On 13 May 1956, Minister of Finance Ibrahim Ahmed introduced a law before parliament to elevate Khartoum University College to university status. After expressing his happiness at overseeing the college’s elevation, he remarked:
Perhaps some members here might ask why the Minister of Finance is presenting this legal project without any other ministers. The answer to this is that the relationship between the government and the university is exclusively a financial relationship, and the government must not intervene in its administration. With this we guarantee the university its academic stability. The experiences of previous nations have indicated that this is the best course to equip the university to undertake its mission in a true fashion. I am pleased to record at this event that the national government has not tried since its establishment in its first year of 1954 to intervene in the university college or to limit its independence.Footnote 1
The minister’s understanding of the university and its status was at once ambitious and typical of the Sudanese elite. The university’s status and its relationship with the state have a long and contested history extending back to the nationalist movement at Gordon Memorial College during the late colonial period. The university became a central site of elite politics, capable of mobilizing opposition to successive regimes through the legitimacy provided by academic training.Footnote 2 Academic literature on university governance in English, including on Sudan specifically, has focused on the issue of “university autonomy,” pointing to the ways that this autonomy has been contested and navigated in the independence period.Footnote 3 Yet in Arabic—the language in which politics, including university politics, was negotiated—the term used was istiqlal al jami’a, or university independence, rather than autonomy. This framing, one of independence rather than autonomy, did not guarantee institutional stability, but it did come to define the parameters of many political conflicts throughout Sudan’s post-independence history.
At its core, the concept of university independence, as understood in Sudan, represented a maximalist conception of university autonomy. Sudanese students, faculty, and politicians all understood that the university was funded by the state and thus accountable to it on some level. Yet, as Ahmed articulated, they also believed that relationship should be limited to financial matters alone. This belief proved difficult to maintain and was tested by authoritarian regimes that forced individuals to choose between their values, the stability of their careers, and their own freedom. In times of authoritarian power grabbing, intransigence on the question of university independence helped carve out space for thought and research while also functioning as a broader demand for political freedom outside the university’s gates, creating a powerful impetus for democracy, or at least freedom for certain elites. People defending this value did so for different reasons: faculty often made appeals in order to protect academic life and working conditions, while students emphasized its importance for organizing protests related to national political issues.
The shared commitment of students and faculty to university independence in Sudan posed a central challenge for authoritarian regimes seeking to control the university. Universities derive their legitimacy from ongoing teaching and research, activities that require the participation of students and scholars. Without them, the space becomes a shell of itself, unable to operate. Yet, faculty’s financial dependence on the university for employment and the maintenance of the institution in which they pursued their academic work meant that they were typically less willing to confront successive governments directly, preferring to work behind the scenes to protect the university. Students, by contrast, were young, had less to lose, and were more difficult to control. They were therefore better able to use the university to organize political opposition. Resistance from both faculty and students, albeit with different orientations, brought the university into the repeated conflicts with authoritarian regimes that have marked Sudanese political history. The state, in turn, faced conflicting impulses, caught between harnessing the university as a provider of civil service employees and future leaders and shuttering it as a potential site of opposition.
While both students and faculty defended university independence, neither group did so solely as a matter of principle. Student politics at the University of Khartoum have long been focused on opposition in national politics, treating the question of university independence as an outgrowth of their right to oppose successive regimes. This is especially evident during the period under discussion in this article, as leftist students sided with President Ja’afar Al Nimeiri’s regime. Indeed, the leaders of the Islamic Trend, Islamist students who gained prominence during this period as outspoken defenders of university independence, later orchestrated the 1989 coup that established Sudan’s third authoritarian regime under President Omar Elbashir. Once in government, they played a central role in dismantling the independence of the very university from which they had graduated.
Faculty, both as lecturers and as university administrators when elected or appointed to manage their department or college, have operated in an intermediary position, caught between students and the state. Most faculty shared a belief that the university needed to retain its autonomy and academic freedom. For faculty, university independence provided space for the pursuit of academic work and the freedoms of association they believed they were essential to university life. By the 1970s, most faculty had studied at Gordon Memorial College or the University of Khartoum and generally shared this vision of how proper academic institutions were supposed to be governed and how politics should be practiced. While they were not at the forefront of opposing government policies, faculty advanced these values through their administration of the institution, often pushing back behind closed doors against government officials who expected the university to remain quiet, even if they supported the politics of the regime. Yet they were also more cautious, facing the possibility of losing their livelihoods or being jailed and jeopardizing their families’ stability and safety.
Moreover, faculty and administrators were not necessarily close to students who pushed in political directions they disagreed with and who often directed anger at university policies (including, but not limited to restrictions on university life) and against complicit faculty.Footnote 4 These students often violated university hierarchies that encouraged respect for instructors as elders and scholars, creating tense personal relationships and making cross-hierarchy alliances difficult. Their activity also disrupted the workings of the university, interrupting classes and at times forcing the closure of the university, much to the frustration of faculty who wanted the academic year to proceed in a regular and predictable fashion. Faculty and university administrators operated with the full knowledge that they would be accountable not just to the regime in power or even to their peers, but also to their students, who would set the tone for campus life.
