Republic of the Sudan

Republic of the Sudan جمهورية السودان
Flag Coat of arms
Capital and largest city	Khartoum
Official languages	Arabic English
Dominant mode of production	Capitalism
Government	Federal Bourgeois Provisional Government
Area
• Total	1,886,068 km²
Population
• 2022 estimate	45,709,353

Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northern Africa bordered by Egypt, Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea with a coastline on the Red Sea to the east. Sudan's capital is Khartoum, located where the two major tributaries of the Nile River merge together. Sudan is Africa's third largest country by area. Prior to the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan was the largest country in Africa by area.

In 2023, a war broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary. The SAF and RSF had previously composed a Transitional Military Council which was formed after a military takeover of Sudan's short-lived transitional government that had been formed after the 2019 ousting of long-time head of state Omar al-Bashir. The outsing of Bashir had occurred after a series of mass protests by a coalition of civilian groups had gained momentum in 2018. The civilian protests against Bashir and also against the successive transitional governments have included people's Resistance Committees and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), among other groups such as the Sudanese Professional Association.

The SAF is headed by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti). Earlier in his career, al-Burhan was posted in Darfur in the 2000s and coordinated joint actions with Hemedti's paramilitary group. In 2015, al-Burhan oversaw Sudanese troops fighting in Yemen on behalf of the Saudi-backed faction. Hemedti was formerly a commander of the Janjaweed militia group and is one of the wealthiest people in Sudan, he and his family being involved in the gold mining industry. The United Arab Emirates, the leading destination of smuggled gold from Sudan, has been accused of financing and arming the RSF.

After the outbreak of fighting between the SAF and RSF forces in 2023, the Sudanese Communist Party issued a statement which characterized the events as "a continuation of the struggle over power and the country's wealth, encouraged by some foreign powers, and being carried out by armed groups subservient to these foreign powers." In another statement, issued in 2025, the SCP described the warring parties as "two sides of the same coin" stating that both regional and international forces led by the United States have been seeking "to secure a partnership between the military and select civilian factions in order to protect their entrenched interests from the threat of radical change." The SCP statement emphasized the need to engage with the masses and construct "grassroots instruments of struggle [...] far removed from the machinations of elite politics." As of 2025, it has been estimated that at least 150,000 people have been killed and at least 13 million people displaced since the outbreak of the war.

History

Ancient history

See main articles: Kingdom of Kush, Nobadia

The area which comprises modern Sudan has been known by different names and varying political and cultural groupings in different periods. The region historically known as Nubia is located in what is today northern Sudan and southern Egypt. The cataracts of the Nile river have in some contexts served as a way of conceptualizing boundaries in the region, with the cataract at Aswan often considered the traditional boundary between Egypt in the north and Nubia in the south. Over millennia, the region of Nubia gave rise to a number of cultures and kingdoms. Some of these include Kush, Makuria, Nobadia, and Alodia.

Kush

A map depicting several of the major ancient and medieval states in sub-Saharan Africa, including Kush, Nobatia/Faras, Dongola, and Alodia.

The area around Kush was inhabited circa 8000 BCE. The city of Kerma was established in Kush by circa 2400 BCE. Kerma traded in ivory, gold, bronze, ebony, and slaves with neighboring states and along the Red Sea. Around 1500 BCE, Egypt conquered Kerma, with Egyptian rule prevailing in Kush until the 11th century BCE. The Kingdom of Kush rose to prominence between approximately 1069 BCE and 350 CE.

Over time, as Egypt's New Kingdom declined (circa 1069 BCE) the Kushite city of Napata grew stronger as a political entity independent of Egypt. Over time, a dynasty of kings from Napata arose, with the third king of Napata, Piankhi (also called Piye), defeating a coalition of Egyptian princes and establishing the 25th Dynasty of Egypt.

Beginning in the 6th century BCE, the capital of Kush was gradually moved south to Meroë, a junction of several important trade routes in a region which was rich with iron and precious metals as well as agricultural production exporting grains and cereals. Kush continued with Meroë as its capital until an invasion by Axumites circa 330 CE, which destroyed the city, with the Kingdom of Kush itself coming to an end circa 350 CE.

