“Migrating Bird”
The Many Names of Sudanese Toubs / Tobes / Tobs
Above, tangerine tones glow against a crisp yellow hijab.
This week’s post is a brief introduction to a series of articles exploring the semiotics of the Sudanese toub. Modest yet alluring, the toub is a garment freighted with cultural and sociological significance. I will be exploring the history of the toub and its role in Sudanese culture next month. Drawing on Sudanese sources such as the late designer and expert in Sudanese dress, Saadia Al-Salahi, considering representations of the toub in art by Rashid Diab and others, next month’s articles will also feature research undertaken by Marie Grace Brown, (Khartoum at Night, Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan), and Griselda El Tayib (Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan). I will also be looking at aspects of contemporary toub design as in Celebrities’ Favorite Toub Designer and The Sudanese Take on the Barbiecore Trend.
See too The Enduring Appeal of the Sudanese Toub
Below, celebrating the toub while adapting this iconic garment to the needs of working Sudanese women.
Sudan Memory; a toub dress, by Saadia El Salahi
Above, late colonial and early post-colonial images of Sudanese women wearing the toubs of their day and which I will discuss in further articles; images, personal collection, Imogen Thurbon.
Above, “Emancipation. Three of the eight Sudanese women who had the educational requirements which gave them a vote in the graduate constituencies”, Where God Laughed, The Sudan Today, by Anthony Mann, Museum Press Limited, 1954.
What’s in a Name?
The Toub as Statements of Political Allegiance
Types of Toub Material and Design
Some Famous Toub Names
The Story Behind “The Post Office Pen”
The Ocampo, Just a Rumour?
What’s in a Name?
Names of toubs are often coined by women informally before gaining currency country-wide. They reference the political issues of the day with wit and affection or serve as tokens of allegiance to a cause. They comment, tongue-in-cheek, on international events and the latest technological advances, as well as offering humourous nods to enduring aspects of the social and cultural fabric of Sudanese life, as in “The Fourth Wife” (Tobana, Facebook Page), a toub you don’t really like but just have to buy, and “Messi”, a toub of a material that slips and slides just like the moves of the famous football star. They provide fascinating insights into the societal issues of the moment and Sudanese women’s material and romantic aspirations and understandings of glamour. Names both reflect and give rise to trends in fashion. Perhaps most importantly, they remind us that Sudanese women have played active and prominent roles in the political movements of their times.
The decline in toub use, its recent orchestrated revival and celebration in the Sudanese media speaks volumes on the changing roles of Sudanese women in the public sphere, changing perceptions of religious orthodoxy and pan-Arab / Islamic identity, as well as crude economic reality.
The names of toubs play on concepts of love, feminine beauty, rivalry, and jealousy, as in “yisimmak”, or “May it poison you”, a silk toub so lovely you will be “poisoned with jealously if you don’t get one like it”, (Griselda Al Tayib). They celebrate the poetry, films, actors, singers and ballads of their day. This is the case of “Migrating Bird”, Al-Tayr al-muhaajir, a toub named after a poem by Salah Ahmad Ibrahim, hauntingly set to music by the late, great Mohammad Wardi. Toubs in turn are immortalized in poetry and song in their own right. Recently northern villages have even been honoured with toubs bearing their name; see ارتماءات نيلية
Above, dazzling colours and graceful folds.
“The naming of tobs by popular topics became for a short while in the 1950s and 1960s deliberately exploited commercially. The Syrian merchant who was at the time the agent for Tootal voile in Khartoum approached some prominent and influential Sudanese women teachers about the topical trends in tob names and asked them to suggest names for new tobs. These names were then sent ot Tootal in Manchester, and labels with the new names in English and in Arabic were printed on the packaging of the latest products.A few of these newest styles of tobs were dispatched by air to these privileged informants, who were given the chance to purchase and wear them before the bulk of the new tobs reached the market.”