Successive regimes attempted to rein in university associative life through the appointment of oversight bodies and academic officials, ultimately culminating in significant restrictions on “university independence.” Yet, the gradual pace of this process points to, first, the strength of the shared values that successive regimes had to overcome and, second, the responsiveness of administrators and faculty both to the state and to the preservation of campus life. Even officials appointed by Ja’afar Al Nimeiri’s regime (1969–85), and later, the Ingaz regime of Omar Elbashir (1989–2019), ultimately were uncomfortable with the erosions to university independence, often opposing reforms internally or rolling them out slowly and reluctantly. This helps explain why regime attempts to impose controls on the university, when met with resistance internally, often resulted in those reforms being stalled or reversed entirely. It was only in the period following 1971, when the leadership of the regime became more frightened of potential overthrow than invested in social transformation, that politicians unaffiliated with the university were able to gain leverage and successfully impose greater controls on university life.
This article links the broader institutional literatures on Gordon Memorial College and the University of Khartoum with histories of student politics and student movement. These intertwined historiographies have been marked by distinct focuses, on the development of universities and academic programs in the case of the former, and “resistance” and protest in the case of the latter. Higher education in colonial Africa began in the nineteenth century with the establishment of missionary-run institutions, including Fourah Bay College and a number of smaller schools and colleges in West and Southern Africa. By the 1920s, French and British colonial governments began to establish a small number of state-run institutions which expanded in a limited fashion through the 1930s and 40s to train colonial civil service employees. At independence, these colleges were elevated to university status, with universities soon expanding and breaking away as newly independent states sought to establish national universities.Footnote 5 Histories of student politics have pointed primarily to the critical role students have played in nationalist movements pushing for independence, as well as the ways that students launched political protests against governments in newly independent African states.Footnote 6 They are rarely in dialogue, in part due to diverging priorities and the differing authorial orientations, often either that of former administrators or former student activists. Yet in moments of confrontation, administrators and students interact, and their interactions account for the ways that institutions develop. Linking these historiographies allows for a fuller understanding of the way that the University of Khartoum evolved through both institution-building efforts by faculty and administrators and through the ongoing demands, opposition, and protest of students, whose actions forced both the university and, at times, the state to respond by meeting some demands while creating mechanisms to reduce students’ political leverage.Footnote 7
The history of university formation and reform, like the history of state formation and reformation, can be understood as iterative, a product of ongoing oppositions and compromises between those with access to the site of institutional decision making and those opposed to it. In the case of the university, administrators and faculty worked as intermediaries. They operated between government officials, to whom they were institutionally proximate and at times politically aligned, and university students, who advanced oppositional views and made use of political arguments and claims to associative life that administrators and faculty had taken full advantage of in the past. This created space for faculty and administrators to defend their institution, while also creating moments when they yielded to state pressures to clamp down on associative life within the university.
These dynamics help define the sources most useful to explore the university as a site of political contestation. Questions of university independence linked into moments of confrontation that were narrated by different parties, of concern both within the university’s walls and beyond. Sudanese academics who have made thorough use of University of Khartoum archives alongside their own experiences and papers have discussed issues of institutional history at length, particularly with regard to the relationship of the university to the state. Meanwhile, students and former students have explored questions of student politics and their confrontations with the university administration and the state, often at the same university where their activism took place. In addition to this secondary literature, written both in English and Arabic, this study also analyzes a number of oral testimonies by both university faculty and students and makes use of national security reports from the period, which closely monitored the university, perceiving students as a potential threat to state power. Reports often included a section titled “Student Activity,” which made clear that while faculty at times were of concern to the state, it viewed students as posing the greatest threat. They recount details of student organizing, including details of student meetings and rallies, as well as quoting more ephemeral texts that circulated or were displayed within universities.
At the University of Khartoum, these dynamics took prominence during conflicts over the status of the university under two military regimes—that of President Abboud (1958–64) and President Nimeiri (1969–85). In their fight for university independence, students and, to a lesser degree, faculty understood university independence as a guarantor of their ability to act politically and mobilized to protect the political space that this concept implied. This paper traces how the University of Khartoum came to be established with such a degree of autonomy, then turns to events in the earliest period of Nimeiri’s regime, particularly the attempt to fire university lecturers on political grounds in 1969, Nimeiri’s declaration to restrict university political activity in 1971, and the day-long sit-in that students launched in opposition to it. It goes on to discuss moments of political struggle that extended beyond the university in the mid-1970s and the structural changes the regime undertook in order to rein in student activism. These reforms created an infrastructure to prevent further mass actions within the university and set the stage for further repressive measures undertaken in the 1990s.
Higher Education in Sudan and the Origins of “University Independence”
As a category, “university independence” differed from standard categories discussed with regard to university freedoms. American and European ideals of “academic freedom” largely center on the freedom of academics to teach and produce knowledge in their fields of specialization without administrative or governmental interference.Footnote 8 They also differed from “university autonomy,” which implies a dependence on the state and acknowledges that independence of choice is hardly absolute, focusing on the administrative connections between the university and the state that funds and oversees it.Footnote 9 These concepts have been discussed in African contexts with regard to the mutual obligations of academics and university to the communities in which they operate, emphasizing accountability not only to the state that funds higher education but also to local communities through pedagogy and research that engage with their knowledge and priorities.Footnote 10 The history of education has also been important in historiographies of the Middle East as it intersects with race, climate, and economy.Footnote 11 In Sudan, the question of university independence arose not from questions of academic relevance or the perceptions of the community, but rather through the university’s mediating role between authoritarian regimes seeking to prevent political dissent and a student body whose activism placed these regimes’ legitimacy in question. In this sense, the issue was linked to the political authority conferred by university degrees in Sudan and the struggles this engendered within universities.Footnote 12 University independence as a value in Sudan was of greatest relevance to questions of associative life and governance, and it shows up, albeit in different ways, in both institutional histories of the university and in the contentious and, at times, violent histories of student politics in Sudan.
