Khartoum is a city where North Africa blends with Sub-Saharan Africa, dark-skinned Arabs with black Africans, town with countryside, relative wealth with abject poverty. Contrasts fade in this huge, relatively flat city, made up of the three distinct conurbations of Khartoum, Bahri (North Khartoum) and Omdurman. Among its mainly low-rise buildings, the spinnaker-shaped 18-storey Corinthia Hotel, built by the Libyan government under Gaddafi, looms like an Eiffel Tower.
The only other structures that stand out are relics of British colonial rule or recent Chinese-constructed official buildings (China was the accredited partner of ex-president Omar al-Bashir’s regime). The most imposing are the unsightly headquarters of the various branches of Sudan’s armed forces, all in a massive General Command compound. Huge crowds gathered outside the compound on 6 April 2019, the anniversary of the overthrow of another military dictator, Gaafar al-Nimeiry, in power 1969-85. Next day, Sudan was paralysed by a general strike and on 11 April, Bashir was deposed after 30 disastrous years as president.
The uprising began on 19 December 2018, when the price of bread rose by decree of a government determined to follow neoliberal precepts and replenish public coffers by extracting money from the poorest. The protests grew in size and radicalism until the sit-in outside the General Command on 6 April 2019, explicitly intended to encourage the armed forces to oust their supreme commander. The oldest or best educated Sudanese remembered that the officers who deposed Nimeiry in 1985 had only held power for a year before handing over to a democratically elected civilian government; but nearly everyone recalled thrilling scenes from the 2011 protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the popular uprising that drove the Egyptian military to depose President Hosni Mubarak, likewise after 30 years in office. <exergue|texte=The SPA quickly showed it could (...)
