Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  The government used its newspapers to justify what had occurred and to legitimate further change. A contributor to Islah lambasted purdah and the chadari as products of ‘ignorance and narrow tradition’ and the ‘selfishness of men’, embracing the common line of Qur’anic interpretation that allowed women to reveal their faces and their hands up to their wrists. An editorial cast purdah and the chadari as aberrations in a long history of Afghan women ‘helping not only in running the home and bringing up children but also in the promotion of agriculture and animal husbandry and even in fighting in wars’. Abdul Haq Waleh, who had become a columnist with the Kabul Times, described chadaris as ‘imported like a few other things from India’.

  Servants and villagers had long aspired to wear chadaris, but the government expected this desire to fade as the new clothing adopted by upper-class women became a model for the rest of society. Instead, servants in Kabul delighted in wearing their employers’ discards, while many women from newly successful families outside the capital embraced chadaris as a mark of distinction. Abdul Haq Waleh found this appetite ‘quite upsetting’ but was consoled by how increasing numbers of women continued to reject the chadari, forcing some of its makers out of business and others to curtail production. ‘Nobody can change the situation after the die has been cast,’ he declared in 1968.

  Hafiza Hassan, editor of the Women’s Welfare Association’s magazine Mermon, claimed that eighty per cent of women in Kabul had unveiled. Donald Wilber, the CIA’s ‘specialist on Islam’, best known for bringing Reza Shah to power in Iran, estimated seventy-five per cent, a figure embraced by the US State Department. Another American, Kathleen Trautman, duly expected to see few chadaris when she arrived in Kabul in 1967 after her husband was posted there. Instead, she found herself surrounded by veiled women. Her explanation was that the Afghan government wanted outsiders to think the chadari was vanishing, and the State Department ‘went along with the myth’.

  Kubra Noorzai continued to exemplify what a woman could achieve in Kabul when she became the university’s first female dean, in charge of its new home economics faculty. She attended international women’s conferences in Colombo and Dublin, a United Nations human rights seminar in Kabul and a follow-up seminar in Mongolia, and led an Afghan cultural delegation to Tehran. When Zahir Shah set about transforming Afghanistan’s political system, she was one of the two women on the Constitutional Advisory Commission. In 1965, the thirty-eight-year-old Noorzai became Afghanistan’s first female cabinet minister, responsible for health.

  One of her goals was to set ‘an example to the new generation of educated, modern and emancipated Afghan girls’, and not just because of her office. The Kabul Times reported: ‘Unlike many other women she does not patronise beauty salons but does her hair at home. She has always made her own clothes too, sometimes on her own and sometimes with help of one of her sisters.’ The accompanying photograph showed Noorzai at her desk with head down writing, an embodiment of seriousness and hard work, in black blouse, white jacket and dark glasses, with collar-length hair not particularly well-cut. Her unmarried status was even more exceptional.

  Anahita Ratibzad, who had run Kabul’s nursing school, then became the first Afghan-trained female doctor, pursued an even more radical course in response to her upbringing in the royal household. Having been a ‘plaything of princes’ before being ‘married off’ to the royal doctor, perhaps ‘to pay his bills’, she left her doctor husband. ‘We are peacefully separated,’ Ratibzad explained. She also became a founding member of the People’s Democratic Party. Most likely, she became the lover—usually described as ‘mistress’—of fellow communist Babrak Karmal, who was married with four children.

  The thirty-four-year-old Ratibzad further tested the bounds of what an Afghan woman might do by contesting the 1965 parliamentary election. Since most voters were men, Ratibzad appealed to them by arguing that, given the failure of men to solve Afghanistan’s problems, they should see what women could do. She also established yet another new group, the Democratic Movement of Women, to get women ‘interested in coming out and voting’. According to the Indian communist D. R. Goyal, Ratibzad’s successful campaign became a ‘mass movement’ involving an improbable ‘two thousand burqa-clad women’.

