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Madaniaao: Answering the Wrong Question of the Sudanese Revolution, by Razaz H. Basheir – 30 June 2025

From Africa is a Country

Sudan’s revolution removed a dictator but left intact the deep structures of racialized hierarchy, militarism, and elite rule. Resistance committees built new forms of power, but without rupture, the old order reassembled itself.

The “strange faces law” is a vague law that was enacted in 2024 by the de facto government of Sudan under the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). It formed part of the legislative arsenal of the state of exception created by the April 2023 conflict and aimed to restrict access to SAF-controlled areas in Northern, Eastern, and parts of Central Sudan by elements associated with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—the insurrectionary militia fighting the national army. The law’s main premise was that individuals whose facial features appeared unfamiliar or “strange” to the local populations in these regions would be subjected to additional scrutiny and filtered out for further investigations. In practice, the law was used to detain large numbers of people, primarily from Western Sudan and other areas with a high concentration of non-Arab ethnic groups (in contrast to those considered “Arab” from Northern riverine Sudan). In a country with over 500 ethnic groups and immense diversity, facial features became a tool for criminalizing people, highlighting the law’s discriminatory and divisive nature. This racialized logic, embedded in the military’s governance strategy, signals the deeper failure of Sudan’s post-revolutionary promise—a failure not merely of leadership but of imagination and political structure.

More troubling still, since the Sudanese army’s recent advancements in January 2025, reversing its unexplainable loss of control at the onset of the conflict in April 2023, the regained territories have witnessed summary executions and arbitrary detentions targeting the same ethnicities. These actions were carried out under various pretexts, such as alleged collaboration with the militia. Simultaneously, a massive wave of evictions for decades-old informal settlements has been taking place in the capital, primarily inhabited by the same targeted ethnic groups under the country’s stark overlap of ethnicity and class. These evictions were justified by claims of involvement in criminal activities—activities largely driven by the collapse of the state during two years of relentless conflict, the loss of income sources, and the erosion of basic means for survival. Tragically, these arbitrary and discriminatory acts have garnered significant popular support, even from former revolutionary actors.

Over the past two years of conflict, the normalization of violence and othering has been perpetuated not only by the historically right-wing, racist, and extremist factions of Sudanese politics, but also by supposedly progressive intellectuals and numerous revolutionary groups and individuals. Many of these actors have fervently supported the national army, endorsing its militaristic and zero-sum approaches. Nationalist sentiments backing the army quickly metamorphosed into a narrow ethno-regionalism championed by the hegemonic Northern riverine minority. This shift marginalized all those outside these ethno-regional lines, including Darfuri people—those who have already endured immense suffering at the hands of the militia.

Citing the militia and its foreign allies (primarily the United Arab Emirates) as existential threats to the Sudanese nation-state has been overstated. This narrative masks the reality that the ongoing conflict is fundamentally a power struggle between two armed factions, both intent on obstructing the revolutionary path to secure control over the country’s resources—chiefly gold. The extraction of gold has only intensified under both sides, with direct and indirect support from the UAE being channeled to the war-ring parties.

The conflict emerges in the aftermath of what was celebrated as a triumphant moment of the December revolution, the toppling of the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir (1989–2019) and his Islamist regime notorious for its atrocities against the darker-skinned populations of South Sudanese and Darfuris. The resurgence of human rights violations is deeply shocking, raising questions about how this could happen after five glorious years of struggle for “freedom, peace, and justice.”

The answer to this question can be found in part in the powerful insights of the visionary Sudanese thinker Abdulla Bola. Bola contended that such violations against significant portions of the population were historically legitimized through a hierarchical framework of citizenship that predated al-Bashir’s rule. According to Bola, “the basic structures of human rights violations” are, in fact, “the mental, conceptual, social, cultural, psychological, and political structures that existed in our society before the Islamists seized power. These structures served as bases of support, reservoirs, and shelters for aggressive energy and fostered psychological conditions conducive to human rights violations.” Bola’s argument reframes state violence not as an aberration of the Bashir era, but as a deep continuity—one that the revolution failed to rupture and, in some cases, unwittingly reinforced. Seen in this light, the recent targeting of “strange faces,” the popular support for the army’s purges, and the exclusionary rhetoric of post-revolution elites are not betrayals of the revolutionary moment but expressions of the very structures it left intact.

Bola’s statement, written nearly two decades ago, has consistently proven to be accurate. Discrimination along religious, ethnic, and regional lines has shaped Sudan’s history, leading to significant events such as the secession of South Sudan and the genocide in Darfur. Today, this logic has evolved further, targeting those associated with the militia’s social constituency—nomadic Arab tribes extending across Western Sudan and interpenetrating borders that stretch through the Sahel region, up to Niger and beyond. These entrenched lines of division and othering, reinforced by decades of slavery and colonial divide-and-rule tactics, have long defined the sources of cultural, political, and economic hegemony in modern Sudan.

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Razaz H. Basheir is a master’s student in southern urbanism at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.

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