National Geographic - UK (2022-02)

know their history, they can protect it.”

Then I pose a delicate question: How do ethnic

groups living in areas of Sudan that never were

part of the Kushite Empire—tribes from the

Nuba mountains or Darfur, for example—react

when asked to rally around an ancient history

they don’t feel is theirs? Bashir’s regime was

notorious for exploiting ethnic and religious

differences to prevent the richly diverse coun-

try from uniting against the Arabized political

elite in Khartoum. Jahin furrows his brow and

pauses. “This is a good point. We need a lot of

work, really.”

Like many young Sudanese, Jahin rejects the

idea that “Arab” is a Sudanese identity. “If some-

one says, ‘My roots come from Saudi Arabia,’ or

something like that, I don’t believe it,” he says

firmly. “I believe that our roots are the same or

close together ... In general, we are Sudanese.

That’s enough.”

T

HE IMAGE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY

kandaka, white-robed among the

protesters, raising her finger in the

sky as she invokes Kushite kings

and queens, has been memorialized

in street art across Khartoum and

around the globe. But when I meet

Alaa Salah during my second trip to Sudan in

early 2020, she’s unrecognizable in a burgundy

headscarf and dark clothes, sitting across from

me at a crowded open-air café on the bank of the

Blue Nile in the fading evening light.

At 23, Salah became a face of the Sudanese rev-

olution, a role that would propel her from engi-

neering student to international figure invited

to speak before the UN Security Council on the

role of women in the new Sudan. Through an

interpreter, Salah tells me that growing up she

was taught little in school about the history of

ancient Kush and that she had to discover it on

her own. It was only a few years earlier that she

traveled to see the fabled pyramids at Meroë. She

was astonished by what she saw: “We have a lot

of pyramids, even more than Egypt!”

When the protesters on the streets of Khar-

toum began the chant “My grandfather is

Taharqa, my grandmother is a kandaka,” Salah

explains, they were expressing their pride in the

defiance and bravery of the ancient kings and

queens. It made them feel as if they too belonged

to this ancient civilization of strong and coura-

geous leaders, particularly for the women who

Outside the museum I meet Nazar Jahin, a

tour guide and member of Artina (“Our Art”),

a student group organized during the 2019 pro-

tests to support Sudan’s struggling cultural insti-

tutions. “The last government, really, they don’t

care about history,” Jahin tells me. Much of that

disinterest was the result of the former govern-

ment’s hard-line interpretation of Islam. “We had

a minister of tourism who said that statues were

forbidden,” Jahin recalls, shaking his head.

But there are bright spots on the horizon, he

says. The Italian Embassy and UNESCO pledged

funds in 2018 to refurbish the museum (a proj-

ect now delayed by the pandemic), and since

the revolution more Sudanese are visiting the

museum and sites like Jabal Barkal and the

ancient capital of Meroë.

“This is most important,” Jahin says. “Suda-

nese have to know their history first. If they

SUDAN’S RECKONING 127