This is the first of two instalments. The second will be published next week.

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.

Throughout May and June 2024, I was on the receiving end of these daily RSF salvoes. I was with my parents, now in their late seventies, who had endured a year or so of life under rebel rule in old-town Omdurman, until the various inconveniences – a lack of running water, daily harassment at gunpoint – eventually forced them out, an undertaking that involved making generous bribes at RSF checkpoints. A friend of a relative generously offered them emergency lodging in his now-empty family home, built in the 1970s in a once-lush neighbourhood in the north of the city. His ailing mother had left town at the onset of war to join her older children, who were long settled in the Arab Gulf.

War had muddled the religious calendar, but certain events are observed under all circumstances: Ramadan, and Eid al-Fitr, which it closes on; and Eid al-Adha, which lands about two months later. For the last, my father and I slaughtered two sheep, one for each of our families, as tradition requires. Most of the meat went to the local community kitchen, which was run by volunteers and funded by locals from the neighbourhood, both at home and abroad. But we kept enough for two days’ worth of cooking. The dishes included umfitfit – literally a meal of morsels – which is prepared from raw stomach, lung and liver, and seasoned with salt, pepper, chilli, lemon, pounded garlic, groundnut paste and a splash of bile.

Guests joined from nearby, among them a mechanic from our old neighbourhood, and a professor of surgery who had taught me at medical school in the late 1990s. The mechanic had survived a few months of RSF captivity by preparing his tormenters’ favourite dishes – thick millet porridge with milk, the thirst-quenching millet-and-yogurt drink gado gado – and repairing the cars they were constantly crashing. “The RSF chaps fire but miss,” my professor quipped at one point during our lively conversation. Indeed, they missed us, but not everyone was so fortunate. On the night before Eid al-Adha, two shells had landed about 300 metres away from that mango tree: one on a cemetery, where it could not kill anyone, and the other on a busy house, where it did.

My professor had also escaped from the RSF. He was apprehended at a checkpoint while driving north and held for two days in a building at the Ahfad University for Women (est. 1966), a proud communal institution of Omdurmani enlightenment. He managed to flee while the young men who were supposed to interrogate him were distracted by crystal meth, booze and other pleasures. The RSF, however, had many checkpoints around the campus on Al-Arda Street, a formerly busy but now deserted thoroughfare, which extends from the domed tomb of Sudan’s nineteenth-century revolutionary, Mohamed Ahmed al-Mahdi, in the heart of the old town to the sprawling Um Badda neighbourhoods beyond the Wad Al-Bashir crossing. Another unit intercepted him as he walked east on a parallel side street.

The unit was unsure what to do with this short old man with light olive skin, who was wearing a half-sleeved white shirt that was dirty but nevertheless tucked into his beige trousers. He did not immediately fit their profile of the enemy. RSF militiamen are recruited largely from the youth of the herding peoples of the western regions Darfur and Kordofan. In rebel propaganda, their foes are the peoples of the riverine heartland of Sudan, the communities that gave rise to the transitional and disruptively progressive figure of the nineteenth century: the jellabi (plural jellaba), an itinerant trader, wheeler-dealer, healer and proselytiser, who carried the germ of market relations wherever he ventured. Jellaba fanned across the sand dunes and clay plains of Kordofan and Darfur, pushing the trade frontier west all the way to Lake Chad.

As far as appearances go, my professor might well have been a Kordofanian herder. He was born in a northern Kordofanian village, in an area dominated by herding peoples: Dar Hamid, Hamar and Kebabish. His rural origins were betrayed by two vertical scars on each temple, from a pre-modern healing procedure for the bacterial eye disease trachoma. Education at the University of Khartoum and surgical training in Ireland had not rubbed off his recognisably rustic accent, which combined well with the markoub – the traditional handmade, closed, laceless leather shoe, worn like a sandal, which he prefers to Western footwear. A markoub allows the observant Muslim to perform the necessary ablutions without the fuss of taking socks off and putting them on again.