Griselda El Tayib, Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan
Statements of Political Allegiance
Below, the political power of the toub as a statement of allegiance today.
Below left, the Minister for Youth and Sport, Ustadha Hazaar Abdel-Rasoul caused a media stir while on an official visit to Libya by wearing a toub stamped with military fatigue motifs in support of the Sudanese Armed Forces, “Al-guwaat al-musalaHa”, ( توب هزار” و”حاجات تانية”). Centre, (detail, right), a young woman models the “da`am as-sari`”, The Rapid Support Force Militia toub in 2014, the borders of which bear motifs echoing the RSF logo (آخر صيحات الموضة السودانيّة ثوب نسائي بإسم الدعم السريع ثـــيــاب الـــنــســيـــج اخـــر صــيحــات الــثــياب
Right, the “taSquT bass”; Just Fall! toub, embodying the slogan of the 2018 revolution, calling for the fall of the Bashir regime and featuring tumbling chess pieces and the proud fearlessness of the lion, (Tobana, Facebook Page, as above)
Below, the iconic image of the revolution; Alaa Salah leading crowds of demonstrators in chants during the Sudanese anti-government protests of 2019. The photograph was taken by Lana Haroun, Wikicommons. The powerful, nostalgic symbolism of the white toub, worn by office workers and public servants in the past will be explored next month.
See too 500 Words’ Ahfad Student Sit-in Inspires ‘White Toub’ Trend.
Below, the artist, Hawa al-Tagtaaga wearing the first toub to bear the design and colours of the first modern Sudanese flag, which came to prominence in the era of anti-colonial struggle. See more fascinating photos in ارتماءات نيلية
See too The Designer of Sudan’s First Independence Flag
Types of Toub Material and Design, A Brief Overview – Griselda El Tayib
The graceful, swaying drapery of a vibrantly patterned toub.
The following are excerpts taken from Griselda El Tayib, Regional Folk Costumes of The Sudan, pp 154 -5. They cover the most prevalent terms used in describing toub materials and design.
Farda – The word literally means “one piece”. This group of tobs is made from handspun and woven cotton, usually in white or with a blue border. These were the first tobs to be worn as they are known today and were used by teachers, midwives and older women.
Below, photograph of a young woman wearing the type of toub popular in 1920s, Sudan Ethnographic Museum, Khartoum.
Damouriya – White or off-white cotton that is courser than the farda. It is typically used for mourning and often of very course, handspun and woven material. The zarag “blueness”, worn for work and by lower classes of workers and servants was of sakobez, material of two types; one heavy and one light, dyed dark indigo and blue. More on this and indigo in Dongola next month.
Bengali – Cheap white Indian muslin of pure cotton with coloured lines, usually blue, on the horizontal edges worn after the time of fardas and damouriya by midwives and teachers.
Firka – This traditional material comes in two types; the silky red and gold material used in weddings and circumcision ceremonies called the garmasis, and um safiha, a silk and wool combination of rectangular shapes with black, white and dark purple colours. The garmasis was originally of silk but is now made of mixed fabrics. Um safiha was used as a cover and also as a gurgab, loincloth.
Below, the wedding garmasis, photo Yassir Hamdi, Wikicommons.
Learn more in Anointing in Robes of Red and Gold
Jeran – “Neighbours” – cheap, colourful Indian voile used for visiting the nieghbours. This type of tob is today manufactured by an Emirati factory in Khartoum Bahri.
Sakobez – Pure, untreated, thin cotton. This light material is used for men’s arragis, the undergarment worn under the jallabiya, and as tobs by aged women and widows.
Surrati – cotton but sometimes expensive silk off-white in colour. In eastern Sudan, it is the generic name for the woman’s coloured tob usually with a yellow silky border. The surrati is also the much sought-after silk tob with a red border – sometimes white or off-white – used for ritual and ceremonial occasions and often the subject of folk poetry.