The University of Khartoum, like many universities in Africa, developed from colonial institutions. Gordon Memorial College was established in 1902 to oversee education, first focusing on primary, then secondary, and then post-secondary education. In 1943, Gordon Memorial College was one of the five colleges examined by the Asquith commission, which recommended a pathway for elevation to university college status for select institutions of education in Africa. This avenue was pursued quickly, as the college had already developed the recommended institutions and practices and functioned with significant autonomy. By 1946, the college had gained university college status, a status that not only conferred a “special relationship” with the University of London but also enabled the institution to build internationally recognized degree programs.Footnote 13 This status continued until independence in 1956, when the college was elevated to university status, conferring degrees on its own authority.
Gordon Memorial College had been established through the direct oversight of the colonial state, and its administration remained in the hands of colonial officials. During its first decades, the “warden,” a title changed later to “headmaster,” also served as the colonial Director of Education in the condominium government.Footnote 14 By the 1940s, direct management by the state had given way to the formation of first an advisory committee and, later, a university council. These bodies introduced a degree of autonomy, with representatives elected from within the college. Nonetheless, they remained closely beholden to the state, with fifteen of the twenty-six positions on the council going to those holding key government positions in the colonial state apparatus.Footnote 15
From early on, the state’s interest in institutional development clashed with the priorities of an increasingly nationalist student body. Gordon Memorial College was constructed by the colonial state to train loyal Sudanese bureaucrats. Yet students at institutions of higher education quickly involved themselves in politics. In 1924, students at the War College participated in the uprising led by the nationalist White Flag League as they launched an unapproved military parade.Footnote 16 Later, in 1931, students at Gordon College launched a strike, refusing to come out of their dormitories until their demands regarding salaries for college graduates had been addressed.Footnote 17 These two episodes figure prominently in nationalist historiography because of how they illustrate the calls for independence that grew among graduates’ reading groups. There, intellectuals debated competing paths to independence through either the idea of “Unity of the Nile Valley” or that of “Sudan for the Sudanese,” rival strategies that sought independence from Britain or Egypt, respectively, as a means of achieving self-government. By the time the Graduates’ Assembly was established in 1938, these different standpoints had taken on sectarian alignments, but the body itself remained committed first and foremost to a nationalism that opposed foreign rule.Footnote 18
When Gordon Memorial College was elevated to university status as the University of Khartoum in 1956, it favored an extremely autonomous system of governance, perhaps because of the status of its graduates in the nationalist movement and in the country at large. Following the civic model of university governance coming to prominence in Britain, the university assembled a University Council and a University Senate, with the former overseeing administration and finance and the latter academic affairs. Unlike in the colonial period, this University Council was no longer composed of a majority of state representatives, with only eight of the twenty-four core members of the University Council concurrently serving in government positions. The position of chancellor was an honorary post, nominated by the University Council and approved by the head of state, though in practice the council always nominated the head of state to the position. The vice chancellor, as the principal academic and administrative officer, was to be elected by the University Council with the consent of the chancellor.Footnote 19 This meant that for the first time, administrative and educational policy at the foremost institution of higher education in Sudan, and, with it, control over associative life inside the university, lay outside the direct control of the state. This created a space for associative life that, after the 1958 military coup which brought President Ibrahim Abboud to power, was less regulated than life outside of university walls.
In the ensuing two decades, the University of Khartoum retained its status as the foremost institution of higher education as higher education expanded. Khartoum Technical School, the School for Commerce, and Omdurman Islamic Institute, all created during the colonial period, also began to be elevated after independence.Footnote 20 Cairo University–Khartoum Branch was established as a college in 1955, and Ahfad University, a community-funded university, was established in 1966, followed by Juba University and Gezira University likewise established in 1975.Footnote 21 This expanded the number of institutions at which students could receive post-secondary education and in which political activities took place. Yet the University of Khartoum remained the centerpiece of higher education, with politics at the university remaining an important symbol of the legitimacy of political regimes.
