi, was the daughter ofAl-Shaykh Hasan al-Yamani who progressed through the judiciary until his appointment Chief Justice of the Sudan in the period post-independence. She was born in Al-Obeid city in April 1934 and died on 15 April 2005 in Khartoum after a life dedicated to hard work and contribution. Fawziyyah was married to DrAl-Tahir Abd-al-Basit and has three sons and a daughter. She received her primary and intermediate education in Al-Obeid and her secondary education at Omdurman Secondary School. Later she joined the Technical College, now Sudan University, where she graduated with a diploma in fine arts in 1956. In 1963Fawziyyah received a scholarship to go to the United States where she completed her BA at California State University, Fresno, in 1964. In 1959, Fawziyyahbegan working for the Ministry of Education as a secondary school arts teacher.She also worked at a number of educational institutions; The Women’s TeacherTraining College in Omdurman, Madani Girls’ Secondary School, the TechnicalSchool in Omdurman, Al-Taqadum Girls’ schools. She also worked as deputy head of the Omdurman Girls’ Secondary School and head of the Bahri Old School for Girls until she was removed as a result of al-salih al-am (political decree) in 1989. Undoubtedly, Fawzaiyyah Yamani was one of the few lucky girls in Sudan to receive a good-quality education which even so, did not isolate them from the concerns of those around them, but rather added to their sense of responsibility.

The British authorities allowed Sayyid Babikir Badri to open the first girls’ school in 1907 and because the government authorities were not entirely well intentioned in this regard, the educational progress was extremely slow. This becomes clear when considering the huge leap in levels of education only fine years into the Sawdanah, post-independence. Initially, the British had tried to organise women’s economic activities, especially inOmdurman market. At the time, women were producing garments made of cotton,silk and wool in Al-Jazira, Kodofan and northern Sudan and then political awareness grew represented by Al-Azza, the wife of the freedom fighter AliAbd-al-Latif and Hajja Nafisa Saror, who sewed the flag of the White FlagLeague on her machine. Later the Sudanese Women’s Union appeared headed byKhaldah Zahir in 1946, Al-Mahdi’s Women’s Association in 1947 and the union of male and female nurses in 1948 (a female nurse became a member in 1955), the Union of Women Teachers in 1949, The Charitable Association in Al-Obeid in 1951headed by Nafisa Kamil up until the Women’s union in 1952 which struggled with the obstacles it had to face during dictatorships and whose activities were often suspended or curtailed. Fawziyyah Yamani was an active member of this union.

During the last few years of British rule in Sudan, and the emergence of the Graduates’ Conference, women had achieved limited voting rights in the elections of 1953 when the Indian head of the international committee tasked with observing the elections, Sukumar Sen, responded to the complaints by some educated women and allowed them to take part in the vote to choose members representing the Graduate Constituencies. With the popular October revolution in 1964, the 1965 law governing elections to parliament granted Sudanese women the right to vote in all constituencies and the right to stand for election in Graduate Constituencies. In a historic event, Fatma Ahmad Ibrahim joined parliament as the first Sudanese woman and superseded many of her contemporaries around the world. Next, Sudanese women won universal suffrage; to stand for election and vote in all constituencies. The Women’sUnion achieved equal pay for work in 1968 and negotiated women’s pension age. Sudan was one of the countries that ratified the World Labour Organisation agreement on 22 January 1970.

The Sudanese Women’s Union began publishing the magazine Sawtal-Mara in 1955. Fawziyyah Yamani was, as Fatma Babikir said, “the magazine’s pioneer cartoonist and produced sarcastic cartoons during military rule which attracted a number of readers to the magazine and which prompted the regime to threaten to suspend the magazine or to actually stop its publication”. The question that needs researching is whether there were anyother cartoonists in Sudan before Fawziyyah Yamani? I have personally looked for references and could not find the answer. I also asked some of those in this field and they told me that this type of art is associated with the lateIz-al-Din Uthman but when I asked his brother, Ustaz Hashim, when Iz-al-Din had started work as a cartoonist, he said it was at Al-Akhbar newspaper at the end of the 1950s and that he was not sure of the exact date. In any case, it is certain that through her cartoon art, Fawziyyah was the first Sudanese woman to address issues relating to her country and to women and to provide an understanding of the cultural and social environment in which the dreams of Fawziyyah, and many other young Sudanese women, were taking shape at the time.

This text is an excerpt and an introduction to a longer analytical study of The Life and Worlds of the Artist Fawziyyah Yamaniby the writer on issues relating to women and children, Dr Nahid Muhammadal-Hasan, consultant psychiatrist at Al-Amal Hospital, UAE.

Readers can find the full study by the same name in the second edition of the book ‘Hikayatuhun Hikayati’ by Dr Nahid Muhammadal-Hasan, published in 2017 by Rafiqi Publishing Ltd.  

‍