Khadiga Hussein

Mama Khadiga, as she was affectionately known in WILPF, spent much of her life campaigning for peace and human rights, working in Sudan and the UK, as well as at an international level. She was a member of several significant international peace organisations based in Africa, USA, Europe and the UK. She brought her considerable experience to WILPF and became a founder member of WILPF UK’s long-running Voices of African Women campaign. This was launched in 2008, and WILPF was able to represent women’s voices from various countries in the African continent. It resulted in a number of African women being brought into membership of our organisation.

Mama Khadiga launched the African Women’s Decade 2010–2020, on behalf of WILPF UK, at a large meeting in the University of London.

At various times Mama Khadiga was a valued member of the WILPF UK Executive, and with WILPF’s support she was able to attend meetings at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the United Nations Human Rights Council and the African Union.

She was deeply involved in the political life of Sudan, and her early career included working for the Ministry of Education in 1954 and being sent as a delegate to the UNESCO centre in Egypt in 1961. She was State Minister for the Ministry of Peace in Sudan from 1988 to 1989, when the Ministry was dissolved. In 1987 Mama Khadiga founded and was chairperson of the Sudanese Mothers for Peace, an NGO based both in Sudan and in the UK, and which was affiliated to WILPF UK. She also started to build a WILPF group in Sudan, and was the first woman to do so.

In 2012 WILPF supported Mama Khadiga in an ambitious project to achieve a peaceful solution to the ongoing conflicts in Sudan. By personal contacts and word of mouth, in a situation where open organisation and the internet were fraught with danger, she collected a million women’s signatures and thumb prints to a simple non-doctrinaire appeal to the government and opposition parties and to armed groups. This urged the start of negotiations for a peace settlement that recognised human rights and national participation. Sadly, it did not impress the dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Mama Khadiga’s ultimate dream was to establish an international pan-African women’s centre for the education and empowerment of women. She had been gifted land but was unable to source the financial backing to make it a reality. We have lost a role model and a friend.