In the decade after independence, the University of Khartoum proceeded with a “Sudanization” and then “indigenization” of the university, which involved the promotion of qualified Sudanese faculty into administrative positions and the selection of a number of Sudanese graduates to be sent abroad to receive higher degrees in order to return and teach within the university.Footnote 22 Most of these faculty were men from northern Sudan, though women from northern Sudan also began to take on some positions among faculty as the 1960s proceeded.Footnote 23
During this time, the university continued to be a space marked by gender, ethnic, and regional imbalances in its demographic composition. The student body was becoming more ethnically diverse, albeit still dominated by students from northern, riverain Sudan. By 1969, young women made up roughly 10 percent of the student body but represented an important constituency within university politics; former activists noted that elections within the women’s dormitory were competitive and understood as critical for the advancement of a political party within the university.Footnote 24 Most notable was an increase in students from the Kordofan and Kassala regions, both of which represented 9.5 and 8.7 percent of the student body, respectively. Students from Darfur and the three southern provinces both made up about 3.5 percent of the student body collectively.Footnote 25 These changes were significant yet also reflected the ongoing marginalization of students from areas outside of northern, riverain Sudan, a pattern exacerbated by ongoing violence in the South. As the student leader who compiled this data pointed out, students from the South, Darfur, Kordofan, and Kassala together were still fewer in number than those from Blue Nile Province, the riverain province that contained the city of Wad Medani and the Gezira scheme.Footnote 26
The freedoms granted to university life became a site of contestation in the latter years of Abboud’s regime. Two years after taking power, the regime made alterations to the legal code governing the administration of the University of Khartoum in the face of sustained student protests. These changes included designating the president as the university chancellor and giving the chancellor the right to appoint a vice chancellor after consulting with the University Council, a change in procedure that reversed power relations in university governance. These alterations also added the Minister of Education to the University Council and gave him oversight over the vice chancellor’s activities and decisions, while the University Council’s membership was radically altered, reducing the number of members from twenty-four to twenty-three and increasing the number of individuals serving in state positions from eight to twelve. This ultimately gave the state control over the council’s decisions. With these structural changes in place, the university administration moved to restrict student political activity by introducing University Statute 9. The statute aimed to place the student union, which represented students, governed student associations and clubs, and led political action taken by students under the control and regulation of the administration. It forbade the student union from participating in politics and banned political events and activities from union facilities.Footnote 27
Students seem not to have heeded efforts to curb their activities. Though the regulations were passed in 1960, in subsequent years, student unions organized themselves along political lines anyway.Footnote 28 Most significantly, four years later, the University of Khartoum student union held a seminar on the “Question of the South” in defiance of university and government prohibitions. When interrupted by police seeking to shut down the event, students fought them, leading to the death of one student, Quraishi. Faculty and students organized a series of protests at his funeral the next day that culminated in a general strike. President Abboud stepped down days later after his army refused to fire on unarmed civilians in what has been described as the “October Revolution.” That political moment, more than the movement for independence, has been described as key for shaping students’ political identity and concepts of citizenship in Sudan.Footnote 29 Since then, a rich Arabic-language historiography has focused on the events leading up to the revolution as well as its aftermath, with particular discussion of the role of students as one of the “modern forces” that helped shape the revolution.Footnote 30 The events also underscored the status that university faculty and students held in society, their ability to leverage that status, reflected in the army’s refusal to fire on their protests even as the same officers actively pursued a war in the South that killed many civilians. They also highlighted the power and potential danger of university associative life in facilitating such political organizing.
Following the resignation of President Abboud, a transitional government was installed. Inside the university, the newly repopulated University Council convened a sub-committee in 1967 to amend the university charter. It recommended that university governance essentially return to the 1956 Act, but further limited the role of the chancellor, declaring that the University Council could appoint the vice chancellor without the chancellor’s approval. It also expanded specific safeguards on academic freedom and university autonomy. Meanwhile, students remained active and took advantage of the freedoms in associative life that had been protected. Yet these reforms, produced at the university level, had not yet been formally approved by parliament when President Nimeiri and the Revolutionary Command Council seized power in a military coup in May 1969.Footnote 31
University Independence and the May Regime, 1969–71
Nimeiri’s regime, called the May regime after the month in which it took power, continued Abboud’s efforts to rein in university associative life. Having come to power with support from Arab nationalists, Ba’athists, and one wing of the Sudanese Communist Party, the regime initially saw the university as a powerful tool for social transformation.Footnote 32 This led to the promotion of certain faculty members and the restriction of others, ultimately culminating in restrictions on the entirety of university academic life. Yet faculty and students, including those ideologically inclined to support the regime, continued to advance university independence as a value and took for granted the importance of the university as a site of politics in addition to research and teaching.
Portraying itself as the upholder of the October Revolution, the May regime moved to recalibrate political space in Sudan, pushing the political spectrum to the left while restricting activity from “reactionary forces,” more conservative political parties that had been dominant in parliament from 1965 until 1969.Footnote 33 These efforts extended to the University of Khartoum, where students were active both in favor of the regime and in opposition to it, and drew the specific attention of the May regime. The subsequent actions of the regime violated university independence as it was understood in academic spaces in Sudan. In particular, the regime extended its efforts not only to secure control but also to assure ideological compliance in the university’s academic activities with state values and goals, implementing these changes through reforms to university governance.Footnote 34 While the vice chancellor was not replaced immediately following the coup, the university’s charter was altered in order to align the university’s mission to the political agenda of the new regime, with the university explicitly tasked with fostering socialist, pan-Arab, and pan-African political education. Nimeiri was appointed as chancellor and the University Council was expanded to thirty-two members, of which half would be members of state bureaucracy and the other half ideologically aligned university officials.Footnote 35
The regime’s first move against university independence took place soon after Nimeiri took power, when it sought to fire university lecturers it deemed “reactionary,” including members of the Umma Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, both sectarian parties, and the Islamic Charter Front, an Islamist party. It first pushed for the dismissal of five, then eventually thirteen faculty on political grounds. The professors dismissed were prominent, and many were conservative but not necessarily known for their political activity, including Abdullah Al Tayeb and Mudathir Abdel Rahim, both known for their writings on literature and history.Footnote 36 These dismissals were linked to tensions within the university during the time of the October Revolution in 1964, in which these figures took positions against the uprising.Footnote 37 Yet the selection of faculty to be fired was neither comprehensive nor uniform. One account notes that the historian Yusuf Fadl Hasan was slated to be dismissed until someone objected, stating that his lack of political activity was not due to reactionary leanings but because “That Yusuf Fadl, he’s not into politics, he’s into cinema.”Footnote 38 Rather than a simple purge of opposition activists, these dismissals were aimed at reshaping the university by eliminating the ideologically suspect.