Medieval history

By the sixth century CE there were three Nubian kingdoms, namely Nobadia, Makuria, and Alodia. These kingdoms converted to Christianity in the sixth century. In the seventh century, Nobadia was incorporated into Makuria.

Mentions of the Funj Sultanate, also called the Sultanate of Sennar, appear in historical records by approximately 1504. The Funj Sultanate was located in central Sudan. Major exports of the Funj Sultanate included gold, slaves, gum arabic, ivory, rhinoceros horn, civet, ostrich feathers and perfumes.

The Sultanate of Darfur arose in the mid-1600s. Its main trading centers were Kobbei and Al-Fashir. The Sultanate of Darfur remained an independent power until being annexed under Turco-Egyptian rule by 1874.

Turco-Egyptian rule (1820-1885)

The period of Turco-Egyptian rule in Sudan is also referred to as Turkiyyah (Arabic: التركية, at-Turkiyyah).

In the 1860s, Egypt, a cotton producer, had taken out loans from Britain and France, during a period in which international cotton prices had risen in part due to the US Civil War. Egypt gained higher profits from cotton at this time, and took out loans, expecting to be able to repay its debts. However, cotton prices fell when the US resumed exporting cotton, and Egypt began to face difficulties with its debt repayments, with debt service consuming two-thirds of state revenues and half of export earnings by 1876. Egypt's increasing foreign debt led it to demand increased tax revenues from administrators in Sudan. British and French creditors imposed economic restrictions on Egypt in the 1870s, establishing British and French dual control in Egyptian governance and the Public Debt Comission (French: Caisse de la Dette Publique), increasingly eroding Egypt's sovereignty. Over time, Turco-Egyptian control over Sudan weakened as military garrisons began to be reduced in size and several military units disbanded, while taxation was increased. Some unemployed Sudanese soldiers who had been forced out of the Egyptian army due to budget restrictions then joined with the Mahdist movement.

Mahdist state (1885-1899)

In 1885, Khartoum was captured by the armies of the Mahdist revolution against British and Turco-Egyptian forces, led by Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdullah, eventually defeated by the British in 1898.

Anglo-Egyptian rule (1899-1956)

Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan was a condominium of joint rule established by an agreement between Great Britain and Egypt under which the two countries would jointly administer Sudan.

On the subject of Anglo-Egyptian joint rule, author Carole Collins, in the paper "Colonialism and Class Struggle in Sudan" refers to this agreement as serving to "preserve the fiction" that Sudan was being jointly administered, while in reality the British were in control, with the joint rule agreement serving useful geopolitical and economic purposes for the British. In Collins' analysis, the joint rule agreement was useful for deflecting the competition of other European powers as they competed for control of the Nile river, with British diplomats able to portray Britain as supposedly having no colonial ambitions in Sudan, able to claim they were only helping Egypt regain its "lost colony." Furthermore, the British were also able to use the joint rule agreement to push the costs of invading and further colonizing Sudan onto Egypt's treasury rather than Britain's.

Analyzing the style of administration of this period, Fatima Babiker Mahmoud notes that the colonial government's objectives included the exploitation of "existing tribal, regional and ethnic reality in order to apply the cheapest administration in a vast country" and to ensure a congruence between tribal and administrative boundaries, which "disguised colonial expansion and portrayed it as a competition between the different tribes and ethnic and regional groups." The British "Southern Policy" in Sudan promoted a cultural division and economic gap between north and south Sudan, intensifying pre-existing differences between north and south and exacerbating southern economic underdevelopment through deliberate policies aimed toward splitting the country between north and south and assimilating south Sudan into other territories in central Africa.