Total – This refers to voile material originally manufactured at the Tootal factory in Manchester. It is the preferred material for tobs with about a third of all garments consisting of this material. The pure cotton does not slip off the head and is not too heavy or too light-weight. Griselda El Tayib goes on to explain that the Tootal factory was the first to improve the sakobez and the begali cotton materials for its toubs. Popular Tootal tobs apart from the Abu gijeja ‘Tufted one’ are the merkasse abu sihan of striped black voile, a material also used for the Nubian jarjar, and risalat london – Message from London, manufactured in Manchester, which since 1971, when Tootal closed down, is no longer available in Sudan. The white voile tob with a zig border or white sehan, white shiny band, was only obtained through shopping trips to the UK where the famous trader, Abdel Samad sold it in London. Then, Swiss ‘total’ from Switzerland became fashionable. The Saudi company Al Adil Wa Al Zain run by a Sudanese manager would send the designs to Switzerland where they were produced.
Below, “The Sudan veil”, from Land of the Blue Veil, Allan Worsley, Cornish Brothers Ltd,1940. A Sudanese servant in zarag, blue sakobez or possibly damouriya toub.
Below, more examples of the zarag toub, colonial postcards, personal collection.
Some Famous Toub Names
“With Khartoum being the cultural centre for the country’s elite, it is logical that the metropolitan women influenced the names of new tob fashions, such as rimush awlad burri – Burri boy’ eyelashes, and dulaa al dakatra – doctors’ ribs.”
Griselda El Tayib
“Examples of these tobes do not survive, and precise descriptions of fabrics and patterns have faded with time. What remains are the names. These fragments of memory collected by Ali Dinar document associative experience rather than a strict chronicle of events. In fact, it is the very persistence of these fanciful labels, when the material itself is gone, thats stands as the strongest evidence of fashion’s rhetorical importance in measuring and marking women’s and men’s lives.”
Khartoum at Night, Marie Grace Brown, p177
Below, excerpts from Griselda El Tayib’s elegant charting of names and designs of toubs from 1900 to 2010, Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan.
Some more toub names, of unknown date, as above:
The Story behind “The Post Office Pen”
….” another memorable tobe from 1915 named the “Post Office Pen” highlights a sense of connection and possibility in a modern age. As part of Khartoum’s reconstruction, a new post office building dominated the city skyline just a few blocks from the Governor General’s palace. And yet, it was the pens on strings attached to the counters inside that captured women’s imagination. It would have been rare for a woman to venture into the post office on her own, and so news of these special pens were likely gleaned from bits of information brought home by husbands or brothers. Nevertheless, to talk of such mundane instruments was to talk of empire. The pen on a chain in the Khartoum post office was not a gag or a novelty, but a very real indicator of imperial systems and progress. The presumably simple act of mailing a letter implied the establishment of a regular mail system with multiple offices, literacy on the part of the sender, and, more poignantly, the existence of a distant friend or relative who was eager for news. Far from being isolated or secluded, the woman who donned “The Post Office Pen” claimed a part of this exciting world for herself. Yet such forms of political expression were illegible to British observers..”
Excerpt from Khartoum at Night, Marie Grace Brown, p40.
The Ocampo, Just a Rumour?
“In 2008, the most highly sought after after tobe was called Ocampo, named for the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who, earlier that year, called for an arrest warrant for Sudan President, Omar Bashir, accusing him of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.The Ocampo tobe, supposedly made of silk with a beautifully detailed design, was so precious and so controversial that its very existence may have been no more than a rumor. Still, at the height of the shopping season Sudan’s fashion elites lined up to request the fantastical Ocampo tobe in hushed tones. More important than the actual fact of the Ocampo tobe were the daring women who searched for it, the conservative shopkeepers who refused to stock it, and the ambitious merchants who claimed they were waiting for a consignment to arrive from Dubai any day.”
Excerpt from Khartoum at Night Marie Grace Brown, p 178
Women's literacy in Sudan 