  The first matter for the parliament was to consider Zahir Shah’s choice of prime minister, a test of the king’s power. He wanted Mohammad Yousuf, a Tajik member of the middle class who had replaced Mohammad Daoud, to continue. When the parliament met in 1965, Ratibzad was the only deputy to focus on the ‘distressed condition’ of women, identifying illiteracy as their ‘most outstanding problem’. Ratibzad was one of several deputies who accused Yousuf of corruption and mismanagement and encouraged university students to disrupt his confirmation. After Yousuf was confirmed as prime minister at his third attempt, a day of protest and violence followed. When soldiers opened fire with machine guns, they killed at least three Kabulis and wounded many others, a disastrous start for Afghanistan’s new constitutional system, which forced Zahir Shah to replace Yousuf.

  Ratibzad loomed large in another parliamentary eruption in 1966 sparked by the school uniform for girls which was a black knee-length dress with black stockings and a white neck-scarf. When traditionalists demanded that they wear the chadari and Babrak Karmal derided it as ‘indicative of primitiveness’, the conservatives smashed their wooden chairs and used the pieces to assault Karmal. He was on the floor being battered when Ratibzad threw herself over him. By some accounts, Karmal’s assailants desisted in keeping with the Afghan tradition of not touching a woman in public. More likely, they assaulted Ratibzad too, as both she and Karmal were hospitalised. A cartoon in the conservative Afghan Millat, one of an array of independent newspapers permitted by recent legislation, showed deputies beating Ratibzad, her thighs exposed to humiliate her.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Nixon Bazaar

  Bruce Chatwin was yet to make his name with books such as In Patagonia and The Songlines when he first visited Afghanistan in 1962 aged twenty-three. Having made his way from England to the Iranian border city of Mashhad, Chatwin travelled to Herat in one of many Afghan trucks with a vast superstructure brightly decorated by specialist painters who primarily depicted European subjects copied from postcards. The truck carrying Chatwin was adorned with windmills, stags at bay and robins in snowy landscapes. The truck’s contents—crates of Japanese-made contraceptives—added to its interest. Chatwin’s companion, Robert Erskine, identified them as a ‘symbol of progress!!’

  A bazaar in Herat, stocked with the ‘wardrobes of thousands of American ladies over forty years’, amazed Chatwin, who imagined the movie star Mary Pickford in one ballgown, ‘shiny black velvet with no back’, and declared another, all ‘bows and pink lace’, perfect for Shirley Temple. These American frocks were part of a much larger trade in second-hand clothes, directed primarily at men, which increasingly involved much newer garments. It was so profitable for the biggest dealers that American exporters flew to Kabul each year to secure orders, while Afghan wholesalers visited Europe and the United States to make their own selections, the New York Times reported, ‘in the same way Fifth Avenue buyers toured European fashion shows’.

  For the United States, this trade was a rare success in a limited, difficult relationship with Afghanistan, which Washington initially considered unimportant while it cultivated Pakistan, then struggled to build when Kabul turned increasingly to Moscow. In Afghanistan, the appetite for old American clothes diminished demand for local textiles, forced many tailors out of business and offended nationalists who wanted Afghans to wear Afghan clothes. But while some Asian and African countries raised the duty on the imports or banned them, the Afghan government allowed the American clothes because they cost little.

  This second-hand clothing trade was long a Jewish domain in the United States, supplied by peddlars who walked America’s cities, crying ‘Cash-for clo!’ or ‘Buy cast off’. The largest old clothes exchange was o
n Manhattan’s lower east side, where the wholesalers generally had the clothes cleaned and repaired, then sold them by weight. As these dealers came to dominate the international trade in old clothes, one of the first reports of their sale in Afghanistan was in 1946 in Life. Five years after its editor-in-chief Henry Luce famously identified the ‘American Century’ because the United States was shaping culture and consumerism around the globe, Life reported that many of Kabul’s young men were decked out in second-hand American suits and coats.

  Such clothes could soon be found in Afghanistan’s most remote areas, but they were particularly visible in its cities, as the CIA’s Edward Hunter discovered in 1956. He was staying at the Kabul Hotel, the capital’s best, when he became curious about a ‘nattily dressed’ guest—an American second-hand dealer, showing off a sample of his merchandise. When Hunter expressed amazement that it paid to travel so far, the dealer took him to the hotel entrance. ‘You see all these Afghan men?’ the dealer asked. ‘A number are wearing Western clothes…Well you can bet on it, practically every one is second-hand from America.’ For Hunter, the export of these clothes was a rare American triumph in the Cold War. Because this trade increasingly depended on donations of good clothes to charities, which sold them to wholesalers, Hunter cast it as an ‘aid program’ providing many Afghans with ‘their introduction to modernisation’.

