Afghanistan: Dying for an Education
By Brinley Bruton
11 April 2001

“My father said, ‘When I am dead, you can send your daughters to school, but while I am alive they will not go’.”

The speaker, an Afghan I’ll call Dr Ahmed, shook his head. He explained as he drove that his wife was illiterate. She rarely left the compound Dr Ahmed shared with his brothers’ families and his father and his wives.

This marriage combination – educated man and illiterate woman – is relatively common here. This in itself was not a surprise, given that illiteracy rates among women are thought to be around 85 per cent, higher than among men. What did surprise me during my time in the country over the past few years was how prized uneducated women could be. An illiterate girl from the countryside often commands a higher bride price than her more educated sister in the city.

I also met many men, as well as women, who chafed at such traditions imposed by family and society. But few felt they could stand up for what they truly wanted.

Dr Ahmed went on to explain that his father, a judge, had vetoed a love marriage with a fellow medical student.

“What can I do?” Dr Ahmed asked me. “My wife is a cousin and if I had resisted, my entire community would have rejected me. I would have been nobody.” He speaks gently and smiles, as if an injustice had not been committed.

Dr Ahmed’s sons, two and five, squirmed next to me in the backseat of the battered white Toyota we were traveling in. The children provided cover – along with the car and my all-encompassing scarf. They help me seem less foreign.

I’ve found that trying not to stand out is a wise policy in Afghanistan, but even more important in this case as we were traveling to Logar, a province next to Kabul where fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar holds sway.

He fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and now opposes the government of Hamid Karzai and his western backers. Afghanistan is not short of such strongmen but Hekmatyar, with long-standing ties to Saudi Arabia, has a history as one of the most violent and vindictive.

It was December 2006, and the countryside around us did not appear dangerous. Snow-covered fields rose gently into jagged mountains on either side of the two-lane highway. Men walked on the side of the road wrapped in thin wool blankets and donkeys laden with firewood trotted behind small boys.

Eventually, we arrived at our destination, a small village school. Inside a guardhouse, set apart from the main building, about ten women teachers huddled around a wood heater grading exams.

The school itself sat empty just a few yards away. Tangled remains of desks and chairs blocked the main entrance and sunlight shone off shards of glass dangling in the frames. Two months earlier, a bomb had blown out the school’s windows and punched a hole through the thick wall. But it could have been worse – the explosion came in the early morning and two additional bombs were found and defused before they went off.

While nobody was killed, the attack terrified the 160 teachers and students.

“I was so scared I cried and cried,” said Nadira, a primary school teacher. “I didn’t come back to school for a month.” Her fears are justified – about 20 teachers were killed throughout the country last year.

Some of the students stopped attending classes altogether after the bombing, although administrators would not tell me how many. The school was unusable and classes were held outside in the cold.

This was not the first time the school had been hit. It was targeted by rocket attacks a year after being built. Soon after, its guards were badly beaten and told they would be killed if they stayed on.

So the guards fled, but not before passing on a message to the school’s principal, Safia.
If she did not stop her work, the message, said Safia, warned that “[the village] would become my grave ”.

The attackers also claimed that educating women went against the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

Five years after the fall of the Taleban, an epidemic of school burnings, bombings and teacher intimidation has spread from the Taleban’s traditional base in the south to the rest of the country. Logar, for example, is in central Afghanistan.

It is easy to get angry at Afghanistan’s men when you see things like this. A lot of people do, including Afghan women.

“After the bombing none of the men of the village helped us. I came at 5 am to clean up with my own hands,” said Safia with a bitter smile.

Men in Afghanistan can hold opinions about women that I find distasteful and even abhorrent – one colleague talked openly about how he often beats his wife and locks her in the house, an admission that did not seem to raise eyebrows among his peers.

What really impressed me, though, were the men who stood up to the threat of violence and coercion, and encouraged the women in their lives to try and bring about change.

One such man is Safia’s husband. He drives her to and from Kabul every day to school – a round trip that can take four hours. She would not be able to do her job without his help.

Another is teacher Nadira’s father, a tall man with a thick black beard who was wrapped in a dun-colored blanket when I met him in the courtyard of the school.

“I tell my daughter every day that she must come to work,” said Rahimullah.

Rahimullah, who donated the land the school is sitting on, drops and collects his daughter from school every day.

“All the time I tell my daughter she is a hero of Afghanistan,” he said as he hugged her around the shoulders and kissed the top of her veiled head. She smiled for the first time since I’d met her.

Nadira then pulled on an enveloping blue burka. As the two turned and made their way through the snowy countryside, I wondered who would win in Afghanistan, men like Rahimullah or those who blew up the school behind me.The names of people featured in this story have been changed to protect their identity.