Western Sudanese marginalization, coups in Khartoum and the structural legacies of colonial military divide and rule, 1924-present

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the long-term history underpinning the tension between the “national” army and provincial “militias” that led to the outbreak of conflict in Sudan in April 2023. Sudan’s British colonizers created the distinction between what would later become a professional military in the northern region of the country, and what were deemed as “tribal”, irregular and ethnically defined forces elsewhere. The aspiring revolutionaries of the post-independence era hoped they could use the military as a short-cut to social change and modernization that would sweep away the neo-tribal system of “Native Administration” imposed by the British, but by aligning themselves to an unreformed colonial army and economic system, found that they forced violent reactions in marginalized regions. The reactions included Western Sudanese involvement in attempts to change the regime in Khartoum by force in 1971, 1975, 1976, and 2008, which this paper documents. These crises exposed the broader tensions within Sudanese nationalism, based as it was on the ideal of synergy between military and people. The paper draws on a wide range of Arabic and English sources, including newspapers and archival content.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• Coups
• Military
• Militias
• Ethnicity
• Marginalization
• Sudan

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Correction

On 12 April 2019, a posse of securocrats plucked Abd al-Fattah Burhan from the realm of relative political obscurity to serve as the head of the Transitional Military Council that they had established to replace – or, according to its critics, reproduce – the regime of Umar al-Bashir, toppled following a four-month civilian uprising. Burhan’s role was cautiously accepted by the civilian opposition leaders because of his perceived lack of ties to the Islamic Movement, which had dominated the governance of the country after facilitating al-Bashir’s coup in 1989. In practise, the most powerful security actor to back the political transition was Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka “Himeidti”, the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a semi-formal branch of the Sudanese army that was as much a private militia and commercial enterprise as a professional military unit.¹ On account of his control over Darfur’s booming gold economy, Himeidti was now the single most influential armed actor in the country, prompting comparisons to the Khalifa Abdullahi, the last individual from Western Sudan to rule in Khartoum (1885–1899).² Yet, Himeidti chose to serve only as Burhan’s deputy on the Transitional Military Council. Burhan, as a long-term professional soldier, was a more acceptable figure to Khartoum elites, Sudan’s new regional allies and Western governments. When the uneasy alliance between the two broke down in April 2023, the backers of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) relied on its reputation as a ‘professional outfit’ to call for regional and international forces to take sides against the RSF in the ensuing conflict.³

The tendency of Western governments to assume that formal militaries, as ‘cohesive, non-ethnic and Westernized structures’ are the most effective governing institutions in African post-colonies ignores the extent to which ‘intra-military tensions’ are ‘extensions of existing societal divisions’.⁴ The structural divisions within the Sudanese military and broader security order, through which separate roles are allocated to riverains (awlad al-bahr) and Western Sudanese (awlad al-gharb), date back to its formation during the Condominium period. As with the police,⁵ there was a distinction between military forces at the centre who acted as guardians of urban, riverain ‘citizens’, and ‘tribal’ militia forces who governed colonial and post-colonial ‘subjects’ in Western Sudan.⁶ In 1964 and 1985, the military announced it was bowing to the popular will following uprisings led by civil political forces. The principal divisions within the military leadership were the same as those within Khartoum political society – there were Ba’athists, communists, Islamists, and representatives of the existing nationalist parties backed by the Khatmiyya and Ansar religious orders. However in 1976 and particularly 1975, military officers and NCOs from Western Sudan attempted to intervene in Khartoum politics, staging coup attempts in the capital that they hoped would remedy the imbalance of power between Western Sudan and the riverain centre. The violent repression of these movements by Jafa’ar Nimeiri’s military regime, in addition to the characterization of the 1976 fighters as non-Sudanese mercenaries, highlighted the security elite’s interest in preserving the structural hierarchies within the Sudanese military, which still remain significant today. With the failure of those movements and the outbreak of the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005) and Darfur Rebellion (2003-present), the distinction between the ethnically and regionally defined forces of the periphery and the professional and “national” military of Khartoum re-entrenched itself.⁷

To date, much of the study of military conflict in Sudan has been focused on the Sudan Armed Forces’ campaigns in the now seceded South.⁸ Nevertheless, over the last couple of decades a scholars have begun to recognize that Sudan has been witnessing multiple civil wars, and that many regions in the country, North and South, faced social, cultural and economic marginalization.⁹ Yet the Western rebels often had a more intimate relationship with Khartoum, which defined their resistance against the various post-independence regimes. Southern rebel groups rarely advanced beyond their region; dissidents in Western Sudan have often sought to seize power in Khartoum, with a view to installing new regimes and changing the structure of governance in the country. Like the Southern rebels, however, much of their alienation stemmed from their marginalization within a military order that reflected broader societal hierarchies.

This article, drawing on a wide range of Arabic and English sources including newspapers, memoirs and archives, will show how the logic of colonial military divide and rule introduced a major division between West and centre to Sudan's security order. In the post-independence era, the core military units at the centre became the vanguard of the “modern forces” and thus national modernity, whereas the regions that were on the peripheries of the military structure were not integrated into the nation in the same way. The article will particularly focus on three attempted coups in 1971, 1975 and 1976. In 1976, the attempt was linked to broader nationalist opposition politics; in 1975, the movement had a more explicit Western regionalist character; in 1971, the motives remain ambiguous, as will be discussed below. Nevertheless, in each case the prominent participation in those events of Westerners within and without the military represented a challenge the governing logic of the security order. The history of military coups in Sudan has too often been told as the story of power struggles between ideological factions at the centre, overlooking the role of Westerners and Western regionalists in the coup attempts of the 1970s.¹⁰ The article’s revision of the history of the 1971 coup in particular will attempt to address this oversight. The piece will then show how after the failure of the 1976 movement, the rise of militias reproduced the logic of colonial divide and rule, before Himeidti in his own destructive fashion upended the dynamic once more.

Colonial military divide and rule: dismantling the Mahdiyya, then the Egyptian army

The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956) structured both its military and administrative order in line with classic colonial divide and rule tactics, seeking to prevent the emergence of a territory-wide nationalist movement built around political, social and religious commonalities. First the British sought to dismantle the Mahdist regime which had ruled Sudan between 1885 and 1898, then turned on their nominal Egyptian co-rulers, making the decision in 1924 to dismantle the Egyptian army which they had used to reconquer Sudan in 1899. Ethnicity and martial race ideology became the governing logic of the new military system. It was also built around regional divides, so that the core remained largely dominated by officers from the riverain centre with close ties to Egypt, whereas in the South, as well as key areas of Mahdist strength in the West, a more “tribal” military system operated – with consequences for the post-independence nation.

The dismantling of the Mahdiyya remains a particularly salient historical reference point during the current crisis in Sudan. Since Himeidti became a major power-broker in Khartoum in the wake of the fall of al-Bashir in 2019 and particularly after his forces wrought devastation on Khartoum during his attempted seizure of that city after April 2023, he has often been analogized to Abdullahi ibn Taisha, the Khalifa (successor) to the Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, the founder of the 1885–1898 Mahdist state that had temporarily defeated both Egyptian and British colonialism in Sudan.¹¹ The Khalifa was born in Western Sudan, to a family with heritage in the region around Wadai and Bornu in contemporary Chad. His rule is frequently remembered as the one time a Western Sudanese ruled in Khartoum in the last 120 years. In practice, up until the 1950s he had been the only Sudanese to rule in Khartoum, since Muhammad Ahmad died shortly after seizing the city from the Turco-Egyptian regime (Turkiyya) in 1885, and after his defeat at Omdurman in 1898 the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium governed Sudan until independence in 1956.

