This is the second of two instalments. Read the first part here.

It is hard to think of another contemporary conflict that has been as thoroughly depoliticised as the civil war in Sudan. The ‘Sudan industry’ – a particular subculture of spooks and mediocre diplomats, humanitarians and development professionals, academics and adventurous journalists – adopted a posture of benevolent neutrality at the outset of the conflict, and have since then done little but sloganeer for “humanitarian aid”. They have been at pains to not take sides in what the more sophisticated analysts among them describe as “two armed formations”, and the cruder reduce to a personality clash between rapacious generals.

Anne Applebaum returned from a brief tour of the country in 2024 to assure readers of The Atlantic that the battle between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) was a transactional, lawless free-for-all, without any ideological underpinning or political endgame – “the most nihilistic conflict on Earth”. Hundreds of democracy activists had sacrificed their lives, and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed, but “the artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery, the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital – all of that had led to nothing, built nothing”.

At the other end of the spectrum are the moralisers, of which there are naturally many. Drawing on the lessons of “history”, they have denounced the “Arab” elite of the Nile Valley, who from the dawn of time have apparently oppressed just about everybody else between the Red Sea and Lake Chad, and from Aswan Dam all the way upriver to Lake Ukerewe – a vast array of tribes and communities lumped together as “Africans”. (The terms merit quotation marks because they essentialise what are political identities.) I was personally struck by the schadenfreude expressed by so many Western scholars who had lived in Khartoum, off the hospitality of its “Arab” elite, during the formative phase of their careers.

Less than a month into the fighting, Alex De Waal wrote in disappointment in the London Review of Books on behalf of “those of us who have lived and worked in Sudan for decades”. He admitted that the battle between the RSF and SAF was like nothing the country had witnessed since the nineteenth-century British military invasion. But, he continued, “if we look at the city’s 200-year history, the fighting shouldn’t be a surprise… Khartoum was founded on a command post built for the purposes of imperial robbery, and every subsequent regime has continued this practice. In ordinary circumstances, Sudan is run by a cabal of merchants and generals who plunder the darker-skinned people of the marchlands and bring their wealth to Khartoum... But the logic of kleptocracy is inexorable: when the cartel is bankrupt, the mobsters shoot it out.”

Is the violence that has been ripping through Sudan for over three years now merely a product of inflated egos and racial hatred? Or might it have something to do with Sudan’s modern political history – and the history of its integration into the global economic system? In the Eid al-Adha season of 2026, I had the pleasure to listen – in Omdurman, Khartoum and Al-Duem, respectively – to three vernacular interpretations of the war that were free of both nihilism and moralism.

An elderly police sergeant in Omdurman’s Al-Abassiya neighbourhood offered my favourite explanation. His was an urban legend of intrigue, hustling, sex, honour and a lot of money, which played out in Emirati palaces. “Why do you think Mohamed bin Zayed hates us so much, ya doctor?” the sergeant asked me, as we stood on a sidewalk beneath the fading streetlamp at dusk. “Everybody knows why – because a few Sudanese men got involved with his mother. Really. It’s exactly as I am telling you.”

“All this happened before Zayed the father passed away. Mohamed the son has a brother – this fellow is a bit of an imbecile – who their mother wished to crown. So she hired a group of Darfuri sorcerers. They were flown to the Emirates, and once they got going, they did not stop. I am telling you, they got millions from her, millions and millions of green dollars. As you must know, black magic doesn’t work unless serious sins are committed. In this case, the mother herself was involved. They sinned with her to ensure she remained silent about the payment. Everybody knows this. My relatives in the Emirates have all the details.

“Mohamed bin Zayed’s security agents eventually broke the news to him. Since then he hates this country called Sudan, and these people called Sudanese. How could he not? They screwed his mother and got away with it.”

In Khartoum I spoke to a former minister in one of the many “national unity” cabinets that were formed and dissolved in the terminal years of Omar al-Bashir’s rule. When the RSF attacked the capital, he withdrew to a small town on the eastern bank of the Blue Nile some 20 kilometres south, and only returned home once the SAF regained control. A good part of Jabra, the bulky concrete neighbhourhood where his house was located, has been looted and ransacked during the rebel occupation. Hemedti briefly maintained an expansive house for his large family there, and reportedly also bunkers. Its frankly apocalyptic feel was only highlighted by the shrill voice of a muezzin, who keenly called the absent worshippers to prayer.

