Culture

On May 13, 2023, the singer, poet, and activist Shaden Gardood was killed by a sniper while sitting on the roof of her family’s home in El Obeid. She had spent the previous day posting online about the war and calling for peace. Nine days after her death, Asia Abdelmajid – Sudan’s first professional theatre actress – was killed by random gunfire in Bahri. A report published in late 2024 by the African Center for Justice and Peace Studies and the Sudanese Music Research Center, titled Tears of Guitars and Screams of Museums, documented more than fifty-five artists, musicians, and performers killed since the war began: some by sniper fire and shelling, some through denial of healthcare when hospitals stopped functioning, at least one – the percussionist Kamel Hasan – through torture in detention. The National Museum was looted. Sudan’s national theatres were bombed or turned into military barracks. ...

In 1968, a young man in Khartoum dressed carefully for an evening out with his brother, his sister-in-law, and his sister. They walked to the cinema to see an Indian film about a mother fighting for her children. Everyone in the city, he recalled decades later, was talking about that film. What stayed with him was not the plot but the outing itself: the family together, dressed up, sharing a dark room with a crowd of strangers. Cinema made that possible. ...