Cover: Original editorial illustration commissioned by Kandaka, 2026. It is symbolic, not a documentary image.

The Case for Blue, Yellow and Green—and Why the People Must Decide

On 1 January 1956, Ismail al-Azhari and opposition leader Muhammad Ahmad Mahjoub lowered the flags of Britain and Egypt at the Republican Palace and raised the flag of an independent Sudan.

It had three horizontal bands: blue, yellow and green.

Blue represented the Nile and water. Yellow represented Sudan’s deserts. Green represented its agriculture and vegetation. The design did not borrow the colours of the departing colonial powers or place Sudan inside a wider ideological family. It described the country through its own land.

Fourteen years later, the military government of Gaafar Nimeiry replaced it with the red, white and black tricolour and green triangle used today. That design belongs to the family of Arab Liberation flags associated with Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and other Arab states, although Sudanese institutions have since given its colours specifically Sudanese meanings.

The independence flag never disappeared. It returned in public memory and appeared prominently during the 2018–2019 revolution. In December 2025, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Transitional Sovereignty Council and commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, proposed restoring it as part of rebuilding the Sudanese state.

The proposal deserves serious consideration. The independence flag is distinctive, historically grounded and capable of representing Sudan without forcing its diversity into a single racial, religious or geopolitical identity.

But the strongest case for the flag is also the strongest reason not to restore it by military announcement.

It was the flag of national independence. It should return, if it returns, through a legitimate national constitutional process.

The Flag Raised at Independence

Sudan’s parliament unanimously declared the country independent on 19 December 1955. On 1 January 1956, Sudan became an independent sovereign republic. The official history published by Sudan’s embassy in The Hague records that the Egyptian and British flags were lowered and the blue-yellow-green Sudanese flag was raised at the People’s Palace by Prime Minister Ismail al-Azhari. Sudan’s General Intelligence Service archive describes al-Azhari raising it beside opposition leader Muhammad Ahmad Mahjoub. Sudanese embassy history; Sudanese archival image and account.

That shared act matters. Government and opposition stood together at the moment the new state’s flag replaced the symbols of condominium rule.

The design is credited to Al-Sarirah Makki Abdullah al-Sufi, a Sudanese teacher, poet and artist. Accounts of her life say she submitted the design under an abbreviated name, and that her authorship was recognized publicly only much later. She explained green as agriculture, yellow as desert and blue as the Nile. Her authorship adds another layer to the flag’s history: the national symbol raised by two famous male politicians was designed by a Sudanese woman whose contribution was not immediately known.

That history should be verified and documented carefully in any official restoration. Sudan should preserve her original submissions, testimony and design records, distinguish well-supported evidence from repeated popular stories, and give Al-Sarirah Makki the place in national history that the evidence warrants.

The United Nations admitted Sudan in 1956, first through a unanimous Security Council recommendation and then by a unanimous General Assembly vote. The blue-yellow-green flag therefore belongs to the founding year in which Sudan entered international life as a sovereign state. UN Security Council Resolution 112; UN General Assembly Resolution 1110.

Why Was It Replaced?

Gaafar Nimeiry came to power in the military coup of 25 May 1969. The present flag was adopted on 20 May 1970: red, white and black horizontal bands with a green triangle at the hoist. A Sudanese embassy’s official description confirms the adoption date and the design. Sudanese Embassy in Qatar.

Its visual relationship to the Arab Liberation flag tradition is unmistakable. Red, white, black and green appear in different arrangements across several Arab national flags. In the revolutionary politics of the period, those colours connected Sudan to a wider Arab nationalist moment.

That origin is relevant, but it does not exhaust the flag’s meaning.

Sudanese official explanations say red represents martyrs, white peace and purity, black the country and its people, and green growth and natural wealth. For more than half a century, generations have seen that flag at schools, matches, embassies, demonstrations, funerals and national celebrations. It has covered coffins and represented Sudan abroad. People who had no role in Nimeiry’s regime have made it their own.

It would therefore be unfair to dismiss the current flag as merely “Nimeiry’s flag” or a foreign Arab symbol. Political origins matter, but national symbols accumulate meanings beyond the governments that introduce them.

The independence flag deserves a fair hearing. So does the attachment many Sudanese have to the flag they grew up with.

The Strongest Case for Restoration

1. It belongs to the act of independence

The blue-yellow-green flag was not designed for a coup, a military movement or a ruling party. It was raised when Sudan formally displaced British and Egyptian authority with Sudanese sovereignty.

Restoring it would reconnect the republic to its constitutional starting point: the parliamentary declaration of independence and the joint participation of government and opposition in the independence ceremony.

