From The Contrapuntal Magazine
On the first anniversary of the Sudan war, I am confronted with the thorny pains that accompany every act of remembrance. I am remembering the start of the war and everything that came before: the revolution in 2018, the protestors’ occupation of the military headquarters, the June 3rd Khartoum Massacre, the October 25th coup, and the mass uprising against it which lasted until the very last day before the war broke out.
I am remembering how the people of a revolutionary Sudan, from all its corners, from the centre to the periphery, ruptured normative space and temporality by imagining parallel futures beyond those we have inherited — buoyant subjectivities revoking their consent to be governed by the imaginings of systemic dispossession and fascism.
Before the war became Sudan’s defining event, there was a revolution; an unprecedented collective uprising against austerity, indignity, and military fascism’s multigenerational grip. The 2018-19 revolution was my generation’s first introduction to the meaning of radical imagination, not as an impalpable, nebulous terminology thrown around progressive spaces, but as a material, collective reality within our reach. The carriers and deliverers of this imaginative practice were the Resistance Committees; horizontal, grassroots units organized through neighborhoods that subsequently became the centre of revolutionary and collective struggle across Sudan.
Arrival of protestors from Atbara on board the historic Atbara train to the join the military headquarters sit-in in Khartoum, 2019
Since the eruption of the war on the morning of Saturday, 15 April 2023, popular media’s analysis of the war reduced it to a mere power struggle between two entities, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), under the leadership of Abdel-Fatah Al-Burhan, and the Janjaweed or Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militias, under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti).
This analysis, however, obscures far more than it reveals. It presents the war as an unforeseen, stand-alone event rather than a calculated endeavor decades in the making under a neoliberalist war economy. It portrays the war as a mere battle over resources between the SAF and the RSF rather than possibly the most effective reactionary maneuver either camp could have produced since 2018 as allies.
Lina Dohia is a London-based writer interested in exploring subjectivity, blackness, and film/visual culture.
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