The Mahdist State is regarded by many Sudanese as providing the basis for the contemporary Sudanese nation. It is significant for the fact that it constituted an alliance between the riverain mercantile elites of Northern Sudan, from where the Mahdi himself also hailed, and the various communities of Western Sudan particularly including the nomadic cattle herding Baggara communities among whom the Khalifa had grown up.¹² During the Mahdist period these would be referred to as the “awlad al-bahr” and ‘awlad al-gharb’. However, in spite of the fact that this alliance was crucial to the defeat of the Turkiyya in 1885, the Khalifa’s reign was marked by severe political tension between the two communities. Even before his role in the Mahdiyya, the Khalifa had experienced the hostility from some of the awlad al-bahr, many of whom looked down on his use of the Arabic dialect spoken in Western Sudan.¹³ After taking power he marched his Baggara supporters from Western Sudan to Khartoum to firm up his authority at the centre. The relatives of the Mahdi (Ashraf) backed a plot to replace him in 1886, and then revolted unsuccessfully in 1891.¹⁴ It is on account of these events that many in riverain Sudan remember the Khalifa’s rule with extra disfavour.¹⁵

After the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of 1899, the Khalifa was slain and the Mahdists were pushed to the fringes of Sudan. The dominant security institution was the Egyptian Army, which was officered by British and Egyptians but recruited from many of the same communities in Sudan that supported the original Turco-Egyptian conquest in 1820. In the early years of the Condominium, the Egyptian Army was central to the colonial government’s efforts to crush any resurgence of Mahdism. However, as the nationalist movement in Egypt began to challenge Britain’s presence in that country, as well as in Sudan, the British dominated Sudan Political Service became increasingly distrustful of the very army that had enabled the reconquest. In 1924, the 11th Sudanese Battalion of the Egyptian Army, whose officers had ties to the pro-Egyptian White Flag League, mutinied.¹⁶ British officials reacted by disbanding the Egyptian Army, forcing the Egyptian units to return to Cairo and reorganizing the Sudanese units as the Sudan Defence Force.

The Sudan Defence Force was organized along regional lines, with the Sudanese battalions of the Egyptian army being disbanded and the forces distributed in five ‘military areas’: Northern, Western, Eastern, Southern and Central.¹⁷ The aim here was dismantle the component parts of the Egyptian Army and stop the new army acting as a vehicle for the spread of Egyptian, and Islamic, influence throughout Sudan.¹⁸ The key concern was to prevent the emergence of officers like the leader of the 1924 nationalist White Flag movement such as Ali Abd al-Latif, of joint Nuba and Southern heritage – who the state regarded as ‘detribalized negro Sudanese’ – and to use the military to reinforce the logic of tribal identity.¹⁹ Whereas “black” or “Sudani” troops would be recruited in the Nuba Mountains and South, elsewhere troops would be recruited from Arabic speaking populations.²⁰

The threat posed by resurgent Egyptian nationalism encouraged the British to play pro-Egyptians and neo-Mahdists off against each other. This allowed a partial rehabilitation of the Ansar under the Mahdi’s grandson Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi.²¹ However, the post-1924 indirect rule policies sought just as much to prevent the nationwide re-emergence of the Mahdiyya ‘by attacking the very basis of its transethnic mobilization’.²² The Nuba Mountains, where Muhammad Ahmad had first announced himself as the Mahdi at Jabal Qadir in 1881,²³ had already been deemed a closed district and was now to be ruled in accordance with the principles of local culture in the name of ‘Nuba Policy’.²⁴ This policy also had an impact on the army, as a Nuba Mounted Company based at Shendi in the North was replaced and the government forbade the posting of Nuba soldiers outside of their areas.²⁵

The British at one point made it a policy to avoid recruiting for the Sudan Defence Force from Mahdist groups,²⁶ but apparently at times did so in spite of themselves. For instance, Orlebar notes that the men of the Camel Corps at Bara ‘came mainly from the Gawama tribes in central Kordofan’ who had ‘formed the flower of the Khalifa’s army’.²⁷ Notably, however, the Corps, like those in other regions, was organized through ‘independent, irregular companies’, not living in barracks and hence not developing a corporate military identity.²⁸

In the Northern military area, which included Khartoum and thus major training institutions such as the military school, the majority of the recruits were Arab-identifying Shaiqiyya.²⁹ Newbold wrote ‘The Shaigia, who make good soldiers and are adventurous, may well have Turkish blood from Bosnian and Albanian mercenaries of Sultan Selim I (1517). Later they fought well against the Turkish invaders (1821) and later still for the Turks against the Dervishes, and now in the Sudan Defence Force’.³⁰ The narrative about the Turkish descent of the Shaiqiyya, which has now been dismissed as historically accurate,³¹ appears rooted in the colonial fantasy that African communities with origins supposedly outside the continent were best suited to rule their peers.³²

Much has been written about the role of colonial “martial race” ideology in ethnicizing military identities;³³ in Sudan, “Arab” Northern riverain Sudanese, nomadic “Arab” Westerners and non-Arab Westerners were constructed by the colonizers as “martial”, but in different contexts, so that the power differential within the military maintained itself. Both “Arabs” and “Blacks” were defined as separate – however, “Arabs” were understood to be part of a broader “race”, whereas the “black” Sudanese were seen as a belonging to “tribal” communities.³⁴ This created a hierarchy, whereby “Arabs” were seen as the guardians of a core, Arab-Islamic Sudan, and “blacks” associated with the “tribal” peripheries of the territory. Yet in the colonial view there were also hierarchies of Arabness. Let us observe, for instance, comments in the 1940s by a British military officer on recruiting for the Mounted Infantry Company among the Arab-identifying Baggara of Southern Darfur: ‘the pure Arabs have become a good deal adulterated with slave blood from South of the Bahr el-Arab … I think that Browne altogether over-estimated the Baggara as a soldier’.³⁵ The same author went on to observe that ‘The best of the N.C.O.’s will nearly always be Taaisha [an Arab identifying group] and the hard-slogging Nafar one of the Magdumate tribes’, which were themselves described as ‘for the most part black’.

The regionalization and tribalization of the Sudanese military also worked to mitigate against social and ethnic mobility within the army. Following the closure of the Khartoum Military School in 1925, the Sudan Defence Force ceased to promote from the ranks.³⁶ In the following decades, the colonial state then racialized the distinction between the officer corps and the rank and file. In the Nuba mountains, Northern officers were recruited to staff the local territorial companies.³⁷ When the military school re-opened in 1948, candidates were required to have graduated from one of the country’s secondary schools,³⁸ which at that time were located in or near the core cities of the urban North.

If there was one set of events in the late colonial era that anticipated the post-independence security ruptures between armed Western Sudanese civilians and the Northern-dominated “regular forces”, it would be the Neguib Riots of 1 March 1954, referred to by Sudanese as the “March events” (ahadith Maris). The context was the arrival in Khartoum of the Egyptian President Muhammad Neguib, who had been invited by the pro-Egyptian National Unionist Party (NUP) to attend the opening session of the Sudanese parliament.³⁹ At this time the NUP was still actively contemplating union with Egypt following the imminent departure of the British, and the pro-independence Umma Party, backed by Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, summoned its Ansar followers from the rural areas – particularly including Western Sudan – to protest against Neguib’s presence. They clashed with a semi-militarized police force that had a similar structure to the army, insofar as it had its most official presence in major urban centres and the force there was in practise led mostly by Northern Shaiqi officers many of whom had ties to the NUP.⁴⁰ The police were temporarily overwhelmed, and both the British Commandant and a Sudanese superintendent were killed before the Ansar were driven back.⁴¹ The events generated considerable hostility against Western Sudanese both within the government and the media. The subsequent criminal trial charged the Umma Party leader Abd al-Rahman Nugdalla with whipping up a mob of ‘fanatical, unsophisticated and excited Westerners … ’.⁴² Meanwhile, al-Ra’i al-‘Aam compared the shouts of the Ansar to those of ‘Red Indians’.⁴³ The party’s newspaper al-Umma (8 March 1954) accused the government of using the powers granted to it by the subsequently declared state of emergency to target Westerners on an ethnic basis, including by abducting them from public transport. This pattern of violent clashes between the Umma Party’s armed supporters and the national security forces, followed by targeted discrimination against Westerners, would repeat itself in the post-independence era.