But the unit could not just let him go either. He had the distinct marks of a koz (plural kezan), the derogatory term for the Islamists of yesteryear – a reference to their propensity to scoop up wealth. (An urban myth holds that Hassan al-Turabi, the ideological figurehead of the Islamist movement that brought Omar al-Bashir to power in 1989, had described each partisan as a koz – a type of metal mug – with which the Sudanese people could drink the sea of Islam.) Like other kezan, my professor had a round full beard and a dark central spot on the brow, born of years of prayerful genuflection. These were just some of the many implicating features that the RSF might punish with immediate execution. Others included a birthplace along the Nile anywhere between Khartoum and Kerma, any association with the state apparatus, and the temerity to protect one’s possessions from pillage. Our own neighbour, a native of Berber, some 300 kilometres north of Khartoum, failed to convince an RSF unit that he was a retired professor, rather than a merchant hoarding gold, as their flawed intelligence had suggested. They blew his brains out on his doorstep.

After some consideration, the RSF youngsters decided to lock my professor up at Faisal Mosque, near the crossing of Al-Arda and the road leading to Al-Hilal Stadium; they simply left him there with a dozen other prisoners. He chuckled heartily as he narrated the most humiliating experience of his captivity: this descendant of a line of Sufi sheikhs who had founded a town in their name for their kin and followers was forced, in the dark of night, to ease his bladder in a corner of the house of prayer.

When the SAF’s locally manufactured kamikaze drones flew overhead, the RSF guards would flee the mosque to hide in the backstreets. By night they had usually passed out from intoxication. During one such opening, a few local captives suggested calling out the first name of a trusted neighbour through the mosque’s loudspeaker. A dangerous plan that worked. The neighbour swiftly unlocked the door that the RSF youngsters had sloppily secured, allowing the surgeon to trek through the alleyways of Hai Al-Arab and Abu Kadouk, beyond RSF lines and into northern Omdurman.

The only place in northern Omdurman where a civilian injured by mortar fire could hope to receive medical attention was Al-Naw Hospital. I trained there many years ago, when it was effectively a primary care unit serving the residents of nearby neighbourhoods and village folk from up north. During night shifts we catered to the occasional injured drunkard. In the early mornings, we were on alert for road accidents, which often involved the rickety pickup trucks without headlights that transported vegetables from nearby villages. Following a major expansion in 2015 – which was part of an ambitious plan to decentralise medical services away from the crowded facilities of central Khartoum – the hospital’s capacity increased from 4,000 to 15,000 patients per year. This upgrade included a surgical theatre, a radiological department and an intensive care unit – all of which served Al-Naw well in its unexpected wartime role.

Al-Naw is located in the 8th of more than 100 numbered neighbourhoods in Al-Thawra Al-Mahdiyya, a residential sprawl to the north of Omdurman that was initially plotted in 1960 under General Ibrahim Abboud. Postcolonial urban planners, like their colonial precursors in working-class Khartoum, allocated each family a plot of 300 square metres, followed by access to running water, electricity and public transport. The 8th’s bus station is named after its first multistorey building: Al-Salalim, “the stairs”.

Under the paternalistic developmentalism of the era, similar urban expansions were undertaken across Sudan, to keep up with a growing public sector. The state distributed land by professional rank: first, second and third class, broadly corresponding to blue-collar workers, white-collar employees and top-tier bureaucrats.

The goal was a healthy, educated and content salariat. To achieve it, planners plotted out a standardised grid of residential blocks, interspersed at regular intervals with squares for sports or other community activities, as well as marketplaces, primary schools and healthcare units. New solidarities were forged in these urban spaces, by what was effectively a shared destiny. When the electricity went down – a daily occurrence in a second-class neighbourhood like the 8th – everything went dark. No one could disturb the peace with a thundering generator, and everyone missed the 8 PM Egyptian soap opera on Sudan TV, the only channel broadcasting in the pre-satellite era.

These solidarities hardened into identities that bred their own prejudices. In old-town Omdurman, where I grew up, boys fantasised that the girls of Al-Thawra were easier to chat up. Early migrants to the capital sustained relations with home by establishing kin-based associations and self-aid groups, like the clunkily named Club of the Sons of Berber. However, those born and raised in the 8th were more likely to marry their teenage sweetheart from across the street than their cousin from the ancestral village. Celebrities even adopted stage names based on neighbourhoods: two of my favourite singers are Rayyan al-Satta (Rayyan from the 6th) and Bakri al-Khamsa (Bakri from the 5th).