That does not make the first post-independence order perfect. Civil war had already begun in 1955, and the new state inherited severe regional inequality and unresolved questions of identity, federalism and citizenship. Restoration must not become nostalgia for an imagined harmonious Sudan that never existed.

The legitimate claim is narrower: this was the flag under which Sudan first became sovereign.

2. Its imagery is specifically Sudanese

The Nile, desert and cultivated land cross political and cultural boundaries. They describe a physical country shared by very different communities. The colours do not require a citizen to define Sudan as only Arab or only African, only Muslim or only secular.

No symbol is completely neutral. Blue may be read through the central Nile even though Sudan contains other rivers, seasonal waterways and communities far from it. Yellow can romanticize landscapes where people experience drought and marginalization. Green may suggest agriculture while overlooking pastoral, industrial and urban lives.

Even with those qualifications, the design begins from Sudanese geography rather than an ideological bloc. That is a substantial advantage in a country repeatedly damaged by attempts to compress plural identities into one official definition.

3. It is more internationally distinctive

Sudan’s present flag is easy to confuse at a distance with other red-white-black-green flags. The independence tricolour is not wholly unique—Gabon also uses blue, yellow and green in a different order—but Sudan’s arrangement and history are identifiable.

Distinctiveness is not the highest purpose of a national flag, but it has practical value. A flag should be recognizable on a building, aircraft tail, screen, uniform or sporting field without needing an emblem or written label.

4. Sudanese citizens have already revived it

The flag’s return during the 2018–2019 uprising was not ordered by the state. Protesters used it as a symbol of independence, civilian possibility and a Sudanese identity distinct from the regimes that followed 1956.

Radio Dabanga documented the blue-yellow-green flag among the banners of the revolution. Scholarship on Sudan’s revolutionary culture likewise records its use in debates over Africanity, Arab identity and the meaning of a “new Sudan.” Radio Dabanga; Sudan Studies Society of the United Kingdom.

This does not prove that most Sudanese want restoration; no credible nationwide poll establishes that. It does prove that the flag remains a living symbol rather than a museum object.

5. Restoration is better than endless redesign

If Sudan decides that the present flag no longer serves the republic, restoring a real historical flag is stronger than inventing a new design by committee.

Every added star, weapon, map, animal or ancient emblem creates new arguments over who is represented and who is not. A complicated hybrid may attempt to include everything and become recognizable to no one.

The independence flag has simplicity, provenance and public memory. Its colours can be standardized for modern production, and its proportions can be clarified, without changing the essential design.

The Strongest Case Against Restoration

1. The current flag is now part of Sudanese history

Fifty-six years cannot be erased. The present flag has witnessed dictatorship, democratic uprisings, peace agreements, South Sudan’s independence, revolution and war. Sudanese people have carried it in opposition to governments as well as in support of them.

Replacing it may feel to some citizens like rejecting their service, grief or memory. A serious process must listen to that attachment instead of treating it as false consciousness.

2. The independence flag did not represent a just political settlement

Sudan’s first years of independence did not resolve the political and regional exclusions inherited from colonial rule. The first civil war had begun before the flag was raised. Power remained concentrated, and many communities experienced the independent state as distant or coercive.

Restoration could therefore be received as a return to an old centre’s story rather than a new inclusive republic—especially if the decision is made in Khartoum or Port Sudan without meaningful participation from Darfur, Kordofan, the east, the north, the Blue Nile region, displaced communities and the diaspora.

The answer is not necessarily to reject the flag. It is to refuse a shallow history of it.

3. A symbol can distract from material priorities

Sudan faces war, hunger, displacement, destroyed institutions, economic collapse and mass trauma. Changing flags does not stop a bombing, reopen a hospital, pay a teacher or return stolen land.

Political leaders often prefer symbolic action because it is visible and inexpensive compared with institutional reform. Restoring the independence flag would become cynical if it were used to imply that the state had been rebuilt while armed power, impunity and exclusion remained intact.

The flag question belongs in a constitutional settlement. It should not displace ceasefire, humanitarian access, justice, civilian rule or reconstruction.

4. Wartime adoption could capture the flag for one side

Al-Burhan’s December 2025 proposal changed the political setting. He presented restoration while speaking as the commander of one principal belligerent and head of the wartime state. News reports quote him connecting the flag to rebuilding Sudan “from the beginning.” Sudan Tribune; The National.

As of 10 September 2026, Kandaka found the reported proposal but did not locate an official law or decree completing the change. A Sudanese embassy page still describes the 1970 design as the current national flag. This is a time-limited finding, not proof that no unpublished administrative step exists. Sudanese Embassy in Qatar.

The proposal does not become wrong because al-Burhan made it. But immediate adoption by his administration would risk transforming a potentially unifying flag into the banner of one wartime authority.

