Digging it Archaeology pioneers break new ground

Young African excavators want to bury the notion that uncovering their past is awhite, western, male job

- Jason Burke and Zeinab Mohammed Salih

A late morning in Khartoum. Inside a low, dusty building in the centre of the Sudanese capital, there are crates of artefacts, a 2.1-metre replica of a 2,000-year-old stone statue of a Nubian god and students rushing through the corridors. Outside is noisy traffic, blinding sunlight and both branches of the Nile.

Heading down one staircase are Sabrine Jamal, Nadia Musa, Athar Bela and Sabrine al-Sadiq, all studying archaeology at Khartoum University. Not one of them is older than 24 and they see themselves as pioneers, breaking new ground on a continent that has long attracted western expeditions, specialists and adventurers but whose own archaeologists have received less attention overseas.

"It is very important that Africans do African archaeology... because then we will have our own archaeological cultures. There is a lot we understand because we are from here. The idea that people from the west know best is changing," said Sadiq.

Jamal, 22, from the remote and wartorn South Kordorfan province, said stereotypes promoted by films and literature in the west were out of date.

"There is an idea of what an archaeologist looks like ... But they should not have a certain image or colour or features or gender," she said.

For decades, the popular image of archaeologists in Africa has been at odds with an increasingly diverse reality. Dr Ghalia Garelnabi, the acting director of Sudan's national museum, said that when she was at university 30 years ago there were only three women studying archaeology, and now there were 20.

"This is a very great change and an important one. There are more and more young women in Sudan who are interested to know about their history and they deserve to know this ... Twelve years ago we had only foreign missions working here, but this is changing. Now we have many Sudanese missions digging at our sites," Garelnabi said.