Places like the 8th neighbourhood of Al-Thawra Al-Mahdiyya were long deprived of appropriate political representation. Neither of the two main political forces that had ushered in independence – the Umma Party and the Unionists – offered much to Sudan’s new urban centres. Their power bases were in the rural provinces; their dominions mapped over agricultural and commercial capital respectively. A graduating student in the 8th in the 1970s and 80s was more interested in education and state employment than small-scale trade in Kordofan or groundnut cultivation in Darfur.

These youth were better accommodated in the ranks of the two competing flagbearers of modernisation, the Communist Party and the Islamic Movement. As such, their solidarities extended beyond the 8th, first to the university campus, and from there as far away in space as Moscow or as far back in time as the Islamic Golden Age. Both journeys offered a convenient shortcut via the army barracks. It is not for nothing that Sudan’s military authoritarians – Abboud, Gaafar Nimeiri and even Bashir – are still hero-worshipped in the 8th for the material improvements they delivered: Abboud’s residential plots, Nimeiri’s schools and clinics, and Bashir’s fuel and bread subsidies, until he did away with them.

Yet neither the Communists nor the Islamists were ultimately able to transform these urban social solidarities into political belonging. The Communist cell largely failed to gain ground beyond its members; the Islamist “family” found little headway outside the mosque. A potentially better fit was offered by the “popular committee”, the Bashir-era basic unit of urban governance. But rather than open their doors to a younger, cosmopolitan generation, these bodies were run by local elites: the wholesale merchant, the prominent landlord, the security officer who recently moved in and the nouveaux pious with little means but declared connections with the new order. They were the sort of men who took it upon themselves to decide whether a displaced woman from the South was entitled to zakat or should receive a clearance order. When the state started shedding off public property in the 1990s, they were well placed to cannibalise squares and football grounds for “investment”.

It took until the revolution of 2018-2019 for the 8th and similar neighbourhoods to be truly politically activated. They were mobilised, largely through messaging apps, into “resistance committees” – autonomous, localised groups that came together for agitation and direction action. University students and high-school dropouts, day labourers, peddlers and artisans, the precariously employed and entirely unemployed: all participated. In a sense, the resistance committees were the alter ego of the popular committee – or, if you prefer, the revolutionary ghost waiting to come to life after the decay of the older organizational form.

The protest march, rather than the political meeting, was the egalitarian plane where resistance committee members met each other. Together they confronted the security apparatus with headgear, gloves and masks; some even collected intelligence about police deployment and movements beforehand. Steadfastness, heroism and sacrifice, not “communicative reason”, were the skills required for distinction. Tactics learned from Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare were repurposed in an urban environment. There were a fair number of carnivalesque personalities: a Spider-Man in full costume; a woman who turned catching teargas canisters into a sport; many a chair-man who sat in defiance right at the invisible battleline between protesters and security forces; even the occasional exhibitionist who brandished his dick at the policemen, as if challenging them to shoot.

To me, the protest marches were visually and symbolically reminiscent of the Mawlid celebrations in Omdurman. They particularly recalled the processions that the smaller tareeqas or Sufi religious orders took through the open ground near the Mahdi’s tomb, complete with flags, chants, big drums and colourfully attired derwishes. When protesters from different committees converged, their shared elation brought to mind a century-old spiritual tradition.

The second word in the term “resistance committee” is misleadingly formal. These ad-hoc groups bore a greater resemblance to football teams, specifically those that play a local version of the sport known as “dafoori” – literally, “pushing and shoving”. Dafoori is situationist football, a performance of skills adapted to local circumstances. The games occur in open spaces, never a proper field. Teams are constituted from the available players, dissolved and then reconstituted as per necessity or convenience. The ball can be a mass of rags in a tied sock. There is no boss. A match’s length is not defined a priori; it can go on as long as light allows, until exhaustion sets in, or one side is put off by the prospect of defeat. Refereeing can be done by spectators, or through on-field consensus. An injured player might be replaced by an onlooker, or simply limp along.

Once the game has begun, however, social stratification is suspended. Relations between dafoori players, quite like members of resistance committees, are based purely on mutual recognition, trust, athletic skills – and very much male camaraderie. Class and race divisions dim the prospects of victory. A pupil from a civil service household with a not-so-sturdy physique will want to play alongside the dropout son of the displaced South Sudanese woman who does his family’s laundry, even if he wouldn’t dare venture into their shack of rags and cartons behind the school.

