Bint El Sudan
Installation, 2019-2021
Bint El Sudan
Installation ,Casa Árabe, Madrid 2019
The story of Bint El Sudan perfume starts in 1919 when a group of 14 merchants approached a British salesman with W.J. Bush & Co named Eric Ernest Burgess in Khartoum. These merchants brought with them a large selection of exotic essences, including jasmine, lilac, lily of the valley, musk, and amber. They wanted to have these ingredients made into an oil-based perfume that went along with their own local identity. Burgess delivered the vials to the W.J. Bush & Co. laboratories in London, where they were blended into a fragrance, with some substitutions being made to enable a sensible price point to be achieved.
Introduced in 1920, Bint El Sudan became an amazing hit with its fame spreading across East, West, and South Africa via trade caravans, and traders reportedly began using Bint El Sudan bottles as a form of currency.
Bint El Sudan “Daughter of Sudan”, refers to the young woman on the perfume label, an image from a photograph “The three princesses” taken by Eric Burgess himself in Sudan.
Bint El Sudan grew ever more popular in Africa, and factories were opened in Kenya and Nigeria.
The fragrance was used widely used at weddings and spiritual rituals especially after the wave of African revolution, national independence, and modernization in the 1960s.
By the 1970s, an estimated 12 million bottles of the perfume were produced every year, making it the world’s bestselling non-alcohol-based perfume, even gaining a reputation as the “Chanel No. 5 of Africa.”
In the United States, it was marketed for the African diaspora as a fragrance from the Motherland.
Following the 1989 coup in Sudan, the Islamist regime led by Omar Hassan al-Bashir launched a propaganda campaign based on skin color/tone with the aim of Arabizing Sudanese identity.
This campaign positioned women with fairer skin and European features above darker women.
In 2017 Sudan imported 1.3 billion Euro’s worth of skin whitening products, and 70% of Sudanese women use skin whitening products.
In that changed atmosphere, the Bint el Sudan label became decidedly politically incorrect, and she became fully clothed and white-skinned, in what was part of the discriminatory Arabization project against Sudanese racial and cultural identity.
In December 2018, the third wave of the Sudanese Revolution began against Al Bashir’s regime. As it started to garner support and gain momentum from all Sudanese ethnic groups, demands were made for a culturally pluralist state not in thrall to the homogeneity and forced assimilation of Arab ideology and culture.
