1207. From the Country to the Town
munzoul a. m. assal
Sudan’s population has historically been highly mobile, and there are
long-established patterns of periodic migration from rural to urban
areas. Until the late 1970s this movement from the country to towns
was generally temporary, but since the 1980s it has increasingly taken
on the character of permanent settlement. During this period, despite
decades of war, Sudan’s population has been growing at nearly three per
cent per annum. This growth has been fastest in a few urban centres,
with Khartoum having the greatest share.
Estimates for rates of migration and urbanization vary. By one
estimate, in 2005, one in three of Sudan’s population was living in towns,
half of them in Greater Khartoum (i.e. the ‘Three Towns’ of Khartoum,
Omdurman and Khartoum North, and their satellite settlements).
Khartoum has become a megalopolis, one of Eastern Africa’s biggest
cities. The capital’s population grew from 250,000 on the eve of indepen-
dence in 1956 to nearly three million in 1993. (By then a quarter of all
Sudanese were recorded as living in towns or cities.) Fifteen years later,
in the census of 2008, though figures have not been officially released,
Khartoum’s total population is indicated at over five million.
Travelling in Sudan today, in the rural areas and the sprawling informal
settlements round the capital and other cities of the northern heartland,
it is easy to see the unprecedented extent to which people have been
moving from villages into urban centres. The increase is linked to another
significant trend. By 2005 one in six people in Sudan were classified as
internally displaced. Involuntary displacement has become a key factor in
Sudan’s rapid urbanization. It has been driven by insecurity, by ecolog-The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors ical degradation and by government policies which have concentrated
(www.riftvalley.net).