The committees gave themselves names reminiscent of male sporting teams: the Lions of Al-Barrari, the Tigers of Al-Abbasiya. They developed flags, ornaments and other markers of identity. Reluctant to distinguish tactics from strategic objectives, or means from ends, they nourished an almost aesthetic idea of revolution as a purifying force that would carry the day, come what may. This dashing, storming approach served them well when their clear objective was to overthrow Bashir, which they achieved in 2019. But it hampered them in navigating the politically ambiguous aftermath.

Once the civilian prime minister Abdalla Hamdok was deposed in a coup in 2021, the demonstrations settled into a new routine, with unspoken rules of engagement between protesters and security forces, both of whom wished to avoid excess deaths and injuries. Resistance committee members fraternised with policemen redeployed to the same sites. A liaison was established that involved a set map of marches and a line of confrontation. Proceedings would begin around noon and conclude at dusk, with an amicable goodbye and see you next time.

From across the broad organisational landscape of the resistance committees, a small group of protesters were attracted to what might be described as “Ghadiboon without borders”. Ghadiboon is the plural form of ghadib, Arabic for “enraged person”. These smaller, self-selecting groups emerged out of personal encounters in the heat of action. They stood at the front ranks of protests and effectively goaded the security forces. While the Ghabidoon understood themselves as a vanguard formation, they can also be thought of as a radical surplus of the committees, akin to the skilled dafoori players of inferior social status. In form, Ghadiboon are similar to the smaller, mysteries-oriented tareeqas that predated the pan-Islamic, scripture-oriented orders that the reformer Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi launched in the nineteenth century.

A Ghadiboon unit works around a central figure, who is occasionally tested and challenged by the membership, but is ultimately responsible for expressing, if not working out, how to act here and now. In January 2022, in the thick of the demonstrations against the coup, three such figureheads – Mohamed Adam (AKA Tupac), at the time barely 17 years old, Ahmed al-Fatih (Al-Nina) and Mohamed al-Fatih (Tirhaqa) – were put behind bars, accused of killing a police brigadier general. When the war broke out, Tupac escaped from Al-Huda prison in Omdurman with thousands of others and eventually made it to Libya, where he rebranded himself a “human rights advocate”. The heroes of the Ghadiboon universe are fallen comrades – Abdalla “the Russian”, Gasim, Abubakr “the Cloud” and other young men and women, the oldest in their mid-twenties, who were killed by the security forces.

In April 2024, a year after the protests had been brought to a violent end, I met a group of Ghadiboon veterans in the square facing Al-Naw Hospital. This square, originally laid out by the developmentalist planners as a free area for sports and recreations, was repurposed during Sudan’s self-imposed neoliberal turn in the 1990s. Impoverished by austerity, local authorities had clumsily divided the public space into commercial lots with fencing, hoping to raise rental and tax revenues. Alas, given the general dearth of capital, it failed to attract a single fancy supermarket, high-tech gym or upscale restaurant. I only found a few tea sellers, a man running an open-air shisha stall, a few hustling car mechanics and countless samasra – petty middlemen who used to offer a number of services, from secondhand furniture sales and car rentals to romantic mediation and not-so-romantic rendezvous. Since the war broke out, however, they had moved on to new commodities: small arms and ammunition, fuel, Starlink kits, and contacts in the RSF – for those looking to salvage plundered cars or access homes in areas under rebel occupation.

The Ghadiboon lads I met for tea were all in SAF fatigues. They had volunteered two months into the war, during the big recruitment drive of June 2023. Each held a Kalashnikov between his legs, the deceptively innocent barrels pointing up at the tin roof. They toyed with these guns as we chatted, running their hands along the rails and tapping on the magazines. To them I was just the Communist “uncle” who was good with words and could tell amusing stories from another era. I mentioned the 1990s Eritrea-based opposition’s slogan – “revolution guarded and buttressed by arms” – but they did not find this history relevant. I could have fathered most of them, had I followed some ancestral examples. My childhood dream was to become a lorry driver-cum-trader, start a family at 20, and in due course set up households in different towns, like a proper jellaba.

