Sudanese women’s fashion is best understood through the tobe, a head-to-ankle fabric wrap, often in white-on-white patterns. According to the University of Kansas, the way it was wrapped stayed roughly the same through the first half of the twentieth century.
From luxury to everyday wear
Early tobes were an elite, imported and expensive garment. As trade routes expanded, cheaper versions appeared. Tobes were originally reserved for married women, but unmarried women and schoolgirls began wearing them in the twentieth century, and a white tobe with blue stripes became the uniform of medical midwives. Marie Grace Brown’s 2017 book Khartoum at Night, presented by its publisher as the first English-language history of these women’s lives, follows how northern Sudanese women used dress to navigate British rule between 1900 and 1956.
Patterns with names
From the 1930s to the 1950s there was an explosion of tobe styles, which women and merchants named to tell them apart. A striped tobe called The Doctors’ Ribs marked the first class of Sudanese men to graduate from medical school in 1928. Names such as Freedom and The Republic appeared ahead of independence from British rule, and in 1965 one was called The Sound of Music.
The tobe today
Tobes are still worn, though younger middle- and upper-class women mostly prefer Gulf fashions. A tobe in the Spencer Art Museum at the University of Kansas, made in Khartoum in 1983 to 1984, is dyed cotton and measures 436 by 150 centimetres.
Sources: University of Kansas: Khartoum at Night looks at Sudanese history through fashion, Stanford University Press: Khartoum at Night, Spencer Museum of Art: Tobe (women’s overgarment).
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