The dismissals were extremely unpopular among faculty, who felt the measure had been imposed from above without consultation with departments and was extremely disruptive to the functioning of the university. A security report monitoring university political activity noted:
[T]he discontent of the teachers is based on the fact that some of their fired colleagues did not practice any political activities. Also, that the timing of the firing of those teachers was inappropriate because the university is coming upon the last period of the academic year and it is an important time to complete courses and prepare for exams…The university will not in the time remaining be able to summon replacement teachers for those released from their positions and this is something that obstructs the progress of students’ studies, which pushes them to use that in undertaking their activities hurting the university itself…Footnote 39
Some discussed the possibility of a mass resignation in solidarity with their colleagues, since so many were dissatisfied with the decision. This plan was brought up in following meetings but was not acted upon.Footnote 40
Rather, faculty undertook measures to protect their remaining colleagues and keep the university running. A report on the “counter-revolutionary forces,” written in March of the following year, noted that in August of 1969 these faculty members united behind “rightist” candidates in the elections for faculty representatives to the University Council. These candidates and their supporters later joined with more left-leaning colleagues to create the Organization of Socialist Sudanese Teachers. Supporters of the regime who wrote about this group conceded that many of its members identified as socialist; however, they still viewed this organization as threatening due to the membership of faculty who had never supported socialism before 1969. Group leadership asserted that all signatories to their charter were socialists, yet up to sixty of them were known by regime supporters as “reactionaries.” It seems likely that this group was designed to provide cover to faculty who would otherwise be targeted as anti-government. After complaints, objectionable faculty were removed from the organization. Yet even then the organization continued to work with them in less official capacities and refused to work with the state-sanctioned association of socialist teachers in supporting the regime’s university regulations.Footnote 41
Even faculty who worked with the administration and sympathized with the May regime’s political aims at times complained on procedural grounds, though their complaints were ignored or overridden by the regime. Professor Abdullahi Ibrahim, then a faculty member at the University of Khartoum, recounted how he worked on a university committee tasked with examining the role of the student union on campus in 1970. Faculty on the committee accepted the right of students to protest and be involved in national politics, albeit with key restrictions to preserve university order. Their report, however, was later edited by the Minister of Education to eliminate all mention of these rights, prompting the committee to issue a circular clarifying what parts of the published report were produced by the committee.Footnote 42
The real bastion of opposition to the regime’s moves came from the student movement and its representatives in the student union. At the time, the union’s proportionately elected council was led by a plurality of Islamic Trend-associated students. The Islamic Trend was a student group aligned with the Islamic Charter Front, an Islamist party fundamentally opposed to the communist-aligned May regime. Yet the Islamic Trend described its opposition to the faculty firings in terms of university independence. The Islamic Trend’s wall newspaper, Akher Lahza, a publication pasted to the university walls periodically, published an article two weeks after the firings with the headline “For the First Time” with the subheadings “1) For the first time, 13 teachers are fired from the university, 2) For the first time, a Sudanese teacher is fired from the University of Khartoum, 3) For the first time, the university patron imposes its authority on the University Council.”Footnote 43
After news of the firings, the student union mobilized in opposition, prompting a confrontation that took several weeks and significant effort from the university administration to quell. The executive committee of the student union issued a memorandum that it attempted to deliver to the administration of the University of Khartoum denouncing the move.Footnote 44 The administration refused to engage or forward it to the Revolutionary Command Council as demanded until it was cleared by legal counsel, claiming that some aspects of it violated state security.Footnote 45 The student union leadership, after meeting with the vice chancellor and being told to amend the memorandum, refused to do so, meaning the memorandum stalled at the university.Footnote 46 Following that, leaders of the Islamic Trend held several symposiums on the issue of “university independence,” one attended by 1,000 students and another by 250.Footnote 47 Eventually the student union’s council of forty issued a series of recommendations to challenge the administration’s decisions, including a strike.Footnote 48 The recommendations were put to a vote by the student body, where they lost by four votes. 1,422 students voted against the council’s recommendations, with 1,418 voting in favor, and 33 abstaining.Footnote 49 This result was explained, at least in the Islamic Trend wall newspapers and speeches following the vote, as being caused by voter intimidation, an extended campaign by regime-aligned students, and pressure on students from the administration to vote against the recommendations.Footnote 50 The close monitoring of these events by the state security apparatus indicates that the regime understood these efforts as a direct threat to its legitimacy and ability to control university associative life.