For these young men, the war was an extension, not an interruption, of the revolution. Throughout the time between the coup and the outbreak of conflict, they had opposed both the SAF and RSF, chanting their throats sore at every turn: “The military to the barracks and the Janjaweed must be dissolved.” (The Janjaweed – originally armed by Bashir as a disposable militia, in a long tradition of counterinsurgency operations on the cheap in the peripheries – eventually mutated into the RSF.) When I asked why they took up arms against one former adversary on behalf of the other, they replied: “What should we do otherwise?” Which is as good a paraphrasing as any of the Leninist dictum, borrowed from Hegel, that “freedom is the appreciation of necessity”.

To elaborate: they were fighting, first, to save themselves from the indignity of peeing in a mosque. Second, for their homes and town. Third, for a radical notion of sovereignty embodied in the right to protest against a military dictatorship, then to turn around and fraternise with the poorly paid functionaries of that very state, unbothered either by foreign powers, their political clients or their propagandists. In short, they were men of action. Having parsed the primary and secondary contradictions of the war, they had concluded that the immediate, first-order enemy was the RSF and its Gulf patron, the United Arab Emirates. In their initial fervour, they dubbed themselves the “Revolutionary Battalion”. But they were assigned to different units after a period of training in Wadi Saydna, and could only meet when off duty. One Ghadib, a man of few words named Taha, had trained as a sniper. He sat with his rifle across his lap, likely a variant of the Russian Dragunov SVDK. The others boasted of learning the ropes on a heavy Goryunov machine gun, a mortar or an RPG.

The Revolutionary Battalion was at home in Omdurman. They could read the urban landscape with a subtlety that no drone or informant could match. Snipers like Taha played a significant role when the SAF pushed the RSF out of the Omdurman marketplace and the old-town quarters in March 2024. This offensive concluded with the liberation of the Sudan Radio and Television headquarters on the eastern bank of the Nile – a feat that is now part of Ghadiboon heritage. Some of them eventually put down their guns. Many others joined the major SAF offensive to liberate Khartoum in September 2024.

Taha and a comrade dared fate, crossing the old iron bridge into Khartoum ahead of the main SAF advance to draw out RSF sniper fire. He was killed on 28 September, during another daring push east along Nile Avenue. It took six more months of gruelling battle to secure Al-Mugran, at the confluence of the two Niles. Taha’s remains were eventually retrieved in March 2025 and laid to rest in Omdurman’s Al-Bakri cemetery, right next to his close friend and Ghadiboon comrade, Abubakr “the Cloud”.

It is perhaps worth pausing to dwell on the meaning of “gheima”. The English world “cloud” singularly fails to capture its true essence. Gheima does not connote the misty gloom of northern skies, but rather – in the permanent summers of the sub-Sahara – the promise of shade from the scorching sun, and the coming of a cool breeze.

Taha Kamal al-Sheikh Madani’s legend endures as the hero of the iron bridge. “He was not only a brave fighter. He was one of the first to volunteer in Al-Naw Hospital. He believed in freedom, justice and peace, and defended the land and the nation until the very end,” said a joint obituary of the resistance committees.

Thanks to him and his comrades, I was able to drive over the bridge into Khartoum in June 2025. The soldiers on guard, tired from waving at and greeting passersby, were more interested in their mobile phones. Some travellers were gripped by enthusiasm: they emerged from cars and hugged random soldiers, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “one people, one army”. Others handed out food and refreshments.

General Hemedti, the RSF lord, had threatened in the lead-up to war that only cats would be left to roam the high-rise buildings of Khartoum if he did not get his way. The RSF had largely fulfilled his promise, reducing the city to a shell of itself. Even the stray cats were gone, save for one I spotted daring through the wreckage of the Central Bank of Sudan.

Herbert Kitchener’s historic capital was mostly devastated. At the main campus of the University of Khartoum, football grounds had been turned into cemeteries. Along a silent University Avenue, monkeys shrieked and bounded through the colonial-era East Indian walnut trees (Albizia lebbeck). Thick bushes of mesquite (Prosopis juliflora) grew from cracks in the asphalt where the RSF had dug up electricity cables to plunder copper – just as they had looted family reserves of gold, the primary social security and retirement reserve of many Sudanese households, held in matriarchal custody, often in a multigenerational savings box. Having thoroughly ransacked the National Museum, RSF militiamen filmed videos of ancient mummies, posting them online as “proof” of the Islamist regime’s hidden mass graves.

