Toub / Tobe (Sudanese Arabic)
Two accounts of its beginnings sit side by side and cannot yet be reconciled. One reference overview links the garment to ancient Nubian and Kerma civilisations, citing archaeological evidence and historical accounts of similar garments. Another account, found on a Wikipedia mirror and not traced to a primary source, dates the tobe to the late eighteenth century, when prosperous Darfur merchants dressed wives and daughters in large lengths of imported linen, muslin and silk. Both agree on one point that is better documented: for a long time the cloth was imported and expensive.
A toub is a long rectangle of cloth, usually about two metres wide and four to seven metres long, wrapped around the body and head and worn over a dress. It may be cotton, silk or a synthetic blend. It was historically worn in solid white or muted earth tones; modern styles add embroidery, vibrant colours and imported fabrics.
Marie Grace Brown's Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan is the key study. She finds that the tobe was first reserved for married women, and that in the twentieth century unmarried women and schoolgirls began to wear it too. A white tobe edged with blue stripes became the uniform of medical midwives, and a midwife, Sitt Batul, photographed in Omdurman between about 1925 and 1935, is remembered as the first Sudanese woman to ride a bicycle.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, as more women were educated and nurses and midwives earned their own money, patterns multiplied and received names that marked life events and public affairs. A striped tobe in 1928, after the first Sudanese men graduated from medical school, was called "The Doctors' Ribs". In the 1950s patterns were named Freedom, The Republic, The Diplomatic Corps and The Russian Satellite; a 1965 pattern took the name of the Broadway show The Sound of Music. Brown reads the names as a way for women to mark changes in their own lives and to comment on events such as independence in 1956. Because many old tobes had deteriorated, her research relied partly on names remembered by women who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s.
Brown notes that the tobe is still worn in Sudan, though younger middle- and upper-class women often prefer fashions from the Persian Gulf states. A publisher's description adds that tobes were traditionally gifts from husbands to wives and marked milestones in a woman's life.
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