Such monitoring and administrative crackdowns were not the only efforts made by the state to intervene. Islamic Trend activity was met with frequent objections from regime-aligned student groups, including boycotts of their meetings on the grounds that they had not given sufficient advance notice. The Socialist Union held a competing symposium attempting to refute Islamic Trend accusations that was attended by many students; it also published multiple wall newspapers and other publications defending the university changes.Footnote 51 The events of December 1969 and January 1970 were used by the university’s administration and state government to justify further clampdowns on student activity, with the government pointing to regime-aligned students to account for their actions. Soon after the vote on the student union recommendations, secondary school students supportive of the regime took to the streets in celebration of the vote with pro-regime slogans.Footnote 52
While there were some efforts before the vote by Socialist and Democratic Front students to split from the union, these efforts became more concerted in the aftermath. Socialist and Democratic Front students resigned from the council of forty, functionally depriving the council of a quorum, while moving to form a new Council of Progressive Students that excluded “reactionaries” entirely. This was announced in a memorandum by Khatim Adlan, the then head of the Democratic Front, which was delivered to the administration after being read to the student body. This shut down the student union and ended independent university organizing on campus, since they could no longer undertake meetings in compliance with their constitution.Footnote 53 New regulations were instituted by the administration limiting student demonstrations on university grounds to those that had been given prior approval by the administration, requiring permission for student-led symposiums and events, and censoring wall newspapers, as well as new efforts to dismiss students.Footnote 54
One year later, in early 1971, regime efforts to rein in university independence escalated and were met with a more pronounced response from students. In March 1971, Nimeiri announced changes to the University of Khartoum in a speech in Hantoob, one of the first secondary schools established in the late colonial period and his alma mater. The changes included new regulations for the university guards, who would be able to enter the university to enforce government policy, a reduction in state subsidies for books and housing, reorganization of the student union, and, most critically, limitations on who could live in student dormitories: exclusively students without family in Khartoum, who would be required to make payments to stay there.Footnote 55 Student dormitories were key sites of student activism at University of Khartoum; free to all students, these dormitories allowed students to live side by side and develop relationships across campus. These dormitories were also sites of such political symposiums discussed earlier, meetings between students, and conversations around organizing, where students could share their viewpoints or plan for demonstrations.Footnote 56 The effort to institute these changes to dormitories, justified as a matter of reducing university expenditures, was also an attack on university autonomy and the independence of university space.
In response, students organized a sit-in, occupying the main campus of the University of Khartoum and provoking a standoff with a member of the Revolutionary Command Council who subsequently surrounded the university with tanks. This sit-in was led by the coalition that had formed during the previous standoff regarding the recommendations of the student union one year prior. The Islamic Trend and the Student Welfare Front, representing students from southern Sudan, worked together alongside supporters of the sectarian parties to unite the campus for collective action. As politics outside the university’s gates had changed, with the Abdel Khalig Mahjoub wing of the Sudanese Communist Party becoming increasingly hostile to the regime, divisions within the student left became increasingly apparent. Progressive student groups were divided on whether to support the sit-in, with some siding with the regime and demonstrating outside the university gates, while others abstained, and others still joined it.Footnote 57 Following the occupation, the Democratic Front was divided; regime-aligned students faulted the Abdel Khalig wing for supporting the protest alongside other groups.Footnote 58
The sit-in and the ongoing pressure students exerted following its conclusion yielded results; many of the reforms announced in the Hantoob declaration did not immediately come about. Those who remember the sit-in recount a day of high drama: the university was surrounded by tanks, and there was a persistent story that a representative of Abu Gasim Hashim or Abu Gasim Ibrahim, one of whom commanded the force, jumped over the fence to negotiate directly with students.Footnote 59 Others recall that when the sit-in dispersed at the end of the day, they went on to see a movie.Footnote 60 Afterwards, the university remained closed for six months. During that time, security reports make note of enduring pressure on the government, with multiple mass protests in downtown Khartoum and outside the Ministry of Education.Footnote 61 It was these negotiations together with the ongoing pressure exerted in public and private that likely forced the government to adhere to whatever agreement had been reached on the day of the sit-in.
These two conflicts over questions of university independence were marked by encroachments by the May regime followed by opposition from the student movement. In these confrontations, students were largely the winners—reforms never really took place, at least not to the extent to which they were intended, and whatever narrowing of space occurred was initiated and managed by university officials and students themselves. This seems to indicate that even among the ranks of regime supporters within the university, administrators and faculty had internalized understandings of how things were to be done that largely preserved the university as a site of associative life. This is also explained by the realignments that took place within regime politics, as the regime moved from one dominated by Communist and Arab nationalist figures to a center-left, “socialist,” regime less defined by ideology. In the wake of these changes, the regime began to take more proactive measures against the wishes of university administrators.
Political Protest, Attempted Coups, and the May Regime’s Crackdown: 1971–75
The ensuing years of university life were marked by political conflict that extended beyond the university’s walls and posed threats to the May regime. As this occurred, the regime became increasingly sensitive to threats to its survival. Following the university confrontations described above, the government contended with a military coup by communist-aligned officers in July 1971. The putschists held power for three days before the Minister of Defense, supported by Egyptian forces, retook the capital.Footnote 62 In the coup’s wake, the regime was forced to reinvent itself, instituting key reforms and establishing the Sudan Socialist Union as it moved from an ideologically defined regime to one less ideologically grounded and constantly evaluating threats to its legitimacy. The university was no longer just a tool for transforming society but also a potential liability. Government officials following the 1971 coup were more amenable to liberal university governance, and they initially offered a “compromise” that restored faculty involvement in the University Senate, albeit with serious limitations.Footnote 63 This changed, however, in light of the persistent threats the regime saw in later events.
