From Equator
How Sudan’s revolutionary generation was dragged into total war
In the summer of 2024, sitting in the shade of an enormous mango tree on the veranda of an ageing villa in Omdurman, I learned to distinguish between the sounds of outgoing and incoming artillery and mortar fire. When an outgoing projectile was launched from the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) base in the city’s northern Wadi Saydna district, it made a thundering explosion that was interrupted within a second by a distinct metallic clink as the empty shell was expelled. By contrast, the incoming projectiles that the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fired from their positions across the Nile in Khartoum North made a whizzing sound as they dashed forward. If the sound intensified, it was closing in; if it faded, it had passed overhead. In either case, the whizz ended after a few seconds with a loud thud. What followed could not be measured in linear time: a silent interregnum in which time itself broke down, before reigniting in the gasps and shrieks of recognition, say, that a ceiling has collapsed.
Omdurman is a town of predominantly sun-baked mud-brick houses, with distinct foci of concrete buildings. When war broke out in April 2023, the RSF had initially tried and failed to break into its northern districts, with the objective of besieging the Wadi Saydna base, which included a military college and airport. Next they resorted to firing on the area from a distance. After a year of shelling, its old, squat adobe structures, adequately designed for impending mortality, were left more shocked than shattered, while the new, taller concrete ones were aching and breaking.
Magdi El-Gizouli is a scholar of the Sudan whose interests include political economy, intellectual history and popular culture. He has written regularly for the Sudanese press for decades – once for the newspapers Al-Ayam, Al-Midan and The Citizen, and now for the weekly magazine Atar.
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