Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2008 > March-April 2008	Print View

In some ways, Mohamed Bakri (B.A. ’06) resembles many Minnesotans: a house in the suburbs, married with three kids, cookouts with the neighbors.

“We love to make shish kebab, and when we do everyone, invited or not, comes over,” Bakri says during a study break at Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. “Just the other night, for example, they came to my garage and stayed until midnight, chatting. It was actually kind of annoying,” Bakri adds with a laugh.

Yet for all the surface similarities, one big difference distinguishes Bakri from his neighbors: He’s a political refugee from war-ravaged Sudan. That doesn’t just mean he grew up speaking a different language; it means he’s seen things they’ve only seen on 24.

“Sure, I know people who have been tortured,” Bakri says, his gentle eyes flashing. He makes it clear that he was not tortured himself—“I was lucky, very lucky”—and did not suffer the level of hardship of the more than 25,000 Lost Boys, orphaned Sudanese boys who spent years walking hundreds of miles to refugee camps to escape war and famine. But Bakri certainly knows what a broken soul is.

“It is very difficult to move on from torture. I have a friend, talking to his family, talking to his mom, denies that he was tortured just because he doesn’t want to harm his family. His case is well documented. And there are others,” says Bakri, a reserved and serious man who also wants to help others understand. “I can give you names.”

In a country not known for democratic institutions or religious tolerance, Bakri spent his early career in Sudan advocating relentlessly for these things. After graduating in 1987 with an undergraduate degree in law from the Cairo University campus in Khartoum, he worked as a journalist, spending many years at the Arabic daily Al-Ayam. He wrote commentaries, profiles of dissidents, a book on the history of executions in the country—anything to shed light on the climate of political repression. All good ways to get a knock on the door from a government official. This happened many times.

The interrogations didn’t really faze him. “It was scary, but if you spoke out against the government you would be questioned,” Bakri explains matter-of-factly. With a wife and young family to consider, however, Bakri knew he had to be cautious. So, after the government accused him in 2000 of feeding confidential information to clandestine newspapers, he fled to Cairo and then, with the help of the Minnesota Council of Churches, to the Midwest.

After finding work as a caretaker and painter, he enrolled at Century College in White Bear Lake, starting out with English-as-a-second-language courses. As a professional communicator, Bakri was frustrated not to be able to cogently express his thoughts. “The barrier between a person and his ambition is language,” he says. Still, he worked hard and quickly became proficient in English. He finished up with a two-year certificate in women’s studies, becoming only the second man ever at Century to do so. “I grew up with seven sisters and am fascinated with feminist theory,” Bakri says. “Women just have a different worldview.”

From there it was on to the University of Minnesota, where he worked toward a degree in sociology, which he earned in 2006 at the age of 43. Along the way he won the College of Liberal Arts’ Turner Award for best summa thesis, titled, “Failed Societal Community? The Crisis of Democracy in Sudan: Sociological Perspectives on the Collapse of the First Democracy in Sudan, 1953–1958.” It was so good his adviser, professor Joachim Savelsberg, nominated Bakri for the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship, awarded to a few dozen college seniors each year out of nearly a thousand applicants nationwide. The $50,000 scholarship, known as the “world’s richest,” is intended to help students of exceptional promise reach their full potential through education.

“Mohamed has a keen analytic mind,” Savelsberg says. “When he considers a situation, even one that for most people would involve very intense emotions, he can still think rationally.”

Savelsberg also notes that Bakri’s drive sets him apart from the typical undergraduate student. “He brings an intensity and knowledge to the classroom that you don’t find in other students,” he says.

When Bakri received the award last summer, he immediately enrolled at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in international relations. He is taking a full course load this year, concentrating on foreign policy, and intends to have his master’s degree by 2009 (his wife is on a similar track at William Mitchell School of Law). After that, he’s not sure. He may continue at the U for a doctorate, work in human rights, or write. “Foreign policy and national security might be one of my options for a career,” Bakri says, “but I still have that fascination about the issues of democracy in Africa and the Middle East.”

Bakri’s dream is to found a research center dedicated to bringing a Muslim perspective to efforts supporting the democratization of developing nations in the Middle East and Africa. “I know I will keep researching the issues of democracy and social transformation,” Bakri says. “Also, I am interested in how to connect security to the issue of development in Third World countries. I believe in the notion that we live in one world and we all affect each other.”

Bakri is also certain about one other thing. “I have to go back,” he says. “I have family in Khartoum. Even though I’m now in America, at the same time I think of myself as a special American, an American with a heritage, still with roots in Africa. I can’t think of my experience in America without connecting it to Africa.

“I have to go back.”

Adam Wahlberg, executive editor of Minnesota Law & Politics, was a 2002 Humphrey Institute Policy Fellow.