The university became a particular threat in two significant political confrontations, each of which had links to the university but extended beyond its gates. These events are distinct from the earlier conflicts in that while they involved the university, the activity deemed threatening took place outside of the university, as either civil protests or armed insurrection. When mobilization beyond the university gates could be traced back in some capacity to the University of Khartoum, it seems that university administrators and faculty had less leverage to uphold standard practices of university governance. State officials used these incidents as evidence of the danger of university space and exerted further controls on university life.
In 1973, students took the lead in what would become known as the Sha’aban protests. Plans for these protests were developed by students and activists in an alliance between the Islamic Trend and the Umma Party, a sectarian national party under the leadership of descendants of the Mahdi family. The organizers hoped to replicate the 1964 October revolution by inciting protests within the university and then expanding to the street, where they would challenge the Republican Palace. They began with a series of lectures, culminating in a march from the university to the Palace in order to deliver a memorandum to the President.Footnote 64 Along the way, students expected to meet demonstrators from other parts of society, particularly members of the Ansar, whose members supported the Umma party. These protests did successfully mobilize students, and the protests that left the university were substantial. Yet protests on the street outside did not command the numbers expected and grew smaller in the face of violent state repression.Footnote 65 British reports of the protests noted that Sadig Al Mahdi, the leader of the Ansar and head of the Umma party, had “stepped aside” and opted not to mobilize civilians outside of the university in a tactical move that left students exposed to violence. Some observers understood this as endangering the vice chancellor’s ability to maintain a “liberal” university.Footnote 66
The vice chancellor at the time, Mustafa Hassan Ishaq, had been in office since 1971, having been appointed with wide support from the University Council and faculty. He was known to advocate for university independence with support from the Minister of Education, Mustafa Hatim.Footnote 67 When the protests broke out at the beginning of Sha’aban, Ishaq received serious pressure to shut them down. He pushed back, making it clear to Nimeiri’s administration that to rein in associative life would be a violation of university independence.Footnote 68 While making it difficult for students to engage in anti-regime activities was acceptable, so long as such restrictions came from the university administration itself, Ishaq and others viewed outright repression on university grounds to be a step too far. These protests, however, threw this autonomy into question as well as the leadership of Professor Ishaq. The regime initiated further reforms and oversight as “the University of Khartoum was gradually being stripped off [sic] its powers and privileges as the foremost institute of higher learning in the country.”Footnote 69
The immediate result was the appointment of a new university vice chancellor. While the May regime had initially withdrawn the changes to university governance introduced after the October Revolution, it did not immediately exercise its authority under the revised legal structure. The appointment of Abdullah Al Tayeb in the year after these protests has been widely discussed in accounts of university politics and is often described as the first instance of an appointed vice chancellor in the university’s history. Al Tayeb was appointed in 1974 after sitting on a committee that re-examined the structure of the university following its closure in the wake of the protests.Footnote 70
It is unclear whether Mustafa Ishaq was also appointed. However, accounts regarding Abdullah Al Tayeb’s appointment speak both to the circumstances of his appointment and to his collaboration with the regime’s efforts to curb university independence after the removal of a vice chancellor widely understood to have worked to preserve it. It also marked a dramatic turnaround in the career of Abdullah Al Tayeb, who had been fired from the University of Khartoum by the same regime after being labeled a reactionary five years earlier. By 1974, the May regime’s politics were understood to be far less ideological, a change that followed the 1971 split with the Communist Party. Perhaps this change accounts for the decision to appoint Al Tayeb and underscored for some a sense that flat acceptance of the appointment was unprincipled and opportunistic.
Incursions into university independence reached their peak in 1975. The Higher Education Act, passed in 1972 and amended further in 1975, had been under committee review for some time, but amended to centralize power, with the government accumulating greater momentum following the Sha’aban protests. By 1975, the act placed significant power in the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), a state council established in 1972, giving it ultimate oversight over all universities. This further relegated university administrations to the sole task of implementing policies made by the NCHE. These policies were criticized years later by academic faculty and administrators. The Association of University of Khartoum Academic Staff produced a study criticizing the move at length which articulated the faculty’s need for democratic processes within the university. The NCHE, they argued, failed to discharge its duties with regard to university policy in terms of grant management. This prompted many faculty members and administrators to appeal for further reform to roll back or amend this oversight for the rest of the May Regime’s time in power.Footnote 71 Yet while the act was drafted with urgency following the protests, a different event proved the potential threat the university posed to the regime prior to its actual amendment.
In September 1975, in the immediate lead-up to the passage of the amendments, Hassan Hussein and several mid-ranking officers from Kordofan attempted to seize power from the state. The coup attempt itself featured no students or faculty from the University of Khartoum; the instigators focused on seizing the National Radio Station, and the whole attempt was put down within a day.Footnote 72 Yet when the coup failed, a number of those involved hid at the University of Khartoum, with their weapons subsequently found close to student dormitories in the South Barracks area.Footnote 73 In the wake of this, the regime undertook a number of other measures to expand control, first closing the university, then establishing a Ministry of Higher Education, and amending the University of Khartoum Act of 1973. In the process, the government gave the vice chancellor of the University more limited access to the President of Sudan in his capacity as university chancellor and removed the University Council, made up of faculty, from decisions regarding the appointment of university deans.Footnote 74 Although the deans were appointed internally, selected from within existing hierarchies, the final appointment rested with Ja’afar Ali Muhammad Bakheit from the NCHE.Footnote 75
These moves undermined the vice chancellor’s office. Abdullah Al Tayeb, who had by then been vice chancellor of University of Khartoum for a year, pushed for reinstating university deans removed from their posts due to their suspected disloyalty to the regime. When the move was rejected by the University Council, he was transferred to serve as vice chancellor for the University of Juba.Footnote 76 While efforts to undermine university autonomy and rein in university activity had been underway for some time, the coup attempt and its connection to the university encouraged a more severe set of policies. It also left university administrators and faculty with less leverage in shaping state policy than they might have had otherwise.