Some of the most intense fighting over Khartoum took place along the road up the eastern bank of the Nile, in the neighbourhood of Al-Izergab. The area was now a museum of war technology. Both sides of the once-again busy thoroughfare were littered with multifarious debris: the burned-out husks of Toyota Land Cruisers, junkheaps of destroyed armoury and machine guns, burned fuel tankers tipped on their sides with their metal bellows dishevelled, destroyed tanks in idle bulkiness, the empty shells of spent projectiles, the rubble of buildings, furniture tossed by the careless hand of war out of the cushions of domesticity and into artistic stagings worthy of a Beuys or a Cattelan.

On closer inspection, the skeletal remains of those Land Cruisers did not offer artistic majesty; their reek reminded me of the morgue at Khartoum Teaching Hospital. These metal beasts are adequately nicknamed “Thatcher”, after the former British prime minister, for their stubborn longevity. A Thatcher is transformed into a formidable fighting machine by mounting a machine gun on its bed, usually a modification of the Soviet DShK or the Chinese QJC-88. The truck also can also accommodate anti-aircraft guns – a favourite being the Soviet twin-barred autocannon ZU-23-2 – and even light, multiple-launch rocket systems like the Chinese Type 63. The basic RSF combat unit comprises a single Thatcher with a mounted machine gun, a fuel barrel, a capable driver and a tight crew of kin who are close in age.

On the roadside, I recognised the brown of dried-out flesh and the white of bone still attached to fragments of khaki cloth; those scraps clung to the thorny mesquite bush, and were thus protected from roaming dogs and birds of prey. Their particular brown was close, but not identical, to the shade of shermout: a kind of dried meat, usually beef, made in strips about 20cm long and 2cm wide. My late grandmother used to hang it on a line in her kitchen backroom.

Shermout made a remarkable recovery during our “senseless” war, as a sort of prized treat in households that could still afford meat. (The masses get by on lentils and white bean soups from communal kitchens.) The delicacy ranges in flavour from tangy to rancid. It can be prepared via different techniques, though there are basically two forms. One is slow or shade-dried, fermented and pounded. The other is quick or sun-dried, and powdered. In times of plenty, minced meat – dubbed, in the idiom of grandmothers, “shermout akhdar” (literally “green” or “fresh”) – replaces the dried preserve in households with refrigerators.

Life, much like shermout and mesquite, recoils and bounces back, often in unexpected ways. Al-Izergab was challenged by war, but not broken. This suburban enclave of small farmers and merchants now sits on prime agricultural land. Its gardens, irrigated directly from the Nile, are once more lush with produce. Many growers have judiciously switched to using solar panels. Along the main road, small businesses have reopened, likewise turning to solar since the RSF made off with the grid’s cables and transformers.

If anything, Al-Izergab is posed to profit from the ravages of war. It historically vied for the Khartoum market with Gezira, whose farmers are bound to a canal network built for gravity irrigation, which is now shattered. With this main competitor sidelined, Al-Izergab’s landlords are charging rents for two rooms and a pit latrine at rates that rival apartments in the city’s deserted gated communities.

From the viewpoint of a contractor, Khartoum is once again a place where some pretty good money can be made. No wonder so many merchants have shifted to the import of transformers, cables and solar panels. Several departments of the embattled central government have also returned to the capital from their wartime refuge in Port Sudan. Some, like the Ministry of Health, have relocated to their old headquarters on Nile Avenue. Others, like the Ministry of Finance, have set up in anonymous office blocks. In January, Kamil Idris, the interim prime minister and a United Nations veteran, made a point of visiting the Grand Hotel on Nile Avenue and Al-Salam Rotana Hotel on Africa Street, both of which are being hastily rehabilitated. It was a signal to internationals that business as usual was resuming.

Khartoum is in some ways breathing again, but largely with the lungs of working-class neighbourhoods like Al-Kalakla in the south and Um Badda to the west. Here men and women lift up fallen electricity masts and fix torn cables; repair water pipes and treatment facilities; dig shallow graves and properly rebury war victims; and not least, clear the roads of obnoxious Thatcher husks and deathly mesquite bushes.

Read more on Salih Basheer’s photo series here.