He offered a mirror account of the Sudan industry’s morality tale. In his mind, the country’s riverine peoples, descendants of the jellaba, had been relentlessly besieged by various threatening “others” since the dawn of independence. First the racially inferior and religiously distinct southern Sudanese; then the racially inferior but religiously equal Darfuri rebels; and now the tribal Darfuri herders, who might profess a belief in Islam and loudly proclaim themselves to be “Arab”, but were nevertheless in deed as heathen as the pre-Islamic hordes of the Arab peninsula. “How can we trust those Darfuri rebels now fighting on the side of the army with our lives, our homes and our womenfolk?” he asked me. “It is impossible to distinguish them from RSF fighters. They look exactly the same! The same dreadlocks, the same kadamol [the ubiquitous, face-covering scarf of Saharan desert nomads], the same Thatchers!” I had to agree on the last point.

The third account came from a veteran trader who had a stall in the relatively small marketplace of Al-Duem, a town on the western bank of the White Nile around 190 kilometres south of Khartoum. Now in his late eighties, Al-Haj has seen it all: late colonialism and independence, various democratic and military governments, conflicts in southern Sudan and Darfur, and finally, civil war. Throughout this period he had been engaged in commerce, retail and wholesale, and more recently oil and flour milling. I met him in his domestic study, a small room packed with thick volumes authored by adherents of the Maliki tradition and the Tijaniyya Sufi order, and stacks of blue accounting books that date back to the early 1970s.

“Do you read the Quran?” he asked me. I said I did. He then recited in a forbidding voice the first three verses of Surah Al-Mutaffifin: “Woe to the defrauders! / Those who take full measure when they buy from people / But give less when they measure or weigh for buyers.”

“Most of the profit flowing into people’s pockets in the market arises from fraud,” he went on. “Lift any package you like: a sack of sugar, a bag of lentils, a jerry can of sesame oil. It says 10 kilos but actually weighs eight, promises 36 pounds but contains 32. Retail sale is ready packaged for display nowadays; nobody weighs a buyer her due at the bench. How can this work? And I haven’t said a word yet about the market in debts and fractions.”

All three explanations contained a kernel of truth. The police sergeant’s tale might have been lurid and phantasmic, but it captured the profound – and profoundly destabilising – entanglement of Sudanese and Emirati politics. In the real world, the rich Emir is engaged in capitalist penetration; in fantasy, the Darfuri nobodies offer a phallic response. For his part, the former minister both asserted and undid the chauvinist ideology of the riverine “Arab” elite. His desperate survey of genetic and cultural features proved quite useless. When push came to shove, it didn’t help to tell the “Arab” apart from the “African”.

Perhaps most insightful was Al-Haj, who in his own way related Sudan’s productivity crisis to a crushing regime of debts with origins in the offices of the Paris Club of creditors, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Profits were being made primarily in the circuits of unequal exchange, from state price-setting right down to the defrauding of weights and measures – a story that had been going on for a long time.

How long had Sudan been caught in this vice? How far back must we go to glimpse a different future?

One answer lies in the rainy season of 1970, when Abd al-Khaliq Mahjoub, the celebrated leader of the Communist Party of Sudan, addressed his cadre at a raucous conference in Khartoum. The party, which had been founded in 1946, was in the midst of its most consequential internal struggle yet. Having originally found its support among railway workers and students in the 1950s, it had launched the mass strike that eventually brought down the regime of General Ibrahim Abboud in the October 1964 revolution, transforming overnight into a force to be reckoned with. In the aftermath, some of its senior figures won parliamentary seats, and even got their first taste of ministerial portfolios. Now, one faction was fantasising about quickly overcoming underdevelopment through military means.

The previous year, in 1969, Colonel Jafar Nimeiri had ousted President Ismail al-Azhari in a bloodless coup. He led a military coalition that modelled itself after the Egyptian Free Officers under Nasser; its ideologically motley crew of civilian allies included Communists, Nasserists, Baathists and Arab socialists. In the eyes of its protagonists, supporters and well-wishers – primarily the salariat of places like the 8th – the 1969 putsch was the next logical step after the October revolution. They believed Nimeiri would crush the backward political outfits of the rural patricians – the Umma and the Democratic Unionist parties – and pave the way for socialism. Mahjoub disagreed. He denounced a coup involving his own party’s military men as an expression of petty-bourgeois anxiety that could never be a substitute for the “patient and persistent work” – a favourite phrase of his – of furthering the national democratic revolution, which, by its very nature, was a mass movement, not a clandestine plot in the barracks.

He was right to be concerned. After taking office, Nimeiri promptly demanded – very much like Nasser – that the Communists subordinate themselves to the will of his regime, and more specifically, that they dissolve their party and join him in constructing socialism with the lorry of bricks he had supposedly delivered to the Sudanese people. The colonel’s challenge split the Communist Party’s central committee horizontally. Mahjoub’s long and winding address at that decisive conference was intended to bring back a fidgety group of predominantly urban intellectuals who were in doubt about the longterm prospects of social change from below, and who wished, as it were, to abandon the one-brick-at-a-time theory of socialism in favour of the lorry-load rendition.

“The democratic revolution is the revolution of agricultural reform,” Mahjoub told his audience. “It cannot reach its logical conclusion without awakening the masses of toiling peasants at the widest scale, and their involvement in political, economic and ideological struggle.” If he stressed agrarian reform, that was because he was well aware that 75% of his countrywomen farmed cereals for their own upkeep, or raised animals in more-or-less subsistence communities. This vast rural population had to be corralled into farming a basket of cash crops for local use. In keeping with the generic Third World developmentalist agenda, he proposed that the Sudanese state, with the help of the socialist bloc, would pursue import substitution – first to promote agrobusiness, and then, once the necessary technology was transferred, to kick off industrialisation in earnest.

Mahjoub wasn’t delirious; he even had some of the numbers at hand. Postcolonial Sudan was indeed diversifying its trade relations away from the United Kingdom and towards the socialist bloc. Soon after independence, the Czechoslovak match company Solo Sušice had acquired a dominant share of the national market. Yugoslav engineers built a powdered-milk processing plant in Kordofan’s Babanusa, with comradely greetings from Josip Tito, who personally inaugurated the facility alongside General Abboud in 1960. In short, the foundations of the magnificent edifice of the “democratic revolution” had already been laid. All that remained was to keep placing the bricks, one by one. It was a task to be orchestrated by the party and undertaken by everyone, or nearly everyone: peasants, workers, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals and, with reservations, the national patriotic (but not the comprador) bourgeoisie.

The party leader did not live long enough to win back his entire central committee. Aggrieved by his reticence, Nimeiri soon locked Mahjoub up in jail, dismissed the Communist officers in his inner council, and declared the party an enemy of the nation. The embittered Communists responded with a countercoup – a “corrective movement”, in their terminology – and succeeded against all odds in holding power for three days in July 1971. But they could not muster the ruthlessness to vanquish their opponents, who returned victorious. This time around, Nimeiri took no chances: he assassinated the top Communist leadership, including Mahjoub, and incarcerated most of its members. Within a year Nimieri’s regime had dropped the socialist mantle and become a satellite of the US security apparatus, operating in tight coordination with Anwar Sadat.

People like myself, who continue to honour the memory of the heroes of July 1971, are wont to imagine that another version of Sudanese history was and is still possible – that Mahjoub’s policy of agrarian reform was the ‘road not taken’ to something like inclusive development. Yet there are reasons to believe that his import substitution programme was too ambitious to begin with. In 1967, in his report of the fourth party congress, Mahjoub had argued that the commercial capitalists who dominated the Sudanese bourgeoisie would always sink the profits they reaped from agriculture into urban real estate and consumer products, rather than reinvesting the money in agrobusiness or industry proper.

He understood this bias to be the birth mark of a comprador class that was subservient to the capitalist metropoles – above all, the former coloniser, Britain. Those countries demanded cheap raw materials to fuel their own industries, which produced the very consumer products that were becoming standards of the good life in Khartoum: Philips radios and televisions, Liebherr refrigerators, Volkswagen Beetles (Mahjoub’s vehicle of choice). In effect, he identified class relations in independent Sudan as a continuation of colonial relations of rural extraction and exploitation, only now under a national authority.

This pattern has only deepened over the past half-century: from the comparably benign mechanised agricultural schemes of the Butana plains around Gedaref, over to militarised oil extraction in the floodplains of southern Sudan (now South Sudan), and gold from an archipelago of artisanal mining zones spread across Darfur, Kordofan, the Blue Nile and the northern Nile Valley. Each of these market expansions caused vast displacement, and brought locally affected communities into conflict. Each time, the central government, in the best colonial fashion, picked and armed one side against the other. 

The intensifying violence, in turn, hollowed out the legitimacy of the central authority that the Communists might have held in July 1971. It haemorrhaged away into a multiplicity of sovereignties, from the independent South Sudan to fiefdoms of rebel governance in South Kordofan and Darfur, up to the monstrous mutation of the RSF: a mercenary force operating as an agent of Emirati capital, equipped with a fascist ideology of racial grievance and supremacy, which has perfected the art of bare extraction on a transnational – and indeed transcontinental – scale. Forsaking a regional headquarters, the RSF makes its money by circulating goods and fighters between Nyala in Darfur, Kufra in Libya, Juba in South Sudan, Nairobi in Kenya, Ethiopian army bases in Benishangul-Gumuz, Somaliland’s Berbera, and Emirati airports.

A lot, then, has changed since Mahjoub’s day – and largely for the worse. The central question that he raised in 1970 – how can we reduce the number of rural labour hours that go into a Volkswagen Beetle? – must be grimly updated: how did the number of rural labour hours that go into a Toyota pickup become so large as to be uncountable? One way of approaching an answer is to consider the histories of the three major commodities that sequentially made it from rural Sudan to the world market in return for Beetles and Toyotas. First cotton, then oil, and finally gold.

Their legacies cannot be reduced to an account of fluctuating prices or even shifting production relations. The commodities in question shaped all aspects of Sudan: its political economy, ideological conflicts, moral values, cultural products, even carnal proclivities. As such, a more expansive and nuanced historical investigation is called for. An adequate historiographical method might be found in the yellowing pages of all those books in Al-Haj’s study.

Indigenous historians of riverine Sudan offer two modes of working out a genealogy. The first is a constructed and reconstructed bloodline of ancestors, a lineage of fathers; the second is a sequence of transmission of knowledge, a lineage of teachers. These two modes of inheritance broadly map to the biological and the cultural, or history as essence and history as contingency. One is no truer than the other; they often fuse in the same figure.

For instance, the ancestry of the revolutionary Mohamed Ahmed al-Mahdi (1844-1884) is usually traced all the way back to the Prophet Mohamed. In The Bliss of He Who Seeks Enlightenment from the Life Story of Al-Imam Al-Mahdi, his authoritative account, composed during its subject’s lifetime, Ismail Abd al-Gadir al-Kordofani names one forebear after another: Mohamed Ahmed was the son Abdalla, a landless shipbuilder, who was the son of Fahal, the son of Abd al-Wali, and so on, until Yagoub, the son of Al-Hassan, the son of Ali and Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet. The factuality of this lineage is beside the point; it is an identity.

Mohamed wad Dayfalla (died 1809) takes the second approach in the Tabagat, his biographical dictionary of Sudan’s sheikhs, saints, holy men, poets and scholars. He traces Mohamed Ahmed’s formation far beyond his ancestral home on Labab island in the Dongola region to a network of khalwas (schools) in Omdurman, Khartoum, Kataranj, Berber, Al-Damer, Um Marahi and Tayba Al-Sheikh Al-Qurashi. The implication is that scholarly training is what transformed the son of a shipbuilder into a Sufi celebrity, and then a military leader who crushed the Turkiyya regime.

The trick lies in combining both genealogical approaches. Then you can hold Mohamed Ahmed al-Mahdi’s humble background and Sufi higher education on the one hand, and his prophetic ancestry and personal miracles on the other, in suspension, without surrendering either to the other.

Even a cursory genealogical investigation of Sudan’s major export commodities would necessitate some elements of this dualistic method. Mahjoub was probably right about the necessity of agrarian reform; Al-Kordofani would have said Allah did not will it. But isn’t the harrow of history precisely these possible impossibilities? Don’t the ghosts of past defeats continue to haunt the living? The late Awad Jibreel, an exuberant Sudanese songwriter from the 1970s, acutely expresses as much in a different register: “A single step, a single step between her and I, had I hurried?” So why did Allah not will Abd al-Khaliq Mahjoub’s “democratic revolution”?

Herbert Kitchener launched his campaign to reconquer Sudan from the Mahdist state in 1896. His army was a blend of a few English officers and soldiers and a mass of Egyptian peasant recruits and Sudanese slaves. Two technologies proved decisive in their victory: the railway they built while proceeding up the Nile, and the recoil-operated Maxim machine gun. On the morning of 2 September 1898, on the plains of Karrari, north of the holy capital, Omdurman, the Anglo-Egyptian troops thoroughly defeated the assembled Ansar combatants, as the partisans of the Mahdi were known.

Some 12,000 Ansaris were killed; another 13,000 were wounded. Kitchener’s army sustained less than 50 casualties. Omdurman was ransacked. The Mahdi’s tomb was blown up with cannon and his remains were dug up and tossed into the Nile. Legend has it that Kitchener kept the skull of the shipbuilder’s son, Sufi master and liberation hero to use as an inkwell.

Many decades later, on school trips to the Karrari battleground, I witnessed how heavy rains continuously eroded the soil of the hilly site, uncovering the remains of those anonymous heroes. Pointing at the bones, our headmaster, Hassan Salim, an ardent Nasserist, condemned the savagery of modern warfare and praised the bravery of Sudan’s freedom fighters, who had won their honour even if they had lost the battle. When I parroted this nationalist lesson to my grandmother that evening, she dismissed it out of hand: “You foolish boy, you, this was a katla” – a slaughter.

Only Marxism, Mahjoub famously explained to one of the many judges who put him behind bars, adequately explained what happened that fateful day in Karrari. From him I eventually learned that the country’s real enemy was not, as Hassan Salim had stressed, the khawaja Herbert, son of Frances Anne and Henry, whose origins go back to the good people of Suffolk – obnoxious as he was – but the system of imperialism.

Sudan had to pay for its reconquest. Her majesty’s imperial government did not bring liberalism and prosperity to its reacquired colony, as the wartime propaganda claimed, but instead turned it into a vast agricultural reserve, primarily for cotton, and a captive market for British consumer products. Commercial cotton production was concentrated in the irrigated Gezira Scheme between the Blue and the White Niles. Urban development followed continuously with Khartoum at the confluence of the two rivers and along the railway route to Port Sudan.

At independence in 1956, the cash crop accounted for around 65% of exports; consumer goods constituted the same approximate proportion of imports. From the profits of this consumer market, the private sector reinvested over half of its capital in real estate and only around 16% in agriculture, seeking rents rather than productive investment – the comprador tendency that Mahjoub would later diagnose.

In short, Sudan was trapped in a classic postcolonial squeeze: it sold cheap agricultural crops to buy expensive manufactured goods. As global competition drove down cotton prices, the cost of imported machinery and fertiliser skyrocketed, worsening the balance-of-trade deficit and triggering successive economic crises.

While it lasted, the cotton economy sustained a specific class of capitalists: riverine Arab merchants, Darfurian Baggara lords, Fur emirs and any number of other groups who commanded traditional authority. Beneath them was a highly stratified workforce made up of a settled local peasantry and migrant labourers who circulated between the irrigation schemes of the riverine heartland and the subsistence zones spanning westwards and southwards.

The government facilitated this imbalanced growth in the name of national development. Throughout the 1960s, vast sums of money were poured into education, public health and research, with the aim of nurturing a scarce health workforce and churning out clerks and managers to run the single cash-crop system. The state flourished in the form of a large bureaucracy, a technocrat’s paradise. (Indeed, the figure of the technocrat has loomed large over postcolonial Sudanese politics; they inevitably emerge at crucial moments, including after the fall of Bashir, to save the nation from its egalitarian fancies.) Scientists studded with British PhDs researched new crop varieties. Marketing boards tracked global prices with admirable diligence. Agricultural inspectors micromanaged tenant farmers, earning themselves damnation in every prayer.

The first two decades of independence are now remembered as a golden age for urban aspirants. In Khartoum, as well as in smaller towns like Atbara, Al-Fasher and Kadugli, there was ample government housing, and plenty of jobs, perks and foreign scholarships to go around. It was a period of romances abroad cut short and unanswered love letters home. A large corpus of fine music and literature was composed. When a mid-career agricultural inspector in the Gezira Scheme got married, the wedding went on for a fortnight, the Department of Mechanical Transport did most of the hauling and chauffeuring, and a friend in Sudan Airways could be trusted to procure subsidised tickets to Addis Ababa for the newlyweds.

The system might not have been inclusive, and it certainly wasn’t sustainable, but it helps to explain why the technocrats preferred Nimeiri over Mahjoub.

The 1970s oil crises exposed the fragile foundations of the cotton economy. Sudan depended almost wholly on imported oil to run its irrigated and mechanised agriculture, the source of over half its foreign earnings. As crude prices inexorably rose through the decade – from $2.48 per barrel in 1972 to more than $35 in 1980 – so production declined, from 280,000 tonnes to 180,000 tonnes in roughly the same period. Falling revenues devastated the state budget, bringing development planning to a halt and gutting longterm investment in schools and hospitals. With local opportunities drying up, there was a massive exodus of skilled labour, and even manual labour, to the booming Arab Gulf.

While the migration crossed class and regional lines, most of the diaspora’s remittances were funnelled back into Khartoum, which was, in real-estate terms, the best bet – the place where the president went to sleep and where planes took off, the centre of water and electricity infrastructure, health and education, trade and finance, politics and culture. Gulf money was, to a great degree, transformed into the concrete, bricks, septic tanks and heavy furniture of multigenerational homes. Not to mention very many fuel-wasting cars.

This real-estate bubble was both driven by and a cause of agricultural stagnation. Banks stopped gambling on failing farms, instead favouring urban land or buildings. New entrants to the market had no option but to turn back to kinship or tribal networks to secure loans. Watching from the margins, young men in Darfur and Kordofan began to see Khartoum as a parasite consuming the nation’s wealth. Their resentment would fester for a generation, feeding the ideological passions of many rebel movements.

By the end of the 1970s, Nimeiri had effectively dumped a set of five-year plans for achieving national self-sufficiency and settled on a more subservient ambition. His “Breadbasket Strategy” was supposed to turn Sudan into a food supplier to the Arab Gulf, via billions in foreign loans. To attract the necessary capital, the state opened its doors to foreign banks – including the US giant Citibank and Egypt’s newly founded Faisal Islamic Bank – while scrapping regulations that required foreign investors to build infrastructure in rural areas. This antidevelopmental gambit yielded little more than a mountain of debt, millions spent on foreign consultants, and a number of towering corporate office blocks in the heart of Khartoum.

Having dug a hole for itself, Sudan acquiesced to the standard IMF structural readjustment package in order to get out. In 1978, for the first time ever, the state devalued the Sudanese pound, which in turn inaugurated the black market for foreign currency. The peasants, herders and farmers that Mahjoub had burdened with achieving the “national democratic revolution” were paid a pittance in an ever-depreciating local currency, while the currency traders, brokers, exporters and bureaucrats – in many instances united in one figure – made a killing. Each devaluation in the succession that followed siphoned wealth out of the countryside and into the pockets of this new parasitic class.

By 1985, Sudan’s national debt had tripled to $9 billion; nearly all of the country’s export earnings went into servicing the interest. Nimeiri was forced into a catastrophic deal with the IMF: to unlock debt rescheduling, he removed all remaining subsidies on food, fuel and textiles. “Our policy is not to subsidise any goods, and we are now proud that we have lifted all subsidies from all goods,” he declared in what proved to be his final address, at the time when famine-like conditions obtained in Darfur and North Kordofan. Popular fury boiled over; the military defected within weeks. A young officer named Omar al-Bashir was among the putschists who brought Nimeiri’s regime down.

If crippling austerity was one of Nimeiri’s lasting bequests to the nation, the other was oil exploration. In 1974 he granted Chevron a concession to dig for crude in southern Sudan, but little was achieved in the short term. It took two decades of brutal war with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and a sharp reorientation away from the Paris Club, and towards China and India, to inaugurate oil exports in 1999. For the next 12 years – until South Sudanese independence abruptly cut off access to the resource – oil accounted for 95% of Sudan’s exports by value and over 60% of state revenue.

GDP growth and inflation alike increased dramatically during the oil bonanza – reaching 10.5% and 15% respectively in 2008. This new wealth was not redirected to investment, but was lit up in a bonfire of conspicuous consumption: restaurants and hotels, high-end medical care and telecommunication. Expatriate returnees from the Arab Gulf, where naturalisation is almost impossible, were increasingly shaping the Sudanese economy.

In those days, it was not uncommon to see a mechanic’s shack along the highway to Port Sudan equipped with an air conditioner. Middle-class weddings and funerals made for so many parking crises. If rentiers and the nouveau riche began migrating to gated communities, then the ultra-wealthy retreated further, to out-of-town private clubs with Peter Harradine-designed golf courses. All along, the somewhat-hazy line between state and private enterprise blurred further: the political, military and security elite nursed growing bellies, diabetes and clogged coronary arteries on the boards of new banks and service-sector businesses.

The class stratification of the oil economy challenged the egalitarian values of rural Sudan – a shock that translated in popular culture into an explosion of jokes about the country bumpkin confronted by urban sensibilities. One such involves a Gezira lad who goes to Khartoum to get an identity card but is unable to fill the form himself. A female sergeant takes over. “What’s your name?” she asks. Awad al-Awad. “Sex?” Three times a day. “I meant male or female. Male, obviously.” No, no, I do them all, whoever I find.

Even more telling were the shifting registers of amorous aspirations. The hearts of ambitious young women with limited means reoriented from bachelor doctors and state engineers to the sugar-daddy of indeterminate but profitable occupation, i.e. a broker. “The man with wife, how sweet is he,” began a song popular at Khartoum weddings and graduation parties. It threateningly went on: “If you’re his first wife, I will be his second.”

Out in the khala – the vast wilderness of Darfur and Kordofan – Sudan’s deepening economic integration into the world market had very different consequences. Starting in the 1990s, if not earlier, in order to meet the rising demand for meat among the expanding Kafala migrant workforce in the Arab Gulf, western Sudan’s livestock production was rapidly commercialised. The sudden rush for profit pitted mercantile livestock herders against settled crop farmers – “Arabs” against “Africans”, in the parlance of the liberal international community. For generations, these groups had shared the landscape through flexible, negotiated tribal customs; they had no concept of modern private property. Now those delicate communal peace treaties collapsed under the weight of market pressure.

Their clash was exacerbated by the fact that Sudan’s agricultural productivity remained frozen. Due to a perpetual lack of investment and modernisation, per-acre yields for sorghum and millet – staple grains – had stagnated for nearly half a century, with output in 2017 virtually unchanged from 1970. In the absence of better technology, agriculturalists had to expand horizontally, swallowing up more territory through slash-and-burn farming, and relying on an underpaid, deeply exploited rural labour force. Trapped between stagnant yields and vanishing borders, the competition between herder and farmer turned existential.

Long before the world took notice, around its genocidal nadir in 2003, a grinding, under-resourced war over land and resources was underway in Darfur. As Adam al-Zain of the University of Khartoum noted, this was not originally a racial conflict: it was, rather, simultaneously a battle between communities over vanishing ecological resources, a bitter feud among Darfuri elites for regional dominance, and a unified rebellion by the periphery against Khartoum’s neglect.

Unlike in southern Sudan, where oil revenues piped from fixed, policeable wells could be shared among rebel factions, Darfur possessed no divisible resources. Its wealth was decentralised, seasonal and mobile: livestock that had to be grazed, gum Arabic that had to be gathered, and crops like tobacco, sesame and groundnuts that had to be farmed. Controlling this economy meant dominating space, trade routes and people. The state could either subjugate rural communities into cheap agricultural labour, or weaponise them as mercenary labour – as it did by establishing the Janjaweed.

When South Sudan became an independent country in 2011, Khartoum lost 75% percent of its vital oil earnings overnight, and was left down by about $300 million a month. With an inflation rate and a currency value speeding in opposite directions, the state could not fall back on the usual austerity measures. Meaningful subsidies remained only in the urban centres, for bread, sugar, fuel and electricity. To withdraw these would have been to court an uprising, as the men in power knew all too well. Many were keen observers, if not veterans, of the 1985 uprising against Nimeiri.

Salvation, of a kind, arrived in a massive, chaotic gold rush. Sudan’s limited industrial mining sector was set up in the north-eastern Red Sea Hills in the early 1990s. By 2011, perhaps anticipating an oil-less future, the state had awarded 200 gold exploration licenses to 73 foreign companies. Yet a vast majority of gold was being hauled out of the earth by hand, or with toxic mercury, by an informal army of five million people – around 13% of the population. In the watershed year of 2012, gold exports amounted to $2.1 billion or 60% of export earnings. Artisanal gold destined for Dubai, alongside commercial livestock herding for Saudi Arabia, replaced oil as the twin engines of the Sudanese economy.

Khartoum had neither the capacity nor the wherewithal to channel artisanal gold into official state exports. Sticking with historical precedent, it outsourced the dirty work to a freebooting militia with fine-grained knowledge of the relevant terrain. The man who would become the lord of Sudanese gold mining cut his teeth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, trading in livestock and other commodities between Darfur, the Central African Republic, Libya and Niger. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – now known as Hemedti – then set up a private security force that drew mainly on fellow Arab Darfuris, with an operational model based on a hierarchy of kin, beginning with the tightly knit crew of close blood relatives in a Thatcher. This gendarmerie-for-hire proved its lethal competence in the counterinsurgency campaign against the Darfur rebels. Dagalo rose up the security pyramid until most of the older generation of mercenaries were under his control.

In August 2013, as a reward for his loyalty, Bashir officially integrated Dagalo’s model troops into the state apparatus under a clumsy new name: the Rapid Support Forces. Dagalo and his brothers soon parlayed their military muscle into a corporate empire. By 2017, their family firm, Al-Jineid, had seized control of the lucrative Jebel Amir mines in Darfur – a ragged peak around 200 kilometres west of Al-Fasher. (Once the sleepy homeland of the agropastoralist Beni Hussein people, the area was transformed in the early 2010s into a mecca for gold prospectors from bordering countries and as far as away as Morocco and Syria.) Unencumbered by taxation or export controls, the RSF expanded vertically, establishing their own gold export arm, Al-Fakher, and launching Alkhaleej Bank in partnership with Emirati capital. In less than a decade, a rural militia had successfully bought its way into the highest echelons of international finance and respectable society.

The RSF also found work in more distant locales. In 2015, Sudan joined the Saudi and Emirati coalition in Yemen, at one point deploying an estimated 14,000 Sudanese combatants. This force included battle-hardened RSF fighters, SAF officers on secondment, and fresh recruits who bribed their way into the conflict for the payout. For a single six-month rotation, they would earn a $10,000 downpayment in addition to a monthly salary that dwarfed anything they could earn at home. Yemen was the crucible in which the RSF matured into a commercialised fighting force – a neoliberal army, as it were. On the battlefield, the militia mastered advanced communications technology, heavy logistics and army-grade tactics, while expanding its recruitment network to absorb veterans from the civil wars in Chad, Libya, Niger and South Sudan.

Back home, the RSF operated a sprawling, cross-border market in stolen cars, narcotics, small arms, debts and humans. This last commodity caught the attention of the European Union, which was desperate to halt African migration. As part of the 2014 “Khartoum Process” anti-trafficking initiative, European borders were advanced to Sudan and entrusted to Dagalo – a partnership that provided the RSF with immense international legitimacy. One wonders whether RSF officers were drilled in the use of surveillance drones by EU officials.

In the last gasps of his reign, Bashir desperately traded away Sudan’s sovereignty for his regime’s survival. To plug the bleeding balance-of-trade deficit, he auctioned off gold concessions covering 16% of the national land mass and dished out millions of hectares of agricultural plots to Saudi and Emirati investors – a fire sale that only hastened its collapse. By 2017, foreign reserves had almost completely evaporated, from nearly $2 billion in 2005 down to a pathetic $180 million. In a frantic bid to control inflation, Khartoum tried to peg the currency, establishing an absurd, fractured system of four simultaneous exchange rates. Well-connected insiders feasted on the artificially cheap prices for wheat and imports, while businesses and investors shifted their money to Dubai. When the state imposed capital controls to stanch the bleeding, it succeeded only in choking off imports entirely, plunging the country into acute shortages of food and fuel.

Sudan had been under a library of sanctions since at least the 1990s; it was even designated a state-sponsor of terrorism by the US. Effectively cut out of the Western financial system, Khartoum had to rely on politically toxic credit guarantees from the Arab Gulf to finance its imports: $1.2 billion from Qatar in 2014, $1 billion from Saudi Arabia in 2015, $1.4 billion from the UAE in 2018, to take a few pertinent examples. (In the 1950s, organised Communists had struck down similarly imperial arrangements with the US, but they were no longer around.) With these debts outstanding, and nowhere else to turn, Bashir went back to the IMF, whose staff effectively took over the finance ministry, as they had in the late 1970s.

The usual scriptures were rehearsed: pursue fiscal austerity, scrap consumer subsidies and deregulate foreign direct investment. Bashir complied, and devalued the currency by around 60% in 2017, and then a second time in 2018, when he asked a committee of bankers and foreign brokers to set the official exchange rate. The consequences were grimly predictable: commodity shortages, soaring prices and bank runs.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the decision in December 2018 to further reduce bread subsidies in Atbara, which was assumed to be a politically reliable city. High-school pupils angered by tripling prices took to the streets, joined by day labourers and artisan miners from the marketplace. Within hours, the headquarters of the ruling party were ablaze, and a mass movement was born. It eventually forced the SAF generals to depose Bashir, though the coup also included a certain RSF leader with an army of his own.

The five-year interregnum between revolution and war was agony for revolutionaries like Taha and Gheima. They watched in dismay as former bankers, development bureaucrats, human rights lawyers and political analysts of a cosmopolitan vintage descended on their country to govern in their name. A phalanx of Ahmed Chalabis and a German UN diplomat who spoke Arabic with a Syrian accent were entrusted with managing – or, as he preferred to say, “facilitating” – a “transition” to democracy.

The technocratic finance minister – a former World Bank economist and employee of the Dubai Economic Council – prescribed another bitter dose of IMF medications, detailing a plan to phase out consumer subsidies and replace them with direct cash transfers, and to divorce Bank of Sudan policies from non-monetary imperatives. He and his equally technocratic prime minister – a former employee of Deloitte and Touche, with stints in too many international organisations to list – handed over the chairmanship of their “Economic Emergency Committee” to Hemedti. The irony was so blatant that it had the structure of a joke.

Sudan’s many creditors hustled and haggled to get what they wanted. Washington strongarmed Khartoum into signing the Abraham Accords as a quid pro quo for rescinding the “state sponsor of terrorism” designation. The UAE snatched a set of infrastructure deals worth $6 billion: a new Red Sea port, an international airport, a free trade and industrial zone modelled after Dubai’s Jebel Ali, and a 162,000-hectare lease of fertile northern land to grow alfalfa. Saudi Arabia wanted more fighting men for Yemen. Russia cajoled its way to a coastal military post. And all along, the EU powers swooned about democracy, human rights and gender equality.

These various plans faced a significant hurdle: Sudan’s many Tahas, who held the government of the day in check with protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, memoranda, roadblocks, media campaigns and mass actions. Even the SAF generals retained some notions of national interest that prevented them from surrendering the Red Sea and Al-Fashaga in return for central-bank deposits. The UAE calculated that it could strike all its targets by sidelining the generals and putting Hemedti on top with a sweeping coup d’etat. Taha and his comrades had another opinion; they are still fighting.