Conclusion
The reforms the May regime undertook to control university associative life proved effective in stifling activity to some extent during the remainder of Nimeiri’s time in power, giving the state greater leverage over university administration in dealing with student protests. But these efforts did not stop student activism. Protests continued at the University of Khartoum in ensuing years, first led by the Islamic Trend until the National Reconciliation of 1977, a political agreement signed by the president with members of the opposition National Front alliance that allowed for the entry of the Islamic Movement into the Sudan Socialist Union. At this point, a center-left coalition led by the Congress of Independent Students gained prominence in 1980–81, involving itself in further organizing during the widespread protests of 1982 and later the coalition of trade unions involved in the 1985 Intifada that ousted Nimeiri from power.Footnote 77
Importantly, these measures set the stage for more extensive state repression and violations of both university independence and academic freedom under the Ingaz regime of Omar Elbashir, in which the government not only continued to appoint university vice chancellors, selecting them for political acceptability, but exerted more granular control. The regime demanded the complete Arabization of university programs and mandated Islamic studies courses, at times even limiting what could be taught and in what way.Footnote 78 Such repression required not only the presence of a repressive state apparatus, but also the cooperation of university administrators and faculty. Some who participated in this process in the 1990s agreed with the political project at hand; however, as in the period discussed here, many did so not out of belief in the necessity of such efforts, but to preserve their own careers and the institution to which they belonged.
In spite of this, the question of university independence remained a flash point for political confrontations, both during the Ingaz regime’s tenure and after. In 2018, students at the University of Khartoum staged a sit-in protesting the detention of students who had been abducted by members of the National Intelligence and Security Services inside the university’s gates. They were joined in their protest by faculty who condemned the violence of the regime.Footnote 79 In response to this successful action, the university administration retaliated by disciplining students and eventually closing the Faculty of Mathematics for one year.Footnote 80
During the 2019 December Revolution that ousted President Omar Elbashir, university students’ and faculty participation in protests was essential. For example, they involved themselves in organizations like the Sudanese Professionals Association, a white-collar union that had organized the first resistance committees and also negotiated with the Transitional Military Council upon Elbashir’s removal.Footnote 81 University reform followed the removal of Elbashir, including further reform to the university charter and the appointment of a woman, Professor Fadwa Taha, as the university’s vice chancellor.Footnote 82
The 2021 coup by the security apparatus against the transitional government and the outbreak of a counter-revolutionary war have both encouraged repressive crackdowns on the University of Khartoum.Footnote 83 Following the 2021 coup, the Rapid Support Forces- and Sudanese Armed Forces-dominated junta attempted to further rein in university life. In the process, they violated the new university charter by removing the vice chancellor, a move that was legally challenged by university faculty.Footnote 84
Since the outbreak of war in 2023, university faculty and students were forcibly displaced from Khartoum and faced impossible conditions as their workplaces and homes became a combat zone. The university soon opened online courses for a displaced student body in precarious conditions, with faculty working for two-thirds of their devalued salaries.Footnote 85 As the war has persisted, the University of Khartoum has faced measures by the state that have further corroded its independence and even its academic standing. Serious allegations of financial mismanagement and land grabbing of university property have been made, alongside claims that the deans’ council has infringed upon the activity of the lecturers’ council. These allegations have pointed to administrative interference in general academic endeavors.Footnote 86 These, in addition to poor working conditions and unreasonable administrative policies regarding faculty returning to Khartoum, prompted the University of Khartoum Teachers’ Union to go on strike in 2026.Footnote 87 These contestations are still underway at the moment of writing this article, and how these matters might resolve remains unclear.
This ongoing back-and-forth is not just a story, then, of state repression, but also of the ongoing salience of Sudanese university politics in national politics. Whatever the state may have hoped, students and faculty remained a powerful threat to the legitimacy of governments, with protests within the university holding great symbolic weight. The decisions of students and faculty had a serious impact on the quality and environment of the university in which they worked as well as the political space for opposition in the country as a whole.
Acknowledgements
The author can be reached at rmglade@gmail.com. A first draft of this paper was developed with a British Institute of East Africa writing grant and presented at the BIEA, Rift Valley Institute, and CEDEJ-Khartoum organized “Sudan’s Universities: Remembering Civic Struggles, Promoting Peaceful Futures” conference in April 2025. Further drafts were presented at a Makerere Institute of Social Research weekly seminar and at the “The Past and Future of the Humanities at African Universities” panel at the 2025 European Conference on African Studies. The author is indebted to Rhiannon Stephens, Abdullahi Ibrahim, Joshua Craze, Christopher Muhoozi, Kenechukwu Nwachukwu, the editors of the JAH, and the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback on drafts, as well as to Lorna Kimayo, Yusuf Caruso, and Christine Riggs for sending scans of key literature.
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