  The American pavilion at Kabul’s first international fair in 1956, exemplified Washington’s scant interest in Afghanistan. When it belatedly decided to participate, after realising that Moscow would have a big display, it turned to the American inventor Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes made of aluminium tubes and hubs, with a translucent, plasti-coated nylon skin, could be prefabricated, transported easily by air and set up quickly. Such domes were a marvel of contemporary architecture, and some of Fuller’s American admirers claimed the Kabul dome was a great success, but Edward Hunter reported it had negligible impact because it was just thirty metres in diameter and on the fringe of the fair. When Afghans talked about the various national displays, they fixed on the Soviet, Czech, Hungarian and Chinese pavilions which, ‘by their combined size and central location’, suggested ‘massive and unquestioned power’.

  The Soviets also dominated trade, especially after Afghanistan, under Daoud, became the first country outside the Iron Curtain to negotiate a substantial aid agreement with Moscow and began acquiring Soviet weaponry and working with a small cadre of Soviet advisers while remaining non-aligned. The tiny American display inside Fuller’s dome was much derided because of the gimmickry of its bouncing ball-bearings, talking cow, talking chicken and television screen on which visitors saw themselves. A larger, more practical display in 1960 had an accompanying delegation talking up the prospects for American tanning, shoe-making and ice-making equipment, as well as trucks, cars and buses, but sales were small. Mohammad Maiwandwal, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Washington, declared, ‘You do send us used clothes, but you surely can do better than that.’

  This trade suffered when Daoud’s support for an independent state for Pashtuns in north-west Pakistan led Islamabad to close its border, stopping the flow of second-hand clothes except those carried by smugglers. The trade was also damaged by the failure of some American dealers to recognise the Afghan preference for warm, long-lasting clothes made of dark, heavy fabrics that would not show the dirt. Afghan dealers grew wary when US dealers, who classed their worst clothes as ‘special’, the median as ‘extra special’ and the best as ‘triplex’, became increasingly inaccurate in these gradings. Yet American dominance persisted, prompting a Canadian official to lament his country’s exclusion from ‘one of the few million-dollar commercial opportunities in Afghanistan’.

  Their vendors within Afghanistan were Hazaras, generally thought to be descendents of Ghengis Khan’s Mongols, whom Afghanistan’s Sunni Pashtuns persecuted because they were predominantly Shia and looked distinctive. Just as Hazaras filled the most menial jobs, so they engaged in the most lowly regarded businesses. While some peddled used clothes in small villages, others had shops in larger villages and towns. One of the major second-hand clothes bazaars was in Herat, where, not long after Bruce Chatwin visited, the dealers moved to a prime location next to the Grand Mosque. More old clothes went to Kandahar, a bigger city and significant regional supplier. Still more went to Kabul, which supplied the country’s centre, north and north-west.

  The used-clothes bazaar in Kabul kept moving as the city changed. From the early 1950s, it was part of the renowned Shor Bazaar in the old city which was bordered by caravanserais. The construction of Jadi Maiwand, a four-lane boulevard bulldozed through the old city as part of a new urban plan, saw most of the dealers shift to an adjoining bazaar. In the late 1960s, they were on a long, narrow street where they displayed their merchandise on lines stretched from storefront to storefront. From the early 1970s, these dealers occupied a two-storied courtyard almost the size of a football field, with importers and wholesalers on the upper level while dealers below sold from stalls and the wooden-legged, rope-strung beds known as charpoys.

  This market was sometimes called the Antique Sellers Bazaar and sometimes the Chindawal after the district where it was located, but it was primarily identified by the source of its stock. Whereas its counterpart in Herat was simply called the American Bazaar, the one in Kabul was known from the early 1960s after the US President, so it was first the Kennedy, then the Johnson, the Nixon, the Ford and the Carter Bazaar. But not everyone updated the bazaar’s name in this way so in 1970, when Kennedy had been dead seven years and Johnson out of office for two, both names remained in use. Others thought of it as the Nixon Bazaar—the name applied most often, remaining in use long after Nixon resigned in 1974.

