Nicki Kindersley’s New Sudans: Wartime Intellectual Histories in Khartoum is a rich and timely contribution to the history of Sudan and political thought in Africa. It comes at a time when the near four-year catastrophe of the April 15, 2023 counterrevolutionary war has produced the fragmentation of Sudan along the borders of historical rupture. The displacement of 14 million people, the death of 400,000, and the manufactured famines and genocidal campaigns swallowing up Darfur, Kordofan, and the Gezira states throughout this war are a part of a longue durée history that originates in the unequal incorporation of Sudanese groups and geographies into the political community of the colonial and postcolonial states. In this work, Kindersley traces how southern Sudanese working people’s intellectual contributions in Khartoum reshaped the Sudanese government’s project of Arabization and Islamization from the second Sudanese civil war (1983–2005) to the secession of South Sudan in 2011 and its immediate aftermath.

Southern Sudanese literary, political, and educational communities imagined a “New Sudan” that could both liberate Black Sudanese and help break the chains of exploitation and centralization that ultimately oppressed all people across Sudan. At the same time, this vision for a “New Sudan” was nebulous and incongruous from the start. Kindersley incorporates 350 interviews conducted over the course of two periods between 2012–13 and 2015–17 firmly in the political history of Sudan, pushing past the historiographical tendency to focus solely on the agents of war. These interviews paint a picture of the complex, contradictory formation of the southern Sudanese identity in and across Khartoum along tribal, ethnic, and gendered differences. Conducted in Khartoum, Bahr El Ghazal, Aweil, Yambio, Torit, Juba, and Kampala, these oral histories draw out the broader East African geography that traverse displaced southern communities’ mapping of the capital city (29–95).

The 1980s was a particularly disastrous and formative period in Sudanese history. After the famines of 1983–85, 100,000 people from Darfur and Kordofan traveled north to Khartoum, contributing to the waves of migration that followed the resettlement of formerly enslaved communities in the Deims of Khartoum and Omdurman between the 1940 and 1960s. As scholars such as Khalid Mustafa Medani have shown, the Muslim Brotherhood was able to capture the state through the control over remittances which helped to broker an alliance between them and the military-state industrial complex in 1983, when Gaafar al-Nimeiri instituted the September Laws. This transition from the previous decade of leftist-leaning politics saw the government rely on Rizeigat and Humr Messiria militias from southern Darfur who had been displaced by drought to raid and conquer the regions of Bahr el Ghazal and Abyei, leading to the breakdown of the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement. While al-Nimeiri’s policies diminished the possibility of an autonomous southern Sudanese state within Sudan, displaced communities in Khartoum organized themselves in the late 1980s and 90s and created networks of survival that allowed them to both coexist and rebel against the dominant order. Political education, media cultures, and networks of social welfare emerged among migrant communities of southern Sudanese, Darfuri, and Nuba groups in the overgrowth of Khartoum’s urban landscape. The Sudanese military regarded them as the “fifth column” of the southern resistance and repeatedly relocated them across the labyrinth of the city to enmesh them deeper into the cycles of displacement that circulate within the war economy. Following Omar al-Bashir’s 1989 coup of the political establishment and the further militarization of Sudanese civilians, “community-based governments” in the form of customary courts were created to navigate new social divides that emerged after the split in the southern resistance in 1991. The state used these courts to procure cheap labor, extend state control to these neighborhoods, and cut down bureaucratic costs (263–88).

Between 1987 and 1992, a million displaced people from the south migrated to Khartoum following the outbreak of the second Sudanese civil war. Southern women often found ladders to economic progress through the gendered shadow market of the late 1980s and 90s period of the privatization of the security sector and the neoliberalization of state resources and debt. When women became the heads of households, Kindersley argues that southern men looked to “African American Black urban cultures” to reconcile with the changing gender relations that emerged in Khartoum. The struggle over southern women’s bodies and autonomy in the 1990s refutes the romanticization of a singular, cohesive southern struggle, and depicts how local actors confronted globalizing cultures and economies (98–140). Kindersley delicately shows how being a southerner was simultaneously a “geographic direction,” belonging to a specific neighborhood, history, or community, as well as a political disposition. Kindersley’s analysis would be complemented with a “reading along the archival grain” of standard accounts of Khartoum’s urban histories, however, and an investigation of how southern cultures in turn transformed the city and the political imagination of people outside of these neighborhoods, and broader Sudanese culture. Indeed, the political lives that emerged among southern and western displaced communities in Khartoum have long been established as the beating heart of the city and its revolutionary impulses. The artistic revolution that blossomed after the toppling of al-Bashir’s thirty-year rule was directly inspired by the musical and visual cultures of these spaces.

New Sudans thus inspires further inquiries: How did southern vernaculars of Blackness coincide with competing ideas among northern and eastern communities? How did the geographies of Blackness and Arabness (if they can even be divided in such a manner) in turn inform how global Black discourses engaged with Sudan, and in particular the ongoing genocide in Darfur and the secession of the south? An exploration of these questions would broaden the theoretical breadth of this masterful historical work.