Sudan women brewing alcoholic drinks

from the Turkish Daily News

Sudanese women brew this illegal alcohol to try to make money. But if they are caught beating can be severe. - Kale

by Jennie Matthew

Zakia is a Muslim woman living under Sharia law, stigmatized as a criminal for brewing and selling illicit alcohol to feed the family that her father abandoned outside Sudan's booming capital.

It is a simple recipe and one cooked up by thousands of women in the squalid camps and impoverished neighborhoods of those who fled years of war across southern, western and eastern Sudan.

Put dates and baking powder in water. Cover with a plastic bag to fend off the perennial dust, then bury underground for two to five days depending on the season. Heat over a fire and drip the piping hot liquid through a sieve.

Add water.

One to two hours later, 23-year-old Zakia has enough bottled aragi to flog to local laborers for a week, earning enough cash to keep her, her mother, brother, niece and seven sisters in food and clothes.

She got married last year. But the relationship failed and they live apart. With a street attitude akin to the Bronx, she slices through the air with a defiant hand when asked if her husband looks after her financially.

"I don't even want to see his face," she says, recoiling in distaste, catching a whiff of aragi as she sits back on a plastic chair while her sisters giggle and plait their hair in the corner.

A gangly customer folds himself onto the bed behind, extending a boney arm along the back of her chair, already a bit drunk in the stifling heat of a leisurely Friday in Halfaya, 15 kilometers north of Khartoum.

"It's just a trade," she says, denying any pang of conscience in profiting from what the Koran forbids.

But it's a dangerous business. Police raids are frequent. Around 90 percent of inmates in the women's prison were arrested on suspicion of selling aragi. They complain of beatings, fines, ransacked homes and confiscated booze.

Community workers say police hide behind the cloak of Islam, running alcohol rackets with what they confiscate to supplement poor pay. They talk about women sinking into prostitution and sexual favors in return for protection.

Chol Sakina, a Christian from the south, has been in Khartoum for more than two years. The poorest of the poor, she does not know how old she is and cannot afford to go home. She is too frightened to talk about alcohol.

She lives with her one-eyed aunt in a mud hut. They say they have not worked since police threw their equipment into the river four months ago.

"Sometimes we only eat flour with salt," says her aunt, Kadose. "This is poor people's food," she says tilting a bucket of grey, watery slop into view.

"We'll die from this food."

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