Sudan's history: a war that began before the state did

How Kush came to rule Egypt

The state at Kerma, near present-day Dongola, flourished from about 2500 to 1500 BC with a culture distinct from Egypt's. Its potters made thin-walled black-topped vessels with geometric patterns, and its craftsmen a blue-glazed quartz faience of their own. From about 2050 BC Kerma pressed on Egypt's southern border hard enough that the Middle Kingdom built a chain of fortresses against it, and around 1650 BC it pushed north past them.

The New Kingdom answered. Thutmose I destroyed Kerma, Nubia was annexed around 1504 BC under an Egyptian Viceroy of Kush, and rebellions went on for 220 years, until about 1300 BC. The occupation left a religion behind it. From around 1500 BC Egyptians held that their state god Amun lived inside Jebel Barkal, a flat-topped sandstone hill about 100 metres high near Napata, and local people still treat the temples at its foot as sacred.

When the New Kingdom weakened in the eleventh century BC, the viceroys of Kush became kings in all but name. Around 750 BC Kashta, a king ruling from Napata, took Upper Egypt. His son Piye, who reigned from about 750 to 719 BC, brought the whole of Egypt to the Mediterranean under Kushite administration. Kushite kings ruled Egypt as its Twenty-fifth Dynasty for close to a century, until Assyrian armies invaded in 671 BC and defeated Taharqa. By 654 BC the Kushites were back at Napata.

Why the writing of Meroë cannot be read

Around 590 BC an Egyptian army sacked Napata, and the court moved south to Meroë, in the semi-desert between the Nile and the Atbara. Most royal burials were made there from the third century BC, under steep-sided pyramids built, in Britannica's phrase, not in the Egyptian fashion. Kush went on ruling the middle Nile for roughly a thousand years after it lost Egypt.

Succession was partly a choice. The kandake, or queen mother, had a decisive part in picking the most worthy member of the royal family, and the crown passed from brother to brother, or to a sister, before it passed from father to son. One kandake, Amanirenas, fought Roman Egypt in the first century BC, and a bronze head of the emperor Augustus was later found buried in front of a temple at Meroë. The war ended in a treaty on terms favourable to Kush that kept the frontier quiet for most of the next 300 years.

Kush also wrote its own language. Monumental inscriptions had been carved in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and from the second century BC Meroitic came into common use, written in two scripts, one derived from hieroglyphs and one cursive. The sound of each sign is known. Too little comparative material has been found to translate the language, above all bilingual inscriptions or a related language that is understood, so the names in Meroitic texts can mostly be read and the longer inscriptions largely cannot. A kingdom that once ruled Egypt left a record that can be sounded out and not understood.

By 350 Ezana, king of Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands, had captured and destroyed Meroë.

How Christian Nubia held off the Arab armies

Three kingdoms took the place of Kush on the river by the sixth century: Nobatia, with its capital at Faras; Makuria, centred on Old Dongola; and Alodia, whose capital, Soba, is now a suburb of Khartoum. Missionaries converted all three between 543 and 575, and Makuria later absorbed Nobatia.

Arab armies took Byzantine Egypt between 639 and 641 and were stopped at the Nubian frontier. They invaded in 641 or 642 and again in 652. One expedition, under Abd Allah ibn Sa'd, besieged Old Dongola and destroyed its cathedral but took heavy casualties and agreed to peace. The terms, known as the Baqt, joined non-aggression to an annual exchange of gifts and an understanding that no Muslims would settle in Nubia and no Nubians in Egypt. With few interruptions they held for nearly six centuries.

Makuria could attack as well. It invaded Egypt in 747, and again in the early 960s, when it reached Akhmim. From the eighth century its scribes wrote Old Nubian in an adaptation of the Coptic alphabet. Women could be educated and hold land, and the rightful heir to the throne was often the son of the king's sister.

The kingdom wore down from the north. Mamluk expeditions in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries devastated Makuria without occupying it, and Arab nomads moved south with their herds and married into Nubian families. Because the Nubians inherited through the female line and the Arabs through the male, Nubian property passed from Nubian mothers to half-Arab sons. A civil war in 1365 drove the Makurian court to Gebel Adda, and the last known king, Joel, is attested in 1463 and 1484. Alodia fell around 1500, to an Arab confederation under Abdallah Jamma or to the Funj; the sources disagree on both the conqueror and the date.

Who ruled Sennar and Darfur before Egypt came

From 1504 the Funj ruled from Sennar. They were neither Arabs nor Muslims at the outset and probably came from the borderlands of the upper Blue Nile, though by 1523 their king Amara Dunqas was recorded as a Muslim. Sufi holy men carried Islam along the river, and north of the confluence of the two Niles the Nubians took on the tribal identity of the Arab Jaalin. By the nineteenth century Arabic was the dominant language of the central riverain Sudan.