The military between the “modern forces” and the marginalized West in the coup era

Between independence in 1956 and 1984, Sudan experienced two successful military coups, seven failed attempts and nine further ‘reported’ coup plots, which made it the third most vulnerable to military intervention among sub-Saharan African states.⁴⁴ The history of coups and attempted coups in Sudan has often been narrated as the product of rivalry between competing ideological factions at the urban centre; yet in Sudan’s most coup-stricken period between 1971 and 1976, Western Sudanese officers alienated by the marginalization of their region played a central role. The link between stalled industrialization and military coups in Africa in this period is well established;⁴⁵ in Sudan, the military crises of the era were a result of the failure of the “modern forces” that emerged from the 1964 October Revolution to extend their vision of social, economic and political transformation beyond the riverain centre.

When the military first seized power in 1958, the coup was led by the generation of officers who had served in the Sudan Defence Force, rather than any radical new generation.⁴⁶ Many of the coup leaders were Shaiqiyya.⁴⁷ In 1964, the military regime was overthrown by a popular revolution, which saw the installation of a transitional government dominated by left-leaning urban radicals, including members of the Sudan Communist Party (SCP) and champions of Nasserist Arab socialism. The government made plans to abolish the colonial era Native Administration, and thus bring an end to the neo-traditional system of rural authority through which the Umma Party governed the cotton farmers working on the al-Mahdi family’s estates. It saw itself as a representative of the “modern forces”, that would sweep the neo-tribal system away. The problem was that economic modernity was identified with the export orientated agricultural schemes of the riverain centre – the pastoral economy of the rural areas, almost entirely overlooked in economic planning in this era,⁴⁸ was not seen as revolutionary in the same way.⁴⁹

The Umma Party was able to effectively topple the transitional government in early 1965 by marching its followers from outside of Khartoum in a show of force. The communists saw the Ansar mobilized by the Umma as a captive peasantry, appealing to them to support the removal of the Native Administration and accept new trade union laws that would guarantee their rights.⁵⁰ They did not prevail. The Ansar mobilization effectively forced an end to the first transitional government and brought about a parliamentary regime led by the Umma Party, which soon attempted to ban the SCP on the grounds of its purported atheism. Clashes between the Umma Party’s supporters and trade unionists intensified in Khartoum in late 1965, with the army and police refusing to intervene. It was at this point that the SCP leader Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub coined the term ‘unf al-badiya’ (‘violence of the wilderness’) to describe the force Umma party supporters used.⁵¹

The conservative turn of the parliamentary regime encouraged many of the radicals in the military to install what they saw as a more progressive system by force. In 1969, the Free Officer Coup led by Jafa’ar Nimeiri swept aside the parliamentary system and established a Revolutionary Command Council with strong ties to the political left and Arab Socialists. Umma party members and Muslim Brothers outside Sudan formed the National Front (al-Jabha al-Wataniyya) to topple what they saw as a communist regime.⁵² The regime was never fully communist; the SCP was divided over whether to back the coup, with select members joining the new regime while the party leadership under Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub refused to sanction it.⁵³ Mahjub warned the ‘revolutionary democrats’ attached to the Egyptian model that it was a mistake to think that the military existed as a neutral force outside of Sudan’s established socio-economic hierarchies, and suggested a more gradualist approach that would involve aligning with Sadiq al-Mahdi as one of the more progressive representatives of the neo-traditional sector.⁵⁴ As it was, al-Mahdi remained outside the new regime. However, under Muhammad Uthman al-Mirghani, the mainstream of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and affiliated Khatmiyya sufi order, with their ties to the army and Arab Socialist movement, took a conciliatory approach to the regime, especially as it grew closer to Egypt.⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the army was rebranded the “People’s Armed Forces”, and the government announced that it would be expanding recruitment among the farmers, workers and ‘toiling classes’- the representatives of the “modern forces” championed in the October period.⁵⁶

From this point, the many Western Sudanese excluded from the “modern forces” resisted the new regime in a number of contexts. Sometimes they did so as armed members of the Umma Party and thus a broader national movement seeking a return to parliamentary democracy and gradual reform, rather than outright abolition of the Native Administration. Elsewhere, they did so as representatives of factions within the armed forces aligned to various Western Sudanese regionalist movements, which often had close ties to the Umma Party and other factions within the anti-Nimeiri coalition, but operated independently of them as well.

Following the 1969 coup the Imam al-Hadi al-Mahdi called upon the Ansar to perform a hijra to the historic Mahdist centre at Aba on the White Nile, just as they had during the years of his nineteenth century ancestor.⁵⁷ Aba Island and its surrounds had historically hosted a number of cotton schemes owned by the al-Mahdi family, which were worked principally by Ansari pilgrims from Western Sudan.⁵⁸ However, in the 1968–1969 agricultural season the major agricultural scheme on Aba Island had ceased operating, leaving many of the residents there facing destitution.⁵⁹ They were easily recruited to the National Front’s scheme to topple Nimeiri. Local Shaykhs, led by a Western Sudanese Ansari who had joined the SCP’s Maoist splinter faction, marched to Khartoum to request a new sugar scheme, but were rejected due to the new regime’s absolute refusal to engage with representatives of the Native Administration.⁶⁰ Meanwhile, the Front equipped the destitute farmers with weapons supplied from across the border in Ethiopia and trained them in their use, developing an army at Aba Island they planned to march on Khartoum with.⁶¹ These events marked the onset of a pattern whereby the government’s determination to exclude those outside its definition of the “modern forces” compelled inhabitants of rural Sudan to arm themselves against the May Regime and its army.

In response to al-Hadi’s rebellion, the Sudanese air force bombed Aba, inflicting devastating casualties on the Ansar.⁶² Al-Hadi was killed trying to escape. Taha, in his narrative of the devastation caused by the army’s combined aerial and ground assault, compares the sight of Ansari fighters lying dead on the banks of Aba to the aftermath of the infamous 1898 battle of Karari during the Anglo-Egyptian Reconquest of Sudan.⁶³ Nimeiri’s army had emulated its predecessor in demonstrating the devastating impact of military techno-modernity on those who lay outside the “modern forces”.

Siddiq al-Badi, in his book on the Aba Island events, attempted to list the names of every fighter slain in the assault. Darfuri groups were most heavily represented, particularly including the Zaghawa, Tama, Fellata, and Rizeigat, as well as those from Kordofan and White Nile.⁶⁴ That al-Badi grouped the names by ethnic affiliation is a testament to the fighters’ rejection of the regime’s policy of dissolving tribal loyalties in the name of Sudanese nationalism. Over the course of 1970 and 1971, the government would pass a series of acts abolishing the Native Administration. What this meant in practise for the populations of the marginalized regions was a system of local councils dominated by bureaucrats from the riverain centre, and the abolition of customary restraints that had previously prevented state officials and merchants from the centre seizing their land.⁶⁵ In the context of the national vision being hijacked by a narrow elite, sub-national affiliations, whether regional or ethnic, held an obvious appeal.

It is in this context that we need to revisit the history of Sudan’s most famous failed coup, the three-day Hashim al-Atta movement of 1971. The coup occurred as leftist members of Nimeiri’s Revolutionary Command Council, led by al-Atta, attempted to oust Nimeiri in retribution for his efforts to marginalize the SCP. The putschists seized control and imprisoned Nimeiri, before a group of NCOs under Corporal Hamad Iheimir launched a counter-strike that set Nimeiri free and restored him.⁶⁶ The two most prominent members of this group, Iheimir and Abd al-Rahman Shambe, were both figures who would later be remembered for their ties to the Nuba struggle. ⁶⁷ It was, as Mansour Khalid recalls, ‘a counter-revolt from the bottom’.⁶⁸

For a while the conventional narrative was that Iheimir and the other NCOs had ‘stormed the palace and released Nimeiri’.⁶⁹ That they launched a coup against him four years later in the 1975 movement discussed below was seen as a result of their subsequent anger at Nimeiri’s marginalization of the Western Provinces.⁷⁰ Nimeiri promoted Iheimir to lieutenant after his involvement in the 1971 counter-coup, and was reportedly devastated by his apparent betrayal four years later.⁷¹ Shambe would also go on to be promoted to lieutenant.⁷² They were among many NCOs in the armoured and paratrooper corps brought into the officer class by the Ministry of Defence to reward their role in 1971, against the opposition of many within the army establishment who complained the move violated established procedures.⁷³ Although they had not managed to seize power, their mobilization during this period had ensured that they were able to traverse the racial divide between the officer corps and the rank and file and NCOs, to the discomfort of the riverain elites. Bedri recalls that in the aftermath of the 1971 coup one officer found a member of the “Shawishiyya” (the NCO ranks) driving around in a car belonging to an officer executed for his participation, whilst men like Shambe and Iheimir began demanding their own emblems, and refusing to salute their seniors.⁷⁴

In recent years, this narrative about the Iheimir group’s participation in 1971 has been challenged by the SCP – although largely for its own purposes. After regaining power, Nimeiri’s regime had blamed the communist-affiliated troops for a massacre of fellow soldiers at the Republican Palace guest house, which occurred as Nimeiri battled to regain control.⁷⁵ The SCP subsequently maintained that the massacre was perpetrated not by troops loyal to Hashim al-Atta, but rather by Iheimir and Shambe’s group.⁷⁶ SCP accounts, such as Hasan Jizouli’s Unf al-Badiya, base this claim on the account of a Nimeiri era journalist who covered the trial of the 1975 coup plotters in Atbara, and, though sworn to secrecy to protect the regime’s anti-SCP narrative at the time, now maintained Shambe had confessed his group’s responsibility for the massacre, and that the purpose of the NCOs’ movement was to eliminate both the Nimeiri and al-Atta groups and seize power themselves.⁷⁷

Al-Jizouli also bases his claim that the NCOs had sought to seize power for themselves in 1971 upon an account he maintains was relayed to the communist writer Kamal al-Jizouli by a member of the group, al-Faki Kanu al-Faki, during their mutual internment under al-Bashir’s regime in 1992. In this account, the officers who participated in Iheimir’s action were part of a collective of Nuba NCOs across different army units who had initially supported the Nimeiri coup out of hostility to the parliamentary regime, but later started planning to remove the May Regime, having been alienated by its own corruption.⁷⁸ This narrative chimes roughly with accounts of the “black power” movements from the time with strong ties to the Nuba Mountains – Philip Abbas notes that the United Sudanese African Liberation Front had been planning to remove the parliamentary regime via its military wing and establish a ‘black dominated administration’ operating a decentralized system, before being pre-empted by the May 1969 movement and failing in two attempts to launch a coup against Nimeiri in that year.⁷⁹

In the SCP narrative, when al-Atta’s coup occurred, Iheimir’s group mobilized tanks from the armoured corps in Omdurman not to save Nimeiri, but to take the opportunity provided by location of the two rivals in the Republican Palace to oust them both. According to officers in al-Atta’s group, the insurgent NCOs deliberately turned their tank fire on the guest house, with the intention of destroying the May Regime’s military elite.⁸⁰ However they subsequently aborted their takeover plan when Nimeiri escaped from his detention.⁸¹ In the purported al-Faki account, they decided to defer their action to the next opportunity, which came about in 1975 (see below).⁸² However partial the SCP narrative on the NCO’s actions seems, it does seem likely that they had ambitions that went beyond simply restoring Nimeiri. What is perhaps most significant about the SCP accounts, however, is that they remember Iheimir’s NCOs as ‘rightist military elements’,⁸³ in line with the contemporary philosophy of the Khartoum political left that viewed regionally based movements as fundamentally reactionary – failing to recognize how so many in the regions had been alienated by the centralizing tendencies of the “modern forces”.

Events subsequent to the 1971 coup furthered the alienation of Western officers and NCOs. After Nimeiri signed a peace deal with the rebel Anyanya in 1972, Southern Sudan became an independent region, but the West remained marginalized. The 1975 coup attempt resulted from a coming together of interests between the Western Sudanese regionalists within and without the army and the banned parties. The factions of the “modern forces” that had backed Nimeiri’s coup had their strongest constituency at the riverain centre, whereas the various “reactionary” forces ousted by Nimeiri’s coup, particularly the Umma Party, had fared well in the Western Sudan. In the 1973 Sha’aban uprising, student protesters were led by Abbas Barsham, a Nuba Umma party activist who had been denied a government job by Nimeiri’s Sudan Socialist Union.⁸⁴ Whilst the objectives of the Khartoum-based parties such as the Umma and the various regionalist organizations of the West were far from fully complementary, personnel did overlap. In 1975, Barsham acted as the lynchpin between the dissident Westerners in the military, the al-Jabha al-Wataniyya (National Front) and the al-Jabha al-Qawmiyya (also “National Front”), a coalition of various regionalist groups.⁸⁵ In spite of Barsham’s membership of the Umma Party, however, he operated with a degree of independence, and senior members of the Umma would attempt to disavow the coup attempt following the subsequent trial.⁸⁶

Barsham and the Jabha al-Qawmiyya approached Hassan Hussein, a young army colonel, to lead the coup. The 1971 NCOs, including Shambe and Iheimir, were a key part of his movement. The coup attempt itself took place on 5 September 1975, and was put down by the regime within 24 hours, although not before giving it a considerable scare, capturing the radio station before Nimeiri’s vice-president, Abu’l-Gasim Muhammad Ibrahim, led a movement to recapture it.⁸⁷

Like Iheimir’s movement in 1971, the left-wing media in Sudan tends to remember the 1975 coup attempt as a conservative one. A piece in Hurriyat in 2012 referred to it as the ‘Islamic coup’, noting that its draft post-coup plan of action involved banning alcohol and appointing Hasan al-Turabi to the government.⁸⁸ Meanwhile, the leading Islamist daily al-Intibaha ran a series of articles the same year commemorating the roles of Islamists in the coup – whilst acknowledging that the Islamic Movement was not the principal driver. Rather, in the words of Abd al-Rahman Idris, a judge and senior Islamist in the National Front, the overall perspective of the movement was that ‘the West is marginalized’, but ‘we entered to influence its direction’. ⁸⁹ Indeed, the 1975 movement was more self-consciously “Western” than most the others discussed here. What is notable was that the Jabha al-Qawmiyya was a genuinely pan-Western movement – it incorporated the Union of the Misseriyya, Hawamza and Rizeigat People, the Darfur Renaissance Front, and Nuba Mountains Union.⁹⁰ Various nominees for the post-coup prime minister included senior Western politicians such as the judge Abd al Majid Imam and Ali al-Haj of the Darfur Renaissance Front and Islamic Movement, before the plotters settled on Idris.⁹¹ The Christian Nuba leader Philip Abbas Ghabosh was also nominated for a ministerial position.⁹² The connections between Islamists and Western regionalists show why the 1975 events have not been easily integrated into the history of regional rebellions in Western Sudan, given the recent focus on leftists fighting the 1989–2019 Islamist regime – in this era the Sudan Communist Party had only a limited influence in the West, and rebellions influenced by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army’s ‘New Sudan’ vision would not arrive in the Nuba Mountains until 1986 and Darfur until 1991.⁹³

Zain al-Abdin Muhammad Abd al-Qadir, one of Nimeiri’s most senior lieutenants, maintained that whilst Iheimir had served a ‘national purpose’ in 1971, he had served a ‘tribal goal’ in 1975.⁹⁴ The distinction between the “tribal” movement of Western officers and “national” movement of Northern officers evokes an implicit distinction between one region as “tribal” and the other as “national”. Abd al-Qadir also described the 1975 movement as ‘pure racism’,⁹⁵ but the Nuba members of the coup movement were subjected to severe racism in retaliation for their participation. Abu’l-Gasim Muhammad Ibrahim reportedly tortured Abbas Barsham, whilst mocking him for his belief that a Nuba could rule Sudan.⁹⁶ Meanwhile, the May Regime’s media repeatedly circulated the narrative that the attempted coup was ‘racist’.⁹⁷ Al-Badi argues that the resentment this caused was a major factor motivating Western Sudanese to participate in the next military movement that sought to topple Nimeiri on 2 July 1976.⁹⁸

The July 1976 coup attempt was notable for being the first conducted by armed Sudanese civilians, outside the framework of the armed forces. It was also notable for the fact that these civilians were trained and armed outside of Sudan: having initially fled to Ethiopia, the remainder of al-Hadi’s forces crossed secretly to Libya after the downfall of Haile Selassie in 1974, picking up Ansaris from Kordofan and Darfur on the way.⁹⁹ It was organized by the National Front (al-Jabha al-Wataniyya) of Sadiq al-Mahdi and Hussein al-Hindi, rather than the National Front of 1975 – the translation of both al-Qawmiyya and al-Wataniyya into English as “national” should not lead to confusion between the two movements. The coup leader was a soldier, Muhammad Nur Sa’ad, who heralded from the Musabba’at, a prominent Western Sudanese lineage.¹⁰⁰ There were, according to different accounts, between 1,000 and 2,000 fighters, who either infiltrated themselves into Sudan in preparation or cut rapidly across the desert from Libya’s Kufra Oasis in advance of the zero hour.¹⁰¹ Most of the fighters were Ansar, but there was also a small contingent from the Islamic Movement.¹⁰²

The move across the desert caught Nimeiri’s security forces off guard, and the rebels quickly captured the radio station, advancing on the airport and military headquarters building.¹⁰³ The coup’s eventual failure was due to a mixture of bad luck, limited resources and poor planning. The vehicles used to traverse the desert were also poorly maintained and the fighters arrived starving and exhausted from the journey.¹⁰⁴ Most of them had limited knowledge of the capital.¹⁰⁵ The army uniforms with which the National Front had planned to equip them had failed to arrive on time, and as such the fighters wore civilian clothing, making them easier for the security forces to identify and arrest.¹⁰⁶ Finally, the unit that captured the radio station lacked the technical capacity to get the radio working.¹⁰⁷

These last two failings in particular would enable the regime to launch a propaganda counter-strike. It broadcast the narrative that the coup attempted had been conducted by ‘foreign mercenaries’.¹⁰⁸ This, combined with the fact that the fighters were wearing civilian clothing, served to rapidly delegitimize the coup in the minds of both the public and the regular army. Demonstrators came onto the street chanting ‘one army, one people’,¹⁰⁹ rehashing the slogans from the early May Regime about the unification of army and people.¹¹⁰ Meanwhile, Khalid notes that ‘[t]he conspirators failed because they challenged and antagonized the Army … .[n]o Army would have accepted humiliation by a gang of armed civilians.’¹¹¹ This in itself contributed to some of the extreme violence meted out to the participants in the aftermath of the coup, reportedly including the fighters being tortured and even buried alive.¹¹²

The “foreign mercenaries” narrative had underlying racial undertones, exploiting the fact that many of the fighters heralded from areas of Darfur where there was considerable social and ethnic intermixture with neighbouring states.¹¹³ The regime even repurposed stock footage of 1967 Biafra Conflict in Nigeria in its efforts to demonstrate that the participants in the attempted coup were not genuinely Sudanese.¹¹⁴ Subsequent accounts by Nimeiri’s henchmen have kept the “mercenaries” narrative going. Abd al-Qadir maintained that the fighters heralded from Gabon, Chad and Nigeria and that their accents gave away that they were not Sudanese.¹¹⁵ Nimeiri era security agents Hashim Abu Rannat and Muhammad Abd al-Aziz acknowledge that the majority of them were Kordofanians and Darfuris from the Shabab al-Ansar (Ansar Youth), but argue that the presence of ‘mercenaries’ was evidenced, among other things, by the fact that a number of the captured fighters spoke Arabic imperfectly.¹¹⁶ This shows how deeply the “foreign mercenaries” narrative was grounded in an exclusivist nationalism tied to the Arabic language. In the wake of the 1976 movement, the government tightened the enforcement of its system of national identity cards throughout Khartoum, using this system to enforce “kashas” or “sweeps” of districts heavily populated by Darfuris, and force those not deemed “Sudanese” out of the capital.¹¹⁷ The regime’s security order was violently demarcating the limits of Sudanese nationalism.

The rise of militia politics

After the 1976 movement, there would be no further attempt to take Khartoum via Western Sudan for a generation – subsequent regimes made bargains with regionalist leaders, and played divide and rule by mobilizing Western Sudanese communities into militias. These militias kept many Western Sudanese outside the army, and thus implicitly the nation. For a long period the power dynamic between these militias and the elites in Khartoum was an uneven one, reflecting the broader divisions between centre and margins within Sudanese political society. However, the rise of Himeidti between 2019 and 2023 would transform the relationship spectacularly.

In 1977, Nimeiri and the National Front engaged in a process of National Reconciliation, which saw the Umma Party and the Muslim Brothers incorporated into the ruling Sudan Socialist Union. However, the remaining fighters in the Libyan training camps were immediately demobilized, rather than being incorporated into the military as had happened with the Southern rebels in 1972.¹¹⁸ Sadiq al-Mahdi would soon leave Nimeiri’s government, and mobilized his followers to take to the streets against it as it fell to the civilian uprising of April 1985.¹¹⁹ Some of the National Front fighters, having been relocated to substandard agricultural schemes post-1977, were remobilized under al-Sadiq’s parliamentary regime (1986–1989) to join the murahiliin militias that would fight in the war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Southern Kordofan.¹²⁰ Meanwhile, the process of militia-ization in Southern Kordofan continued to be driven by government land policies that were beginning to make historic Baggara pastoral economies increasingly untenable.¹²¹

The process began in the 1985 transitional period and was orchestrated by the man who would subsequently become Sadiq al-Mahdi’s right hand man and eventual political successor, the Misseriyya general and Transitional Military Council (1985–1986) member Fadlallah Burma Nasir.¹²² Although the principal purpose of the mobilization was to fight the war in Kordofan against the SPLA, the Umma Party was also hoping to establish the murahiliin as a counterweight to the regular military, which it saw as still being dominated by pro-Egyptian, Khatmiyya affiliated officers from the Northern region.¹²³

Before Sadiq al-Mahdi fell in 1989, he was planning to formally organize and legally empower his militias as “Popular Defence Forces (PDF)”, in response to pressure from the armed forces to shut them down.¹²⁴ However in 1989, the National Islamic Front took power via a military coup, and seized the Umma Party’s militia networks in Western Sudan for itself. The PDF expanded considerably, incorporating numerous fighters from throughout Western Sudan and elsewhere. Although the 1989 coup was certainly not done in the name of Western Sudanese regionalism, some Western Sudanese regionalists came into power on its back.¹²⁵ However, when Western Sudanese pushed within the National Assembly for greater regional devolution, the more conservative and ethnocentric Islamists opposed this move, leading to a major split as al-Turabi was forced out the government. Many of the Western Sudanese Islamists went into the new party he formed, the Popular Congress Party, which itself had ties to the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) formed by the Zaghawa PDF leader Khalil Ibrahim around the turn of the century.¹²⁶ The core philosophy of the JEM sought to challenge the domination of the government and economic sector in Sudan by a narrow riverain elite.¹²⁷ Come 2003, JEM was one of the principal rebel protagonists in the Darfur conflict.