The independence flag should not be annexed by the army, the RSF, a political coalition, an ethnic movement or the diaspora. Its legitimacy must be broader than any belligerent.

Who Has the Right to Decide?

The flag should be settled by constitutional law, not a leader’s preference.

Sudan’s constitutional texts have generally left the national flag, emblem and other state symbols to legislation. The deeper democratic principle is straightforward: a foundational national symbol requires a body with a credible mandate from the people.

The best process would occur during a legitimate post-war constitutional transition and contain five steps.

1. Establish the historical record

A small independent committee of historians, archivists, artists, constitutional lawyers and museum specialists should publish the evidence on both flags: adoption laws, original dimensions and colours, designers, meanings, official use and later political history.

This should not be a propaganda committee. Its task would be to tell the truth, including uncomfortable history.

2. Conduct inclusive public consultation

Consultation must reach every accessible state and Sudanese refugees and diaspora communities. It should include displaced people, youth, women, disabled people, veterans, artists, schools, religious communities, customary authorities and communities historically excluded from central decisions.

People should be able to defend the present flag, support restoration or argue for another course without being accused of disloyalty.

3. Present clear choices

The ballot or legislative question should not contain ten speculative designs. A manageable process could compare:

  • retaining the current flag;
  • restoring the 1956 flag essentially unchanged; and
  • opening a later design process only if neither receives sufficient support.

If restoration is chosen, any adjustment should be technical: exact colour specifications, proportion and construction sheet. Kandaka’s preference would be to avoid adding emblems or text.

4. Use a legitimate decision rule

An elected constitutional assembly or parliament could decide after consultation. A referendum could provide direct legitimacy, but only if conducted safely, inclusively and without coercion. A wartime vote that excludes occupied, displaced or refugee populations would not settle the question fairly.

The legal threshold should be agreed in advance. The process matters more than whether the final instrument is a referendum or a representative constitutional vote.

5. Protect continuity and choice

If the flag changes, the law should provide a practical transition for passports, uniforms, embassies, aircraft, military insignia and public buildings. Existing documents should remain valid. Citizens should not be punished for possessing or peacefully displaying either historical national flag.

A new national symbol should expand freedom, not create another offence.

Kandaka’s Position

Kandaka supports restoring the 1956 blue-yellow-green flag in principle, subject to a legitimate and inclusive post-war constitutional decision.

The reasons are historical and civic rather than cosmetic.

It is the flag raised at sovereignty. It was designed by a Sudanese woman. Its colours arise from Sudanese geography and livelihoods. It avoids assigning the republic exclusively to either Arab nationalism or African nationalism. It is simple, dignified and distinctive. Its reappearance in the 2018–2019 revolution shows that it still carries democratic emotional power.

The preferred option is restoration essentially unchanged. Sudan should standardize its blue, yellow and green shades and its proportions for consistent manufacture, but should resist adding a coat of arms, stars, writing, weapons or ancient imagery. The original flag’s strength is that it does not ask one emblem to settle every argument about Sudanese identity.

This position is not unconditional.

Kandaka would oppose an attempt by a military authority to change the flag unilaterally during the present war. That would weaken the very symbolism restoration is meant to recover. Nor should the flag be used to declare a “new foundation” while postponing civilian government, justice or equal citizenship.

Sudan’s independence flag should return only as the flag of the whole republic—not as the victory flag of one armed camp.

What a Flag Can and Cannot Do

A flag can give visible form to a constitutional promise. It can remind citizens that their country is more permanent than a ruler. It can make the state recognizable and offer a shared symbol at moments of mourning and achievement.

It cannot enforce that promise.

Blue cannot guarantee that Nile water is shared justly. Yellow cannot protect pastoralists or communities facing desertification. Green cannot reform land ownership or make agriculture productive. Restoring the flag will not demobilize armed forces, return displaced families or build a democratic state.

But symbols are not meaningless merely because they are insufficient.

Sudan’s present crisis is partly a crisis over who owns the state and what that state represents. A legitimate constitutional settlement will need institutions, rights, federal arrangements and security reform. It will also need public language and symbols capable of holding a diverse country together.

The independence flag is a strong candidate for that work because it does not promise a new invented identity. It returns to a simple scene: colonial flags descending, a Sudanese flag rising, and government and opposition sharing the rope.

Sudan should consider raising it again.

This time, the people should hold the rope.

Principal Sources for Review

Research note, 10 September 2026: the original 1956 legal construction sheet and a first-person archival record of Al-Sarirah Makki al-Sufi’s authorship were not available in the sources reviewed. Those gaps are disclosed rather than filled with certainty. Any future constitutional proposal should commission archival, legal and nationwide consultation work before a decision.