The British "Southern Policy" included measures such as opening the south to Christian missionaries to operate, especially in the field of education. One outcome of this was the exclusion of Arabic from schools and government offices, being replaced by English. Southerners were also pushed to drop Arab names, customs, and clothing. The British also applied a policy of disengagement between peoples of the north and south, relocating many southern tribes and restricting trade and movement of people between north and south. Furthermore the British did not promote economic development in the south, widening the pre-existing economic gap with the north, while railway expansion drove rapid economic growth in the north.^:7-8

Agriculture in the colonial condominium period was primarily export-oriented, with the Gezira Scheme established to supply British industrial capital with cotton. Other major exports of this era were gum, livestock, and oilseeds (including sesame, groundnuts and cotton-seed). Subsistence agriculture became more and more integrated into the money economy while small-scale agriculture became more linked with the export market. Also during the colonial condominium period, industry as well as production of handicrafts was halted in order to make way for foreign manufactured imports, mainly from Britain.

In 1928 and 1931, students at Gordon College organized strikes. During the 1930s, Sudanese nationalists formed study groups in Khartoum and Omdurman to discuss independence. In 1938, a Graduates' Congress was formed, which would come to have chapters in several cities and small towns and reach almost 2000 members and required at least a high school education, while in 1941 the Gordon College students' union was formed, whose activities would grow more overtly political throughout the 1940s with influence from the Graduates' Congress. In 1943, Ismail al-Azhari, future prime minster of independent Sudan, helped form the Ashiqqa Party, the first political party organized in Sudan. In 1945, the Umma Party was formed. In 1946, Sudanese workers formed the Worker's Affairs Association (WAA), Sudan's first trade union, which was focused mainly on rail workers as the railway department was the single largest employer in Sudan with 20,000 railway workers. The Sudanese Movement for National Liberation (SMNL), later to become the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), founded a branch at Gordon College in 1946.

Independence

On January 1, 1956, Sudan gained formal independence, with Ismail al-Azhari elected as first prime minister.

In the analysis of Fatima Babiker Mahmoud, a lecturer of political economy at the University of Khartoum in the 1980s, after independence in 1956, the nature of the state which had previously been constructed to support colonial rule did not change significantly after independence. In Mahmoud's view, the main difference was a shift from British colonial policy to a neo-colonial configuration.

Sudan was under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1969, when Jaafar Nimeiry overthrew the corrupt junta with support from the Sudanese Communist Party. Nimeiry banned all political parties except the SCP. In 1970, he began an attack on Sadiq al-Mahdi's reactionary Umma Party before cracking down on the SCP.

In 1978, Nimeiry signed the first of several stabilization programs with the International Monetary Fund. This resulted in the creation of a typical IMF/World Bank program which consisted of measures such as currency devaluation, trade liberalization, social spending cuts, layoffs, removal of food subsidies, and a shift to privatization and an export-oriented economy, particularly focusing on the export of cotton. The export-led growth model led to smallholders being pushed off of their lands while giving an advantage to already large land owners and agribusiness, as well as to a decline in the production of food for local consumption and a rise in dependence on imports of wheat via US taxpayer-subsidized commodity aid programs.

In 1985, mass protests removed Nimeiry from power, but Omar Hassan al-Bashir established another dictatorship in 1989. The US labeled Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993. U.S. president Bill Clinton ordered the destruction of Sudan's only pharmaceutical plant in 1998, removing 90% of Sudan's access to medicine. Sudan lost all access from anti-malaria drugs.

South Sudan broke away from Sudan in 2011. Following the secession of South Sudan, Sudan's oil revenue dropped significantly and gold became Sudan's primary revenue source. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and paramilitary forces established private companies for providing armed security in the gold industry and partnered with foreign investors.

2019-present

In April 2019, the military overthrew Bashir, and Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf briefly took power before being replaced by Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan, an ally of the Saudi and UAE monarchies.

In October 2020, Sudan, then under the Sudanese Transitional Sovereignty Council (TSC), signed the Abraham Accords. Sudan also agreed to pay the US $335 million as "compensation" for victims of terror attacks. Following this, Sudan was removed from the USA's "state sponsors of terrorism" list.

In October 2021, the army staged a coup and took full control of the state. In 2023, fighting broke out between Abdel Fattah's government and the Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti).