Sudan

The middle Nile was home to the Kingdom of Kush, whose rulers governed from Napata and later Meroë, built the steep pyramids that still stand, and in the eighth century BC conquered Egypt itself as its 25th "Kushite" dynasty. Meroë later developed its own script and an iron industry before declining around the fourth century AD. Christian Nubian kingdoms followed and held out for centuries against the Islamic expansion, before Arab migration and trade brought Islamisation and Arabic to the north from roughly the fourteenth century.

The Ottoman-Egyptian conquest of the 1820s founded Khartoum. In 1881 a religious leader proclaiming himself the Mahdi led a revolt that overran the country, killed General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885, and built a short-lived Islamic state, crushed by an Anglo-Egyptian army at Omdurman in 1898. Sudan was then ruled as an Anglo-Egyptian "condominium" until independence in 1956.

Independent Sudan has been governed by the military for most of its history, through a series of coups. Civil war between the Arab-Muslim north and the African, partly Christian and traditionalist south ran from 1955 and again from 1983, ending in a 2005 peace deal and the 2011 secession of South Sudan, which took most of the oil. Omar al-Bashir, in power from a 1989 Islamist-backed coup, presided over the Darfur conflict from 2003 — mass killing that led to genocide charges — before a popular uprising and the army removed him in 2019. A civilian-military transition was derailed by a 2021 coup, and in April 2023 the army and the Rapid Support Forces, its former partner, turned on each other, plunging the country into a catastrophic war.

Sudan straddles the Arab and African worlds. The riverine north is largely Arabic-speaking and identifies as Arab; the west (Darfur, Kordofan), the east (the Beja), the Nuba Mountains, and the far south are ethnically African, with their own languages and traditions, and this fault line runs through the country's politics and its wars.

Islam, overwhelmingly Sunni, shapes public life, and Sudan is a heartland of Sufi orders — the Friday dhikr with whirling, drumming, and green-and-white robed dervishes at the tomb of Hamad al-Nil in Omdurman was, in calmer times, one of the country's great sights. Hospitality to strangers is proverbial, and Sudanese were widely regarded by travellers as exceptionally welcoming.

Extended family and clan ties are strong, weddings are large and prolonged, and customs around coffee-making, henna, and the tobe (the woman's wrapped garment) mark daily and ceremonial life.

Before the war, around 48 million people lived in Sudan, roughly a third in the Khartoum–Omdurman–Bahri conurbation at the confluence of the Niles. The economy — already battered by the loss of oil, sanctions, hyperinflation, and the removal of fuel and bread subsidies — ran on farming (sorghum, sesame, gum arabic, livestock), gold mining, and remittances.

The war has upended all of it. Millions have fled abroad or been displaced within the country, Khartoum has been fought over street by street and largely emptied, crops and markets have been destroyed, and much of the population depends on aid that fighting and bureaucracy obstruct. Famine has been confirmed in parts of Darfur and elsewhere.

For those still in the country, daily life means shortages of food, water, cash, fuel, and electricity, closed schools and hospitals, and the constant risk of shelling, air strikes, and armed men.

Sudanese cooking centres on sorghum and millet, made into the thin fermented flatbread kisra or the stiff porridge asida, eaten with stews (mullah) of meat, okra, or dried and pounded ingredients. Ful medames — slow-cooked broad beans dressed with oil, cheese, and egg — is the classic breakfast, scooped with bread.

Grilled meat, lamb offal (umm nyolokhia), shaiyya, and the peanut-rich stews of the west are common, and Egyptian and wider Levantine dishes appear in the cities. Aseeda with date syrup, and basbousa and other semolina sweets, are festival food.

Coffee (jebena), roasted, ground with spices, and served from a clay pot, and hibiscus tea (karkade) are the social drinks. Alcohol has been banned since 1983, though the ban was formally eased for non-Muslims in 2020.

Sudan's headline sights, currently unreachable, are the pyramid fields of the Kingdom of Kush: Meroë, with more than two hundred steep royal pyramids rising from the desert; the temples and royal city of Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra nearby; and the older sites around Napata and the holy mountain of Jebel Barkal, all UNESCO-listed.

The Nile itself defines the country — the confluence of the Blue Nile (from the Ethiopian highlands) and the White Nile (from the Great Lakes) at Khartoum, the great S-bends of the river in Nubia, and the cataracts. Nubian villages of brightly painted houses line the northern banks.

On the Red Sea coast, Sanganeb atoll and the Sha'ab Rumi reef — where Jacques Cousteau built an underwater habitat in 1963 — offer world-class, near-untouched diving, and Port Sudan and the ruined Ottoman port of Suakin have their own history. Wildlife survives in Dinder National Park on the Ethiopian border. All of it awaits an end to the war.