It is tempting to frame a revolution from its climax: the iconic images of a million people flooding the streets of the capital, the sit-in at the army headquarters, the moment a dictator’s three-decade reign is brought to an end. This lens, however, is a seductive illusion. It centres the state, its institutions, and its most visible city as the primary stage for history. But in Sudan, the state had long been failing its people everywhere but Khartoum. The revolution, therefore, did not begin in the centre. It ignited in the peripheries, in the towns history often overlooks, where the will to imagine a different future was not a sudden inspiration but a necessity forged by decades of systemic neglect.
Before the chants of “Tasqut bas!” (“Just fall, that’s all!”) echoed through Khartoum’s avenues, they were murmured in the homes of Atbara, the “Railway City,” once the heart of Sudan’s historic labour movement. The spark was not a political manifesto drafted in an elite club, but the simple, brutal mathematics of survival: the tripling of bread prices. When the government cut subsidies in December 2018, it was in towns like Atbara, Dongola, and Port Sudan that the first protests erupted not as a coordinated national campaign, but as the inevitable explosion of a pressure built up over a lifetime.
This was not a new struggle; it was the latest chapter in an old one. Atbara’s legacy of labour organisation and resistance meant its people understood the power of collective action and the weight of broken promises. Their uprising was a reclamation of that history. Similarly, in Port Sudan, protests were fuelled by more than the price of bread; they were driven by deep-seated grievances over the systemic marginalisation of the east, a region whose resources have long been extracted while its people saw little return. This pattern repeated itself in Damazin and Nyala, where the revolution felt like a continuation of long-standing struggles against a central power that governed through neglect and violence.
These towns were not simply following a script written in the capital. They were writing their own. They became the laboratories of resistance, proving that the regime’s authority could be challenged. Their early, fierce protests which were often met with disproportionate violence served as a crucial test. They demonstrated the regime’s brittleness and, more importantly, showed a fearful nation that it was possible to stand up. This was the periphery, in the political sense long described by scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani, asserting itself as the engine of change.
The journey of the revolution from these peripheral towns to the capital is the story of a nerve impulse travelling through a national body. The protests moved along the very arteries the state had neglected: the highways connecting the north, the digital networks sharing videos of courage, the whispered solidarity between cousins in different cities. By the time the wave reached Khartoum, it was not a single wave but a confluence of countless streams of anger, hope, and resolve from every corner of the country.
To begin the story in Khartoum is to miss the point entirely. It is to ignore the deep, structural reasons why the revolution happened and to misunderstand its truly popular character. The uprising was a decentralised network of struggles, united by a common goal but rooted in unique local contexts of injustice. It was the periphery speaking back to the centre, not waiting for its permission, and in doing so, reminding the nation that the future is not built in the halls of power alone, but in the steadfastness of communities long told they were forgotten.
References
Al Jazeera. “Sudan’s Port Sudan Protesters Lift Blockade after Deal.” Al Jazeera, October 3, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/3/sudans-port-sudan-protesters-lift-blockade-after-deal.
BBC News. “Sudan Crisis: Security Forces Fire on Khartoum Protesters.” BBC News, June 3, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48511226.
Berghof Foundation. Sudan: Options for Systemic Conflict Transformation. Berlin: Berghof Foundation, 2019. https://berghof-foundation.org/files/publications/SUD_Sudan_Options_for_Systemic_Conflict_Transformation.pdf.
Daily Sabah. “From Atbara to Khartoum: The Many Phases of Sudan’s Revolution.” Daily Sabah, August 30, 2019. https://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2019/08/30/from-atbara-to-khartoum-the-many-phases-of-sudans-revolution.
de Waal, Alex. “The Historical Precedents of the Current Uprising in Sudan.” The New Yorker, January 10, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-historical-precedents-of-the-current-uprising-in-sudan.
Mada Masr. “Atbara: The First Days of the Sudanese Revolution.” Mada Masr, May 2, 2019. https://www.madamasr.com/en/2019/05/02/feature/politics/atbara-the-first-days-of-the-sudanese-revolution/.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.
Radio Dabanga. “Damazin Residents Protest Economic Conditions.” Radio Dabanga, July 21, 2021. https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/damazin-residents-protest-economic-conditions.
Sudan (@sudan). “Video of Protests Across Sudan Over the Years.” Instagram video, October 29, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CVn4IUcq0QH/?igsh=MTJ3OTNxbDMxMDhmbQ==.
Sudan Tribune. “Sudan: Nyala Protesters Demand Better Services.” Sudan Tribune, April 18, 2019. https://sudantribune.com/article67769/.
KutubوKalam 
Leave a comment