  The Kabul Times characterised this naming as ‘affectionate’. Afghan writer Hafizullah Emadi has identified it as derogatory, consistent with Nixon’s contentious status among educated Kabulis. When his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, spent nineteen hours in Kabul in 1970, he was greeted by four hundred leftist student protesters, carrying banners such as ‘Hands off Middle East’ and ‘Stop Killing Vietnamese People’, who threw bricks and tore up an American flag. Either way, the bazaar was the most popular American institution in Afghanistan.

  Some of its patrons were Russian officials and advisers eager for clothing unavailable behind the Iron Curtain. Others were resident westerners, who found its prices so low they saw no point in bargaining. As tourists discovered it too, Japanese archaeologist Konishi Masatoshi included a photograph of the bazaar in his 1969 guide to Afghanistan, while the London Guardian lauded it as the ‘biggest second-hand clothes market in the world’ and ‘the showpiece of the Kabul bazaars’. Yet the vast majority of its customers were Afghans who shopped there out of poverty. ‘With the coming of the first baby, the mother starts buying clothes from the Nixon Market because she has no choice’, an Afghan journalist observed.

  Old uniforms—sometimes postal, railway or police, but usually army—sold well partly because they were good protection against the Afghan winter. But Louis Dupree, who arrived when surplus US army and airforce jackets were in demand, also emphasised their appeal to ‘martial Afghan males’. Other observers noticed a seemingly contrary phenomenon: Afghan men in western women’s clothes, especially coats, which American novelist James Michener attributed to the ‘unconscious’ femininity of Afghan men. ‘One often sees a lean, hipless Afghan man, walking down the street in a haute couture outfit bought secondhand from Paris or New York’, Michener wrote after visiting in 1955. ‘Topped by a turban, decorated with gun and bandoleers, such coats are decidedly dashing.’

  Some had their purchases altered and embroidered to look more traditional, but most left their acquisitions as they were. Educated men bought suits that demonstrated their status. Many Afghans combined the traditional with the western, resulting in incongruous juxtapositions, compounded by the imported garments often being far too big or small. As the prevalence of such clothi
ng became a subject of public debate, a contributor to the daily Anis lamented how America’s discards had ‘completely changed’ local dress and called vainly on the Afghan government to ‘advise the people to wear simple clothes and to try to look neat’.

  CHAPTER 7

  Golden Afghans

  Kabul’s foremost rug dealers in the mid-1960s also sold weapons. Pir Mohammad, who for many years had the best stock of new and antique rugs in Kabul at his store near the Ghazi Stadium, devoted the centre of his shop to a series of large cases of chainmail suits, swords and antique guns. Abdul Noor Sher, who eclipsed Pir Mohammad when he came to occupy all three floors of a new building in the Shahr-e Naw district and occasionally chartered entire cargo planes to carry consignments of carpets to Europe, always had an array of old guns on his desk in his office.

  Many foreigners wanted jezails, muzzle-loaded muskets or pistols with curved inlaid stocks, handmade in Afghanistan. But much of the market was for imported weapons, ranging from sabres made by English sword maker Henry Wilkinson of Pall Mall to Winchester repeating rifles, renowned in the United States as the ‘Gun that won the West’. After visiting Kabul, a regional manager with IBM departed with an armoury of ‘two beautiful English-made muzzle-loading rifles, two muzzle-loading pistols, a leather powder case, the equipment for adjusting and sharpening the flint, a battleaxe (with Sanskrit writing on the blade) and a metal battle club’.

  Anna Weatherley, now best known as a fashion and porcelain-designer, was one of the few women to engage in this trade. She bought textiles, furniture, metalware and guns in Kabul, then sold them to shops and collectors in Sydney. If visitors did not exceed a limit of two jezail guns, two jezail pistols, two swords, two leather spears, two axes, two bejewelled knives, ten ordinary knives and ten powder kegs, they could take this weaponry out of the country free of tax. They were meant to obtain permission from Kabul’s National Museum before they left, but this attempt at heritage protection was flouted repeatedly.