How the Funj sultans lost their own army

Badi II, who reigned from 1644 or 1645 to 1680, carried Funj authority across the White Nile into Kordofan, and the slaves captured in those campaigns became a military caste at Sennar, loyal to the monarch alone. Badi IV, sultan from 1724 to 1762, used them to break the old aristocracy. By the end of his reign he could no longer hold the army. Under Abu Likaylik, his viceroy in Kordofan, it turned against him and exiled him to Soba, and from 1761 or 1762 the Hamaj regents ruled through Funj sultans who were their puppets.

Why Darfur kept a separate history

Darfur, whose name means the home of the Fur, was organised as an independent sultanate in the fourteenth century, outside the states along the Nile. Its Keira dynasty began as a small kingdom in northern Jebel Marra and was nominally Muslim from the reign of Sulayman Solong, around 1660 to 1680. Muhammad Tayrab, who reigned from 1751 to 1786, conquered Kordofan in 1785, and at its height the sultanate covered an area roughly the size of present-day Nigeria.

How the Egyptian conquest ended in the Mahdiyya

What the Turkiyya took from the Sudan

In July 1820 Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, sent an army south under his son Ismail. He wanted the Sudan's gold and slaves, and by 1821 the Funj had surrendered. Egypt's administration, the Turkiyya, levied taxes that amounted to the virtual confiscation of gold, livestock and slaves. Ali Khurshid, governor-general from 1826 to 1838, cut them and developed Khartoum as the capital.

After the state trading monopolies were abolished in 1838, European merchants opened the White Nile and the south to commerce, and the south was plundered for slaves. Egypt annexed Darfur in 1875. In the same decades Britain pressed Cairo to end the slave trade, and the merchants who lived by it suffered under the campaign Charles Gordon waged against it.

How the Mahdi took Khartoum

Muhammad Ahmad, the son of a Dongola boatbuilder, announced in June 1881 that he was the Mahdi, the guided one. Holy men joined him, and so did merchants of the slave trade, but Britannica judges that neither group could have carried the revolt alone. The fighting men were the Baqqara, cattle nomads of Kordofan and Darfur who hated taxes. At Shaykan on 5 November 1883 the Mahdists destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men, and on 26 January 1885 they took Khartoum and killed Gordon, the governor-general.

The Mahdi died on 22 June 1885. His successor, the Khalifa Abd Allah, came from the Ta'aisha, a Baqqara people, and ruled from Omdurman with emirs, usually Baqqara, over each province, so that for thirteen years the Nile valley was governed by men from the western cattle country. Britain, which had occupied Egypt since 1882, concluded in 1897 that it had to conquer the Sudan to keep France away from the Nile waters. On 2 September 1898 about 25,000 Anglo-Egyptian troops under Kitchener met the Khalifa's 60,000 outside Omdurman, and the battle was over by midday.

Why the condominium governed two Sudans

The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of 1899 gave the Sudan a status of its own. Sovereignty was shared between the khedive and the British crown, the two flags flew side by side, and the governor-general was appointed by the khedive on Britain's nomination. In practice the partnership was unequal and Britain ran the country. It extended railways and steamers into the Gezira for the cotton scheme, and Gordon Memorial College, opened in 1902, produced the Western-educated elite from which the nationalists came.

How the south was kept apart

Resistance in the south lasted longer, and the administration there confined itself to keeping order. In the early 1920s the Closed Districts Ordinances required passports to travel between north and south and permits to trade across the line. Islam was discouraged in the south while Christian missionaries worked there, and its governors attended colonial conferences in East Africa, where Britain hoped to attach the region. Darfur was taken by force. Its sultan, Ali Dinar, was deposed by an expedition in 1916 when he was suspected of siding with the Ottoman Empire, and the government afterwards directed its money and officials to the tribes of the centre near Khartoum.

Who led northern politics before independence

Northern politics formed around two religious houses that the British chose to work with. The Mahdi's posthumous son, Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, led the Ansar, whose party was the Umma. Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani led the Khatmiyya, which backed Ismail al-Azhari and what became, in 1951, the National Unionist Party. In Britannica's judgement these sectarian elites controlled the parties until the last decade of the twentieth century.

In 1946 the British reversed the southern policy and decided to govern north and south as one, and southern officials were told at the Juba Conference of 1947 that they would come under a common administration. Britain and Egypt agreed on 12 February 1953 to self-government and self-determination within three years. Of the eight hundred government posts vacated by the British in 1953, four went to southerners.

How independence arrived during a mutiny

On 18 August 1955 southern soldiers mutinied at Torit. The revolt was put down quickly, but a low-level guerrilla insurgency followed it, and in the early part of the war hundreds of northern officials and teachers serving in the south were killed. On 19 December 1955 the parliament declared independence unilaterally and unanimously, and Britain and Egypt recognised it on 1 January 1956, when their flags were lowered at the People's Palace in Khartoum.

The southern complaint was specific. The new government ignored its promise of a federal system, and it governed in Arabic when most southern officials had been trained in English.