As militia fighters and rebels, JEM members had remained outside of the core national security institutions – but like those who fought in 1976, they would attempt to establish a more prominent role for themselves by force. In 2008, JEM attacked Khartoum, reproducing the raid across the desert that the National Front attempted. 1,000 fighters riding around 130 vehicles arrived in Omdurman on 10 May 2008.¹²⁸ They attempted to move towards the radio station and cross the river to attack the Republican Palace, but were repulsed by the security services.¹²⁹ What followed was an attempt by the government and its affiliated media to characterize the JEM insurgents as ‘Chadian mercenaries’, repeating the language used in 1976.¹³⁰

While it is true that Chad had been increasing its support to JEM in early 2008 and it appeared to have used Chadian-supplied weapons and vehicles in the assault on Omdurman, it is not known whether Chad officially backed the raid or JEM acted on its own.¹³¹ The problem with the narrative about ‘Chadian mercenaries’ was that, as Tubiana puts it, for the Zaghawa communities from which JEM drew its fighters, ‘the border is just a line on the map’.¹³² Depicting the forces as collectively “Chadian”, however, enabled the Sudanese government to locate them outside the Sudanese body politic and justify the ethnically motivated violence that followed. The government claimed that JEM fighters had infiltrated Khartoum in civilian clothes so as to justify racially based arrests of Darfuri and particularly Zaghawa citizens.¹³³ As was the case in 1954, Darfuris were seized from public transport apparently purely on the basis of their physical appearance.¹³⁴

Although they discomforted the ruling elites, the various coups of the 1970s, like the 2008 movement, were crushed in relatively quick time. They thus stand in stark contradistinction to today’s events, whereby Himeidti’s forces in Khartoum have proved extremely hard for the existing “regular forces” to shift. Yet to understand the current dynamic in Khartoum, to which the transitional project to create a national military has been so central, it is important to locate today’s events within the lengthy history of Sudan’s fragmented security order and the proliferation of sub-national militias.

The politics that gave rise to the emergence of the militia politics in Sadiq al-Mahdi’s era also provides the background for the current disaster in Khartoum. It was Sadiq’s Libyan backers who armed the first Janjawiid groups in Northern Darfur that fought in the Fur-Arab war of 1987–1989.¹³⁵ After 1989, al-Bashir’s government considerably increased the political power of the camel herding Arab groups in Northern Darfur, and then armed them against the Masalit when fighting broke out between the two communities in 1999.¹³⁶ As conflict broke out throughout Darfur in 2003, these groups became the core of the Janjawiid militias that served as the government’s principal counter-insurgency arm in the province. Amidst the leaders of the Janjawiid was Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the nephew of Juma Dagalo, Umda of the Awlad Mansur clan of the camel-herding Mahariyya Arabs.¹³⁷ In the aftermath of Himeidti’s recent power-grab in Khartoum, one Sudanese commentator argued his family had no historic presence in Sudan, having fled from Chad in 1997.¹³⁸ In practice, Himeidti’s clan have been moving between Chad and Sudan for centuries.¹³⁹ While it is true that when the government established the Janjawiid militias it did recruit Arabs from Chad and other West African countries, the extent has been exaggerated.¹⁴⁰

In 2007, Himeidti established himself as a major player by triangulating between Khartoum and the rebels, eventually rejoining the government forces when al-Bashir brought more money to the table.¹⁴¹ The government reinvented Himeidti’s Janjawiid troops as the Rapid Support Forces, deploying them throughout Khartoum and using them to crush civilian protests in 2013.¹⁴² Himeidti’s forces then expanded considerably due to the income they received from the Saudi and Emirati governments who employed them to fight against Houthi Islamist militants in Yemen.¹⁴³ When al-Bashir fell to a civilian uprising in 2019, Himeidti was in a position to act as kingmaker. In the subsequent transitional Sovereignty Council he took the position of deputy to Abd al-Fattah Burhan, one of the soldiers who had initially helped to arm his militia during the outbreak of the Darfur conflict.¹⁴⁴

In 2019, Sadiq al-Mahdi publicly invited Himeidti and his forces to join the Umma Party – now the National Umma Party.¹⁴⁵ There was a precedent for this in the decision of Fadlallah Burma Nasir to join the party immediately after having served on the 1985–1986 Transitional Military Council.¹⁴⁶ However, Sadiq’s initiative prompted a furious response from al-Saiha, a legacy NCP-era publication, which asked why he was inviting Himeidti and the RSF to join his party, but not the police, general intelligence service, army and their respective leaders. It accused al-Sadiq of attempting to treat Himeidti as a ‘Dervish’ owned by the al-Mahdi family, and, recalling the revolt of the Ashraf against the Khalifa in 1891, insisted that the people of Darfur would no longer act as the servants of the Mahdi.¹⁴⁷ The piece was evidently partisan, but held a grain of truth: in 1965, 1986 and (almost) in 1976, the Umma Party had been able to mobilize armed Western Sudanese to bolster its power in Khartoum and nationally. However, Himeidti had already used his control over the booming Darfuri gold economy and transnational mercenary networks to turn the tables on al-Bashir as the 30 year overlord of Sudan’s militia networks;¹⁴⁸ the National Umma Party may have founded the original militia economy, but it was in no more of a position than al-Bashir to control Himeidti. It would attempt to, nevertheless.

After Sadiq al-Mahdi’s death from coronavirus in 2020, Fadlallah Burma Nasir became the National Umma Party’s first leader from Western Sudan, and also one of the major players in the dominant faction of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC). After the FFC Central Council initially rejected any further negotiations with the military subsequent to the October 2021 coup against the civilians, Nasir once more conducted talks with Himeidti and Burhan. In September 2022, he went public with their discussions. Burhan, he noted, insisted that the army must remain in charge until the end of the transitional period. Himeidti, however, was willing for the army to return to the barracks. Himeidti’s position, Nasir insisted, was ‘closer to the aspirations of the Sudanese people’.¹⁴⁹ The National Umma Party subsequently became the major player in an internationally backed framework agreement, signed in December 2022, that laid the course for the generals to hand over power to a civilian transitional government. Himeidti threw his full public weight behind the agreement, whereas Burhan signed less enthusiastically and subsequently attempted to drag his feet.¹⁵⁰

As the political battles over the implementation of the agreement intensified, many of the political dynamics from Sudan’s second parliamentary era reproduced themselves. The National Umma Party had, it appeared, once more attempted to use a militia from Western Sudan to outmanoeuvre the army. Meanwhile, the DUP – now the “DUP Original” – the National Umma Party’s chief parliamentary antagonist from that era, aligned itself with the military in opposing the Framework Agreement as head of the rival FFC-Democratic Bloc. The military and the FFC-Democratic Bloc backed an alternative political dialogue in Egypt, where the regime feared that the Framework Agreement would lead to it losing influence to the “Quad” of powers that had supported it, including Himeidti’s Emirati backers.¹⁵¹ Subsequently, a major standoff emerged over the process of integrating the RSF into the military as decreed by the Framework Agreement,¹⁵² leading to the outbreak of conflict on 15 April 2023.

In the wake of Himeidti’s devastating assault on the capital, its inhabitants have damned the RSF as the ‘forces of the wilderness’,¹⁵³ reprising language similar to that deployed by Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub in 1965. Evidently the RSF fighters are not ‘the forces of the wilderness’ – the violence they are wreaking has been enabled by modern military technology and supported by a modern social media PR campaign. Nor were they simply proxies of the National Umma Party – in spite of its efforts to court Himeidti, the party had to announce in May 2023 that one of its own leaders was killed by the RSF in the fighting.¹⁵⁴ Nor were they principled regionalists. There were Darfuri Arab rebels willing to make a principled alliance with other marginalized Westerners in 2007, but Himeidti was not one of them.¹⁵⁵ The RSF fighters are mercenaries in a way that the 1976 and 2008 fighters were not.