General Ibrahim Abboud took power in a bloodless coup in November 1958, pushed Arabic and Islam in the south and expelled foreign missionaries between 1962 and 1964. The Anya Nya rebellion broke out in September 1963. The south then brought down the regime in the north: in October 1964 students at the University of Khartoum met in defiance of a ban to condemn its southern policy, demonstrations spread while most of the army was committed in the south, and Abboud resigned.

Elected coalitions led by the sectarian parties then alternated with officers. Colonel Gaafar Nimeiri seized power on 25 May 1969 and in 1972 signed the Addis Ababa Agreement, which gave the south a degree of self-rule and ended the first war after seventeen years. He introduced sharia law in September 1983, and the war in the south began again. Officers removed him on 6 April 1985, after demonstrations over price rises and a general strike. Sadiq al-Mahdi, the Mahdi's great-grandson, formed a coalition government in June 1986, and on 30 June 1989 Colonel Omar al-Bashir overthrew it.

What the south and Darfur fought Khartoum over

Through the 1990s, under the National Islamic Front and Hassan al-Turabi, the government imposed strict sharia-based law and declared the war against the south a jihad. The second war displaced more than 4 million southerners, and the two wars of 1955 to 1972 and 1983 to 2005 are estimated together to have killed 1.5 million people.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in Nairobi on 9 January 2005, gave the south six years of autonomy and then a referendum, and divided oil revenue evenly between north and south. Southern Sudanese voted from 9 to 15 January 2011, almost 99% of them for secession, and South Sudan became independent on 9 July 2011. Abyei, claimed by both, was left for a referendum of its own, and SPLA units stationed north of the new border formed the SPLM-North and rebelled in South Kordofan and Blue Nile within months.

In February 2003 the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, recruited mainly from the non-Arab Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit, took up arms against a government they accused of oppressing Darfur's non-Arab population. With its army losing, the government turned to the Janjaweed, armed Baqqara herders it had already used against a Masalit uprising from 1986 to 1999, and equipped them as a paramilitary force. A United Nations observer team reported Fur villages emptied, looted and burnt beside Arab settlements left unharmed.

The death toll is disputed. The World Health Organization estimated 50,000 deaths by September 2004, most from starvation, and a study in The Lancet in January 2010 put excess deaths at between 178,258 and 461,520, about 80% of them from disease. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir in 2009 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the case against him came to include genocide.

Why the army and the RSF went to war

The force that went to war with the army in 2023 was built during the war in Darfur. In 2013 al-Bashir announced that the Janjaweed would be reorganised as the Rapid Support Forces under their commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, and a law of 2017 made the RSF an independent security force. The Congressional Research Service records that al-Bashir let it seize gold mines and sent it to fight in Yemen, and that the revenue made it more autonomous. The regime backed it as protection against a coup from inside the regular army. A ruler on the Nile had leaned on a force loyal to himself against his own establishment once before, at Sennar, where the army Badi IV had built on slave troops exiled him in 1762.

How protest removed al-Bashir

Protests over the price of bread began in December 2018. On 6 April 2019 protesters began a sit-in outside the army headquarters in Khartoum, and two days later a photograph of Alaa Salah leading a chant from the roof of a car made her a symbol of the movement under the name kandake, the Meroitic title of a queen mother. The army removed al-Bashir on 11 April 2019. On 3 June security forces including the RSF cleared the sit-in, killing 128 people by one count. A constitutional declaration in August 2019 set up a Sovereignty Council of officers and civilians, and as the date for handing its chair to a civilian came near, the army and the RSF seized power together on 25 October 2021.

Where the fighting went after Khartoum

Talks on folding the RSF into the army split over the timetable, ten years in the RSF's proposal and two in the army's, and over who would command it. Fighting began in Khartoum on 15 April 2023. The RSF held most of the capital and took most of Darfur by late 2023. The army retook Khartoum in March 2025, after a 23-month RSF occupation, and on 26 October 2025 the RSF took El Fasher, the army's last stronghold in Darfur, after an 18-month siege. United States officials estimated in May 2024 that at least 150,000 people had died in the war's first year, and UNHCR counted 11,321,158 people forcibly displaced on 5 October 2026. In April 2025 UNESCO reported evidence of large-scale looting at the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum.

Who calls it a war against the state

Members of the RSF and its sympathisers, the BTI's 2026 country report records, describe the war as one against "the 1956 state", the state of the independence era, which on this account neglected Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile and kept development in the capital and the north. The BTI's own assessment is that citizenship in postcolonial Sudan has worked through an ethnic hierarchy favouring groups from the north and centre. The RSF was itself raised by the government in Khartoum, and on 7 January 2025 the United States State Department declared that members of the RSF and allied militias had committed acts of genocide. The same report records massacres by the army of the Canabi population in Gezira and in the South Belt of Khartoum, which the army justified as action against RSF collaborators. When the report was written, Sudan was formally one country and in practice two.