Conclusion

It is a continuity of Sudanese history that movements originating from within Western Sudan, or using Western Sudanese manpower, have frequently been used to instigate a change of regime in Khartoum. These movements have had multifarious leaders and motives, including Islamism, sectarianism, “black” politics and regionalism. Some could be considered specifically “Western” movements (1975, 2008 and, according to one narrative, 1971); at other times, national movements led by the Umma Party drew heavily on support from Western Sudan (1954, 1965, 1970, 1976). Most recently, Khartoum has fallen prey to the mercenary empire of General Himeidti and the RSF. Many of these crises are the long-term product of a structural tension within the military that dates back to the divide and rule policies of British colonialism. The British feared neo-Mahdism and pro-Egyptianism equally, and as a consequence established divides within Sudan’s security and broader socio-legal and economic order that would prevent either movement fully capturing the Sudanese body politic. The consequence was that while Northern officers dominated the military after independence, the army, the other security institutions and the regimes they generated only had a limited social authority in Western Sudan, where the Mahdiyya had previously held sway.

Whether the movements studied were explicitly “Western” movements or national movements drawing heavily on Western support, they provoked similar fears and reactions within the dominant security elites. In the era of the October Revolution and early May Regime, Nasser’s Arab Socialism in Egypt served as the model for Sudan’s “modern forces”, the army was seen as the vanguard of those forces, and the Umma Party’s various efforts to capture the Sudanese nation using its followers in Western Sudan were characterized as a return to tribalism. In practise, many of the Umma party’s armed followers, like those who joined later militias, were among those who the economy of the “modern forces” had little space for. When Western Sudanese NCOs, structurally marginalized due to the logic of the colonial neo-tribal system, attempted to seize power, their movements were denounced as racist and ethnocentric. The established elites deemed the movements originating in Western Sudan to be incapable of a national vision. Like the colonial security elites,¹⁵⁶ they also feared the consequences of social and economic ties between Darfur, Kordofan and the regions of the Sahel further West. This provided the context for narratives about the 1976 and 2008 movements’ use of “mercenaries”, which functioned to exclude many Western Sudanese from the nation altogether. Himeidti has been able to entrench mercenary politics so effectively in the current era precisely because previous elites had excluded so many from the key military institutions that had served as the nucleus of the national project.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two reviewers, as well as those whose contributed feedback following my presentation at the Northeast Africa Forum, for comments and advice that helped me to refine and improve this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with an error, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2024.2343546)

Notes

1 Magdi El Gizouli, ‘Himeidti: the New Sudanese Man’, Sudan Tribune, 17 May 2014, https://sudantribune.com/article49850/.

2 Young et al, Sudan’s Spring.

3 Abdelwahab el-Affendi, ‘There is much danger in the Sudan crisis, but also an opportunity’, al-Jazeera 17 April 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/17/there-is-much-danger-in-the-sudan-crisis-but-also-an-opportunity.

4 Decalo, ‘African Studies’ 7.

5 Berridge, In the Shadow.

6 Here I am drawing on Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

7 De Waal, ‘Counterinsurgency’.

8 See, eg., LeRiche, ‘Sudan, 1972-1983’

9 Johnson, Root Causes, especially Chapter 9.

10 See, eg Alain Gresh

11 See, eg., Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim, ‘Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo: lastu Rizeigi … ana da’am al-sari’a’, Independent Arabia, 23 April 2023, https://tinyurl.com/bde649ke.

12 Holt, Mahdist State, 43.

13 Ibid, 44.

14 Ibid, Mahdist State, 125-131, 180-184.

15 Berridge et al, Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy.

16 Vezzadini, Lost Nationalism, 93.

17 Muhammad, Sudan Defence Force, 37.

18 Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 62.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Holt and Daly, History, 93.

22 Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors, 152.

23 Holt, Mahdist State, 48.

24 Salih, ‘British Policy’.

25 Muhammad, Sudan Defence Force, 55.

26 Ibid, 56.

27 Orlebar, Tales, 10.

28 Ibid. See also Muhammad, Sudan Defence Force, 34-35.

29 Muhammad, Sudan Defence Force, 54-55.

30 Newbold and Henderson, Making, 481.

31 Ali, The Shaiqiya, 13.

32 For the Hamitic myth’s influence on colonial ethnic politics in Africa see Reid, A History, 166-167. For its impact in Sudan, Mamdani, Saviors, 78-80.

33 See, e.g., Streets, Martial Races.

34 See Mamdani, Define and Rule, for the distinction between ‘Arabs’ as a race and other groups as ‘tribes’.

35 6th Mounted Infantry Company-Nyala. Handing Over Notes Written by Bimbashi Luxmore, 1946, 720/2/36 Orlebar papers.

36 Keays, ‘History of the Camel Corps’, 117.

37 Kamal Osman Salih, ‘British Colonial Military recruitment’, 186.

38 Muhammad, Sudan Defence Force, 98.

39 Berridge, ‘Guarding’.

40 Berridge, In the Shadow.

41 Berridge, ‘Guarding’.

42 Abdel Rahman Nugdalla + others v Sudan Govt, HC/Maj.Ct/14/1954 AC/CP/181/1954, 8 Aug. 1954, 2.D.1. Fasher (A) 32/1/1, National Record Office, Khartoum, cited in Berridge, In the Shadow, 238.

43 al-Ra’i al-‘Aam, 2 March 1954, cited in Berridge, In the Shadow, 238.

44 McGowan and Thomas, ‘African military coups d’etat’, 638.

45 Ibid.

46 Berridge, Civil Uprisings, 122.

47 Holt and Daly, A History of Sudan, 119.

48 Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow, 190.

49 See Al-Sawi, ‘Al-Yasar al-Sudani’.

50 Berridge, Civil Uprisings, 163.

51 Jizouli, Unf al-Badiya, 23.

52 Al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 46-49.

53 Gresh, ‘Free Officers’.

54 Ibrahim, ‘The 1971 coup’, 103.

55 Berridge, Civil Uprisings, 81.

56 Said, al-Saif wa’l-Tugha, 46.

57 Taha, al-Jaysh al-Sudani, 90.

58 Woodward, ‘Nationalism and Opposition’, 386.

59 al-Badi, Ahdath, 9.

60 Ibid, 24.

61 al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 52.

62 al-Badi, Ahdath.

63 Taha, al-Jaysh al-Sudani, 93.

64 al-Badi, Ahdath, 86-96.

65 Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow, 208-209, 216; Johnson, Root Causes, 130.

66 Khalid, Nimeiri, 143.

67 Shawqi Bedri, ‘Madhbaha bayt al-diyafa’, Sudaniyyat, 30 July 2011, https://www.sudaress.com/sudanyiat/1000448. Omer Shurkian, ‘The Nuba: A People’s Struggle for Political Niche and Equity in Sudan’, Sudan Tribune, 30 March 2008, https://sudantribune.com/article26617/.

68 Khalid, Nimeiri, 23.

69 Ibid, 143.

70 Ibid.

71 Hibba Mahmoud, ‘Inqilab al-Muqaddam ‘Hassan Hussein’ fi 5 September 1975 haraka didda Nimeiri lam taktamal’ al-Rakoba, 9 June 2013, https://www.alrakoba.net/news-action-show-id-114489.htm

72 ‘Attempted Coup -5 September 75’, 16 September 1975, signed by Colonel DA, FCO 93/720, The National Archives.

73 Said, al-Sayf wa-al-ṭughah, 48.

74 Shawqi Bedri, ‘al-Batal al-Mazlum Muhammad Nur Sa’ad (2)’, al-Rakoba 17 July 2014.

75 Ibrahim, ‘The 1971 coup’, 105.

76 Umayma Abd al-Wahhab, ‘Al-Hizb al-Shiyu’yi: Majzara Qasr al-Diyafa Irtikabaha Majmoua Hassan Hussein’, 21 July 2010, https://www.sudaress.com/akhirlahza/10852.

77 Jizouli, Unf al-Badiya, 185. A similar claim was also made by the leading SCP figure Yousif Hussein. See Abd al-Wahhab, ‘Al-Hizb al-Shiyu’yi’.

78 Jizouli, Unf al-Badiya, 186-188.

79 Abbas, ‘Growth of Black Political Consciousness’.

80 al-Surur, Haraka 19 Juliu, 87. Salah Basha, interview with Madani Ali Madani, al-Rakoba 3 August 2017, https://www.sudaress.com/alrakoba/1080692.

81 Jizouli, Unf al-Badiya, 186-188.

82 Ibid, 188-189.

83 Surur, Haraka 19 Juliu..For the latter point, see, eg.,

84 ‘Ala al-Din Zain al-Abdin, ‘al-Shahid Abbas Barsham – ibn Jabal al-Nuba al-Asham’, Sudanile 26 February 2014, https://www.sudaress.com/sudanile/64939

85 As quoted in al-Intibaha, ‘Asrar fi’l-siyasa Sudaniyya tunshir li-awwal marra’, 23 September 2012, https://www.sudaress.com/alintibaha/22468. ‘Hiwar istithna’i ma’ Mawlana al-Qadi Abd al-Rahman Idris’, Intibaha 21 September 2012, https://www.sudaress.com/alintibaha/22361.

86 al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 81-82. Abd al-Halim al-Tahir interview with Majid Muhammad Ali, al-Sahafa 8 September 2017, http://alsahafasd.com/10297246.

87 ‘Hiwar istithna’i’, Intibaha.

88 Bakri al-Saeigh, ‘5 September 1975: al-Dhikra al-37 ala al-Inqilab al-Islami’, Hurriyyat 3 September 2012, https://www.sudaress.com/hurriyat/76383.

89 As quoted in al-Intibaha, ‘Asrar fi’l-siyasa Sudaniyya’, Op Cit.

90 Shurkian, ‘The Nuba’. ‘Asrar fi’l-siyasa’, al-Intibaha.

91 al-Intibaha, ‘Asrar fi’l-siyasa’, al-Intibaha Op Cit.

92 ' Hibba Mahmoud, ‘Inqilab al-Muqaddam ‘Hassan Hussein’. elSaeigh, ‘5 September 1975’.

93 Johnson, Root Causes, 246, 257.

94 ‘Abd al-Qadir, Mayo, 76.

95 Ibid.

96 Shurkian, ‘The Nuba’.

97 al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 89.

98 Ibid.

99 Taha, al-Jaysh al-Sudani, 102.

100 al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 165.

101 Khalid, Nimeiri, 150.

102 Berridge, al-Turabi, 60.

103 Khalid, Nimeiri.

104 Shawqi Bedri ‘Shahada Zamil al-Batil Muhammad Nur Sa’ad, Sudanile, 25 July 2014, https://www.sudaress.com/sudanile/70623

105 Bedri, ‘Shahada’.

106 Al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 93.

107 Ibid, 103.

108 Ibid, 96.

109 Ibid.

110 Said, al-Saif wa’l-Tugha, 46.

111 Khalid, Nimeiri, 151.

112 Al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 168. Shurkian. ‘The Nuba’.

113 Al-Badi, al-Jabha al-Wataniyya, 96.

114 Ibid.

115 Abd al-Qadir, Mayo, 77.

116 Abu Rannat and Abd al-Aziz, Asrar, 258, 264.

117 Berridge, ‘Nests of criminals’, 248.

118 De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 149.

119 Berridge, Civil Uprisings, 84.

120 De Waal, ‘Peace and the Security Sector in Sudan, 2002-2011’, 182. De Waal, ‘Some comments’.

121 Pantuliano, ‘Oil’, 7-23.

122 De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 147.

123 Johnson, Root Causes, 81-82.

124 De Waal, ‘Some comments’, 142, 150.

125 Berridge, al-Turabi, 257, 275.

126 Flint and De Waal, Darfur, 103. Gallab, First Islamist Republic.

127 el-Tom, Imbalance.

128 Human Rights Watch, Crackdown in Khartoum: Mass Arrests, Torture and Disappearances since the May 10 Attack, https://www.hrw.org/report/2008/06/17/crackdown-khartoum/mass-arrests-torture-and-disappearances-may-10-attack

129 Human Rights Watch, Crackdown.

130 Sudanese Media Center ‘Bi-quwwa al-difa’a al-Chadi: al-‘adl wa’l-musawa … intahara ala masharif Omdurman’, 15 May 2008, https://www.sudaress.com/smc/2130.

131 Tubiana, ‘Renouncing’, 21.

132 Jérôme Tubiana, ‘Why Chad isn’t Darfur and Darfur isn’t Rwanda’, London Review of Books, 17 December 2009, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n24/jerome-tubiana/why-chad-isn-t-darfur-and-darfur-isn-t-rwanda.

133 Human Rights Watch, Crackdown.

134 Ibid.

135 Harir, ‘“Arab belt”’, 167-173.

136 Flint and De Waal, Darfur, 56-63.

137 Ibid, 260.

138 Khalil Muhammad Suleiman, ‘Khartoum Maqbara al-Janjawiid’, al-Rakoba 22 April 2023, https://tinyurl.com/5n7pynvj.

139 Berridge et al, Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy, 63.

140 Flint and De Waal, Darfur, 66.

141 Ibid, 260.

142 Berridge et al, Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy, 66.

143 Ibid, 76-77.

144 For the historic relationship between Burhan and Himeidti, see al-Sharq al-Awsat, ‘al-Burhan wa Himeidti … nihaya ‘anifa li-Sadaqa qadima’, 16 April 2023, https://tinyurl.com/ynjzresh.

145 Sadiq al-Mahdi, ‘Nurahhib bi-Indimam al-da’am al-sari’a li-hizb al-Umma’, Nilein, 24 December 2019, https://www.sudaress.com/alnilin/13103237.

146 Lesch, Sudan, 219.

147 al-Saiha, ‘Al-Fariq Awwal Himeidti laysa Darwishan li-Aal al-Mahdi!’, 28 December 2019, https://www.sudaress.com/assayha/23936.

148 Berridge et al, Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy, esp. Chapter 2.

149 Kush News, ‘Ala Khalfayya tasriihat rais hizb al-umma al-qawmi … hal intafa’a al-siraj bayna generalat al-hizb wa’l-mukawwin al-askari?’, 19 September 2022, https://www.sudaress.com/kushnews/341529.

150 Dabanga, ‘Signing of Sudan’s final agreement postponed over SAF-RSF differences’, 4 April 2023, https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/signing-of-the-final-agreement-postponed-over-saf-rsf-differences.

151 The ‘Quad’ comprises Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. al-Sudani, ‘Warasha al-Qahira … hal najahat Misr fi taqdim hulul li’l-Sudaniyyin?’, 11 February 2023, https://www.sudaress.com/alsudani/1167183.

152 Dabanga, ‘Signing of Sudan’s final agreement’, Op. Cit.

153 Azza Mustafa Babikir, ‘The Fall of Khartoum’, May 2023, https://www.cmi.no/publications/8790-the-fall-of-khartoum.

154 al-Quds al-Arabi, ‘Al-Sudan … Ishtibakat wa muqtil qiyadi fi hizb al-Umma … wa mabaouth Burhan yajri mubahathat fi Qatar’, 29 May 2023, https://tinyurl.com/y88tun8b.

155 Flint and De Waal, Darfur, 261-262.

156 Fisher, ‘British Responses’, 350-351.